Harlequin
November 6, 2018

Want Me, Cowboy

Her rancher boss is looking for the perfect wife…

and she wants the job!

Poppy Sinclair kept her feelings for Isaiah Grayson secret for a decade. When her infuriatingly gorgeous Stetson-wearing boss enlists her help in finding him a convenient wife, she threatens to quit. Until Isaiah counters with an interesting proposal: Why doesn’t she marry him? Can she say yes to sharing his life and his bed, but not his heart?

“Yates’s heart-wrenching latest Copper Ridge contemporary (after Claim Me, Cowboy) uses powerful emotions to challenge a logical, practical view of marriage.” —Publisher’s Weekly on Want Me, Cowboy

Also In this Series:

Take Me, Cowboy

April 1, 2016
Hold Me, Cowboy

November 8, 2016
Seduce Me, Cowboy

March 7, 2017
(Jonathan & Hayley's book)
Claim Me, Cowboy

April 1, 2018
Need Me, Cowboy

April 1, 2019
(Faith's book)

Excerpt

November 1st, 2018

Location: Copper Ridge, Oregon

WIFE WANTED —

Rich rancher, not given to socializing. Wants a wife who will not try to change me. Must be tolerant of moods, reported lack of sensitivity, and my tendency to take off for a few days time in the mountains. Will expect meals cooked. Also probably a kid or two. Exact number to be negotiated. Beard is nonnegotiable.

November 5th, 2018

Revised draft for approval by 11/6

WIFE WANTED —

Rich rancher, not given to socializing. Successful Rancher searching for a wife who enjoys rural living. Wants a wife who will not try to change me. Must be tolerant of moods, reported lack of sensitivity, and my tendency to take off for a few days time in the mountains. Though happy with my life, it has begun to feel lonely, and I would like someone to enhance the enjoyment of what I have already. I enjoy extended camping trips and prefer to mountains to a night on the town. Will expect meals cooked. Also probably a kid or two. Exact number to be negotiated. Beard is nonnegotiable. Is looking for a traditional family life, with a wife and children to share it with.

“This is awful.”

Poppy Sinclair looked up from her desk, her eyes colliding with her boss’s angry gray stare. He was holding a printout of the personal ad she’d revised for him and shaking it at her like she was a dog and it was a newspaper.

“The original was awful,” she responded curtly, turning her focus back to her computer.

“But it was all true.”

“Lead with being less of an asshole.”

“I am an asshole,” Isaiah said, clearly unconcerned with the fact.

He was at peace with himself. Which she admired on some level. Isaiah was Isaiah and he made very apologies for that fact. But it was a problem if the man wanted to find a wife. Because very few other people were at peace with him just as he was.

“I would never say I want to—“ he frowned — “enhance my enjoyment. What the hell, Poppy? That sounds like I’m taking a penis pill, not looking for a wife.”

Poppy had known Isaiah since she was eighteen years old. She was used to his moods. His complete lack of subtlety. His gruffness.

But somehow, she’d never managed to get used to him. As a man.

This grumpy, rough, bearded man who was like a brick wall. Or more like one of those mountains he liked to disappear into for days at a time.

Every time she saw him it was like he’d stolen the air right from her lungs. It was more than just being handsome — thought he was — but a lot of men were handsome. His brother Joshua was handsome, and a whole lot easier to get along with.

Isaiah was…well he was her very particular brand of catnip. He made everything in her sit up, purr…and want to be stroked.

Even when he was in full hermit mode.

People — and interacting with them — were decidedly not his thing. It was one reason Poppy had always been an asset to him in his work life. It was her job to sit and take notes during meetings…and report her read on the room to him after. He was a brilliant businessman, and was fantastic with numbers. But people…not so much people.

As evidenced by the ad. Of course, the very fact that he was placing an ad to find a wife was both contradicting to that point and also, somehow, firmly in affirmation of it.

It was Joshua’s fault. Well, probably Devlin and Joshua combined, in fairness.

His brothers had been happy bachelors until a couple of years ago when Devlin had married their sister Faith’s best friend, Mia.

Then, Joshua had been the next to succumb to matrimony. A victim of their father’s harebrained scheme to marry him off, the patriarch of the Grayson family had put an ad in a national newspaper looking for a wife for his son. In retaliation Joshua had placed an ad in his own, looking for an unsuitable wife that would teach his father not to meddle.

It all backfired. Or… Front fired. Either way, Joshua had ended up married to Danielle, and was now happily settled with her, and her half-brother that both of them were raising as their son.

It was after their wedding that Isaiah had formed his plan.

It had — he had explained to Poppy at work one morning — clarified a few things for him. He believed in marriage as a valuable institution, one that he wanted to be part of. He wanted stability. He wanted children. But he didn’t have any inclination toward love.

He didn’t have to tell her why.

She knew why.

Rosalind.

But she wouldn’t speak her foster sister’s name out loud, and neither would he. But she remembered. The awful, awful fallout of her betrayal.

His pain. Her own conflicted feelings.

It was easy to remember her conflicted feelings, since she still had them.

He was staring at her now, those dark eyes hard and glinting with and energy she couldn’t quite pin down. And the coldness there, the coldness that hadn’t been there before. The one that told her and any other woman — loud and clear — that his heart was unavailable.

That didn’t mean that her own heart didn’t twist every time he walked into the room without notice. Every time he leaned closer to her — like he was doing now — and she could get a hint of the scent of him. Rugged and pine-laden and basically lumberjack porn for her senses.

He was a contradiction from his cowboy hat down to his boots. A numbers guy who loved the outdoors and was built like he belonged outside doing hard labor.

Dear God, he was problematic. He made her dizzy. Those broad shoulders, shoulders she wanted to grab on to. Lean waist and hips – hips she wanted to wrap her legs around. And his forearms…all hard muscle. She wanted to lick them.

He turned her into a being made of sensual frustration, and no one else did that. Ever. Sadly, she seemed to have no affect on him at all.

“I’m not trying to mislead anyone,” he said.

“Right. But you are trying to entice someone.” The very thought made her stomach twist into a knot. But jealousy was pointless. If Isaiah wanted her…well, he would have wanted her by now.

He straightened, moving away from her and walking across the office. She nearly sagged with relief. “My money should do that.” As if that explained and solved every potential issue with this.

She bit back a weary sigh. “Would you like someone who was maybe…interested in who you were as a person?”

She knew that that was a stupid question to ask of Isaiah Grayson. But she was his friend, as well as his employee. So it was kind of…her duty to say something like that. Even if she didn’t want him to do this at all.

And didn’t want him to find anyone.

Wow. Some friend she was.

But then, having…complex feelings for one’s friend made emotional altruism tricky.

“As you pointed out,” he said, his tone dry, “I’m an asshole.”

“You were actually the one that said that. I said you sounded like one.”

He waved his hand. “Either way, I’m not going to win Miss Congeniality in the pageant, and we both know that. Fine with me if somebody wants to get hitched and spend my money.”

She sighed heavily, ignoring the fact that her heart felt an awful lot like paper that had been crumpled up into a tight, mutilated ball. “Why do you even want a wife, Isaiah?”

“I explained that to you already. Joshua is settled. Devlin is settled.”

“Yes, they are. So why now?”

“I always imagined I would get married,” he said simply. “I never intended to spend my whole life single.”

“Is your biological clock ticking?” she asked dryly.

“In a way,” he said. “Again, it all comes back to logic. I’m close to my family, to my brothers. They’ll have children sooner rather than later. Joshua and Danielle already have a son. Cousins should be close in age. It just makes sense.”

She bit the inside of her cheek. “So you…you just think you can decide it’s time and make it time?”

“Yes. And I think Joshua’s experience proves you can make anything work as long as you have a common goal. It can be math.”

She graduated from her cheek to her tongue. Isaiah was a numbers guy unto his soul. “Uh huh.” She refused to offer even a pat agreement because she just thought he was wrong. Not that she knew much of anything about relationships of…any kind really.

She’d been shuffled around so many foster homes as a child, and it wasn’t until she was in high school she’d had a couple of years of stability with one family. Which was where she’d met Rosalind, the one foster sibling she was still in touch with. They’d shared a room and talked about a future where they were more than wards of the State.

In the years since she felt like she’d carved out a decent life for herself. But still, it wasn’t like she’d had any romantic relationships to speak of. Since pining after your boss didn’t count.

“The only aspect of going out and hooking up I like is the hooking up,” he said. She wanted to punch him for that unnecessary addition to the conversation.

She sucked her cheek in and bit the inside of it too. “Great.”

“When you think about it, making it a transaction is smart. Marriage is a legal transaction. But, you don’t just get sex. You get the benefit of having your household kept, children…”

“Right. Children.” She’d ignored his first mention of them, but…she pressed her hands to her stomach unconsciously. Then, she dropped it quickly.

She should not be thinking about Isaiah and children area or the fact that he intended to have them with another woman.

Confused feelings was a cop out. And it was hard to deny the truth when she was steeped in this kind of reaction to him talking about children.

The fact of the matter was she was tragically in love with him. And he’d never once seen her the way she saw him.

She’d met him through Rosalind. When Poppy had turned eighteen she’d found herself released from her foster home with nowhere to go. Everything she owned was in an old canvas tote that a foster mom had given her years ago.

Rosalind had been the only person she could think to call. The foster sister she’d bonded with in her last few years in care. She’d always kept in touch with Poppy, even when she moved into Seattle and got work.

Even when she’d started dating a wonderful man she couldn’t say enough good things about.

She was the only lifeline Poppy had, and she’d reached for it. And Rosalind had come through. She’d had Poppy come to her apartment, and then she’d arranged for a job interview with her boyfriend who needed an assistant at his job for a construction firm he was with.

In one afternoon, she’d found a place to live, gotten a job and lost her heart.

Of course, she had lost it, immediately and — in the fullness of time it had become clear — irrevocably to the one man who was off limits.

Her boss. Her foster sister’s boyfriend. Isaiah Grayson.

Though, his status as her boss had lasted longer than his status as Rosalind’s boyfriend. He’d become her fiancé. And then after, her ex.

And that was the one and only thing about living with a divided heart for so long. Even after their split, she was able to care for them both. Though she never, ever spoke to Rosalind or mentioned her in Isaiah’s presence.

Rosalind didn’t have the same embargo on mentions of Isaiah. But in fairness, she was the one who had cheated on him, cost him a major business deal and nearly ruined his startup company and — by extension— nearly ruined his relationship with his business partner who was also his brother.

So.

She’d loved him while he’d dated another woman. Loved him while he nursed a broken heart because of said other woman. Loved him when he disavowed love completely. And now she would have to love him while she interviewed potential candidates to be his wife.

She was wretched.

He had said the word sex in front of her like it wouldn’t do anything to her body. Had talked about children like it wouldn’t make her… Like it would make her long.

Men were idiots. But this one might well be their king.

“Put the unrevised add in the paper.”

She shook her head. “I’m not doing that.”

“I could fire you.” He leaned in closer and her breath caught. “For insubordination.”

Her heart tumbled around erratically and she wished she could blame it on anger. Annoyance. But she knew that wasn’t it.

She forced herself to rally.“If you haven’t yet you’re never going to. And anyway,” she said, narrowing her tone so that the words would hit him with a point. “I’m the one who has to interview your prospective brides. Which makes this my endeavor in many ways. I’m the one that’s going to have to weed through your choices. So I would like the ad to go out that I think has the best chance of giving me less crap to sort through.”

He looked up at her, and much to her surprise seems to be considering what she had said. “That is true. You will be doing the interviews.”

She felt like she’d been stabbed. She was going to be interviewing Isaiah’s potential wives. The man she had been in love with since she was a teenage idiot, and was still in love with now that she was an idiot in her late twenties.

There were a whole host of reasons she’d never, ever let on about her feelings for him. Rosalind and his feelings on love aside.

She loved her job. She loved Isaiah’s family, who she’d gotten to know well over the past decade, and who were the closest thing she had to a family of her own.

Plus it was just…easy to dismiss it. She wasn’t the type of girl who could have something like that. Not Poppy Sinclair whose mother had disappeared when she was two years old and left her with a father who forgot to feed her.

That was changing though, slowly.

She was living well beyond what she had ever imagined would be possible for her. Gray Bear Construction was thriving, the merger between Jonathan Bear and the Grayson’s company a couple of years ago more successful than they’d imagined it could be.

And every employee on every level had reaped the benefits of that.

She was also living in the small town of Copper Ridge, Oregon, which was a bit strange for a girl from Seattle, but she did like it. It was a different pace. But, it also meant that there was less of a social life. That there were less people to interact with. And that by default you ended up spending a lot of her free time with the people she worked with every day. There was nothing wrong with that. She loved faith, and she had begun getting close to Isaiah and Joshua’s business partner wife recently. But it was just… Mostly there wasn’t enough of a break from Isaiah on any given day. But then, she also didn’t enforce one. Didn’t take one. She supposed she couldn’t really blame the location when the likely culprit of the entire situation was her.

“Place whatever ad you need to,” he said, his tone abrupt. “When you meet the women you’ll know.”

“I’ll know,” she echoed lamely.

“Yes. Nobody knows me better than you do, Poppy. I have Faith that you’ll pick the right wife for me.”

With those awful words still ringing in the room, Isaiah left her there, sitting at her desk, feeling numb and ill used.

The fact of the matter was, she probably could pick him a perfect wife. Someone who would facilitate his life, and give him space when he needed it. Someone who was beautiful and fabulous in bed.

Yes, she knew exactly what Isaiah Grayson would think made a woman the perfect wife for him.

The sad thing was, Poppy didn’t possess very many of those qualities herself.

And what she so desperately wanted was for Isaiah’s perfect wife to be her. But dreams were for other women. They always had been.

Which meant some other woman was going to end up with Poppy’s dream.

While she played matchmaker to the whole affair.

Want Me, Cowboy

Also In this Series:

Take Me, Cowboy

Hold Me, Cowboy

Seduce Me, Cowboy

Claim Me, Cowboy

Need Me, Cowboy

Excerpt

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