Overlook: A Slow Burn MM Cowboy First Kiss Romance

CADE

The day the bank sends a consultant from Seattle, I expect a vulture in a suit.

What I get is Julian Moretti. Messy hair, city boots, nervous smile. Soft hands that have never seen barbed wire. And eyes that track every broken fencepost like he’s already rewriting the future of my family’s ranch.

Ironwood Valley is all I have left. My brothers are gone. My father’s dead. The mortgage is past due, and a luxury “guest ranch” across the valley is circling like a wolf. I’ve got twenty-three days to hit a nearly impossible booking target or watch four generations of Hartley sweat and sacrifice get bulldozed for an infinity pool.

I don’t have time for a crush.
I definitely don’t have time to want the man the bank sent to judge whether I deserve to keep my home.

But Julian starts following me through my days. Into the barn at dawn. Out on the fence-lines in the cold. Up to the trails only family usually sees. Camera in one hand, too-strong coffee in the other, asking questions that cut straight through my armor.

He turns my work into stories. Turns my scars into proof I’ve fought for this land, not evidence I’ve already lost. Turns our failing website into a lifeline that might actually save us.

And somewhere between the storm rolling in, the power going out, and a ride up to my father’s favorite overlook, I stop seeing Julian as the bank’s man.

I start seeing him as mine.

The kiss is supposed to be a mistake. A moment of weakness, high above the valley I’ve promised to protect.

Instead, it feels a hell of a lot like the start of something I don’t know how to live without.

JULIAN

I come to Montana with one fix Ironwood Valley’s bookings, save my reputation, and get out.

After a public crash-and-burn in Seattle, this ranch is my last shot at proving I’m not the screwup the industry decided I was. Ninety days, one impossible revenue target, and a grumpy ex-soldier whose entire life is nailed together with stubbornness and duct tape.

Cade Hartley is everything I am not.
Quiet where I talk too much. Solid where I overthink. Built of calluses, history, and promises he doesn’t know how to break.

He doesn’t trust easy. Not me, not the bank, not the future.

But he lets me follow him anyway. Into the pre-dawn cold to feed the horses. Along the fence lines where he explains how you can judge a ranch by its wire. Into the barn where he gentles the “difficult” mare with more patience than he gives himself.

I came here to sell “authentic Montana” as a marketing hook. Somewhere between the emergency storm prep, the generator rattling to life, the comments pouring in on our first video, and Cade’s hand closing over mine on a frozen ridgeline, I realize something

I don’t want to sell this story.
I want to belong to it.

The view from the overlook steals my breath. The first kiss knocks the ground out from under me. And the offer sitting in my inbox from a Seattle firm—a corner office, huge salary, the old life I thought I wanted back—suddenly feels a lot less like salvation and a lot more like a different kind of ending.

Twenty-three days to save the ranch.
Five days to decide if I walk away from the man who finally makes me want to stay.

OVERLOOK is a slow burn, first-kiss M/M cowboy romance set on a struggling Montana guest ranch, with grumpy/sunshine vibes, storms, rival ranchers, found family, and two