Saddle Up, Make Out
MM Cowboy Romance
by Jace Wilder
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Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Rivals to Lovers, Fake Dating, Forced Proximity, One Bed, Caretaker Romance, Only Soft For You, Touch Starved, Cowboy/Rodeo
Two rival rodeo cowboys. One fake relationship. Zero chance of keeping it professional.
A bronc rider with a sponsorship problem and a bull rider with a reputation for bad behavior agree to fake a wholesome romance to save their careers. The deal is simple: six months of hand-holding, shared trailers, and couple selfies for the cameras. No feelings. No complications. No kissing unless absolutely necessary.
Levi Hartley is the rodeo circuit’s golden boy — charming, magnetic, and one bad headline away from losing everything. Rhett Dawson is the bull rider nobody can talk to, touch, or tolerate — talented as hell and just as difficult. They’ve spent three years circling each other like two storms that never collide.
Until now.
Forced into the same trailer, the same interviews, and the same bed, they discover that the line between rivalry and attraction was never as thick as they pretended. And when a brutal injury forces Rhett off the circuit and Levi becomes his hands, his ice packs, and his reason to stop pretending — the fake relationship becomes the realest thing either of them has ever had.
But the truth about how they started is a ticking clock. And when it detonates, they’ll have to decide: let the lie destroy what they’ve built, or tell the whole truth and bet their careers on a love story nobody was supposed to believe.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ Enemies-to-lovers with real competitive heat
✅ Fake dating that combusts into real feelings
✅ Grumpy/sunshine cowboy energy (one talks, one glares)
✅ Forced proximity in a very small trailer
✅ Injury + caretaking that rewires the power dynamic
✅ “Only soft for you” and touch-starved tenderness
✅ Inferno heat (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ Grand gesture with a cowboy hat and eight thousand witnesses
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes), strong language, rodeo-related injury (shoulder dislocation), depictions of family rejection related to coming out, and themes of isolation and self-worth. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.
Chapter One: Eight Seconds and a Bad Headline
The bronc’s name was Hellbent, which Levi Hartley thought was a little on the nose for a Tuesday afternoon in Amarillo.
He settled into the saddle behind the chute gate, boots locked in the stirrups, rein wrapped tight around his left hand. Hellbent shifted beneath him — thirteen hundred pounds of ugly temperament packed into a compact, slate-gray body that smelled like dust and animal fury. The horse’s muscles bunched and rolled under Levi’s thighs, coiled so tight the vibration traveled up through his pelvis and into his chest.
“You good?” The chute boss leaned over the rail.
Levi flashed him a grin. “Born good. Ask anybody.”
He nodded.
The gate swung open, and the world became violent.
Hellbent launched out of the chute like a truck rolling off a cliff — front end dropped, back end vertical, and then the spin started. Levi’s free arm shot up and back, counterbalancing as the horse whipped left, kicked right, and tried to fold itself in half underneath him. The crowd noise hit a wall of white sound. Dust filled his lungs. His thighs burned, his lower back screamed, and his brain went quiet the way it only ever did on the back of something trying to kill him.
One second. Two. Three.
He found the rhythm — not fighting the horse, riding the chaos, matching each buck with a spur stroke that looked effortless from the stands and felt like defusing a bomb from the saddle. Hellbent snapped left and Levi rolled with it, spine liquid, hips loose, the rein an extension of his fist.
Four. Five. Six.
The horse changed tactics, switching to a sharp vertical buck that rattled Levi’s teeth and sent a jolt of white pain through his wrist. He held. The crowd surged louder.
Seven.
Hellbent gave one last nasty twist — a full-body corkscrew that Levi absorbed with his knees and his stubbornness and every ounce of rodeo muscle memory he’d spent eleven years building.
Eight.
The buzzer sounded.
Levi’s free hand came down, grabbed leather, and he kicked out of the stirrups as the pickup riders flanked Hellbent and pulled him clear. His boots hit dirt and the roar of the crowd crashed into him like a wave — not a big crowd, maybe three thousand, but they were loud and they were his and goddamn if that wasn’t still the best drug he’d ever found.
He pulled off his hat and tossed it at the nearest section of bleachers. A teenage girl caught it and screamed.
Eighty-seven point five.
Not his best. Not his worst. Good enough to hold second in today’s go-round, good enough to keep his season average respectable, and definitely good enough to earn the camera that was already tracking him as he walked toward the catch pens with dust in his teeth and adrenaline still fizzing through his bloodstream like cheap champagne.
“Levi! Over here!”
A photographer from one of the western lifestyle blogs. Levi turned, hooked his thumbs in his belt, and gave her exactly what she wanted — jaw tilted, eyes half-lidded, the kind of smile that suggested he’d just done something filthy and was thinking about doing it again.
“Great ride,” she said, snapping a burst of shots.
“Great horse. I just held on.”
He didn’t just hold on. He never just held on. But humility played well on camera, and Levi had learned a long time ago that what played well on camera was the only currency that mattered when you weren’t rich enough to stop caring.
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
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Eight Seconds More — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon
After the season finals, Levi and Rhett have the ranch to themselves. No cameras. No sponsors. No audience. Just two cowboys, one bed, and every filthy promise they’ve been saving for a night with no interruptions. The heat runs higher than any ride score.
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