Save a Horse, Ride the Grump
A Contemporary Cowboy Romance
by Isla Wilde
📚 Available at your favorite retailer
Pairing: M/F
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Grumpy/Sunshine, Enemies to Lovers, Forced Proximity, He Falls First, Possessive Hero, Praise Kink, One Bed, Small Town, Cowboy Romance, Touch Her and Die, Slow Burn, Neighbors to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Found Family, The Grovel™
He communicated in monosyllables. She went viral for all the wrong reasons. The Texas Hill Country wasn’t big enough for both of them.
Cade Walker is six-foot-four of silence, solitude, and Hill Country stubbornness. He runs the ranch his father drank himself to death on, hasn’t left the county in three years, and communicates primarily through jaw clenches and one-word texts. His mother left when he was twelve. He’s been building walls ever since — the kind made of stone, and the kind made of silence.
Piper Hayes had two million followers, a curated life, and a smile that could sell anything — until a viral meltdown turned her into the internet’s favorite cautionary tale. When she inherits a crumbling ranch next door to the grumpiest man in Texas, she shows up in a yellow sundress and cowboy boots she bought at the airport, determined to reinvent herself. She knows nothing about ranches. She knows even less about the man glaring at her from across the property line.
He thinks she’s a disaster. She thinks he’s a caveman. They’re both right. But when a storm traps them together and proximity becomes combustion, they strike a deal: burn it out of their systems. No feelings. No strings. No complications.
The deal doesn’t work. Not even close.
Because Cade Walker doesn’t just fall — he crashes. And the man who can’t say three words to save his life is about to discover that the woman next door isn’t the performance he assumed. She’s real. She’s brave. She makes the worst banana bread in Texas and the best sound he’s ever heard. And the secret he’s keeping about her land could destroy everything.
Save a Horse, Ride the Grump is a 93,000-word high-heat MF contemporary cowboy romance featuring a grumpy rancher who communicates in monosyllables and a sunshine former influencer who teaches him that silence isn’t the same as safety, seven explicit scenes that escalate from hate-fueled to holy, a goat named Dolly who judges everyone, the greatest grovel in Kindle Unlimited history, and a guaranteed happily ever after. Book 1 in the Bitter Creek series. Standalone.
⚠️ Content Notes
This book contains explicit sexual content including: multiple detailed MF encounters, kitchen counter sex, truck bed sex, hayloft sex, creek sex, praise kink, possessive behavior, rough sex, emotional intensity during intimate scenes. Also includes: parental abandonment (both leads), alcoholism (father, backstory), online harassment/cancel culture, property dispute/financial threat, emotional manipulation (backstory), a man learning that vulnerability isn’t weakness and a woman learning that authenticity isn’t performance. All content between consenting adults. Guaranteed HEA with epilogue.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Chapter One: Dust and Delusion
The ranch was not what the pictures promised.
Piper Hayes stood at the end of a dirt road that her rental car’s GPS had tried to reroute her away from three separate times, staring at eight hundred acres of Texas Hill Country real estate that looked, in the golden late-afternoon light, like the “before” photo in a home renovation show that had been cancelled due to structural concerns.
The farmhouse sagged. Not metaphorically — the actual roofline dipped in the middle like a horse that had given up on posture. The porch railing was missing three spindles and leaning at an angle that suggested a casual relationship with gravity. The front door was painted a shade of blue that might once have been cheerful but had faded to the exact color of disappointment, and there was a goat standing on the porch.
The goat was staring at her with the flat, judgmental eyes of an animal that had seen better visitors.
“Hi there,” Piper said to the goat, because she’d been driving for six hours and her standards for conversation partners had deteriorated significantly since Waco.
The goat did not respond. The goat continued to stare with an expression that communicated, with remarkable clarity for a farm animal, that Piper was not what it had been hoping for either.
Frequently Asked Questions
How steamy is it?
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 (5/5 flames). Seven fully explicit scenes that escalate from hate-fueled kitchen counter sex during a thunderstorm to slow, devastating lovemaking in a moonlit creek where both characters cry and neither apologizes for it. The heat serves the story — every scene marks a shift in the power dynamic and the emotional stakes.
What kind of hero is Cade?
The strong, silent type — literally. Cade Walker communicates in monosyllables, jaw clenches, and acts of service. He’ll rebuild your porch railing without being asked but can’t say “I love you” without his throat closing. He’s possessive, protective, and devastating when he finally breaks. Think: the man who says twelve words in twenty-two chapters and every single one matters.
Is there a grovel?
THE grovel. Chapter 20. A man who hasn’t left his county in three years drives 140 miles in an ironed button-down to stand in a motel parking lot and deliver the longest speech of his life. With tears. This chapter has been known to cause involuntary screaming and the urgent need to text your book club.
Tell me about the goat.
Dolly is a goat who hates everyone. She screams at the sunrise. She headbutts phones. She judges you with flat yellow eyes and finds you wanting. She is also the emotional barometer of the entire book — when Dolly lets you touch her, you have earned something sacred. Readers have described her as “the best character in romance fiction” and “more emotionally intelligent than most humans I know.”
Is there a happy ending?
Always. Full HEA including: a public kiss in front of half the town after a grass fire, a fence torn down between their properties, a goat who still screams at Cade every morning, banana bread that finally works, and the last line of the book will hit you like a freight train. No cliffhangers. Standalone with series potential (Jesse’s book is next).
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