The Stud by Emma D. Reynolds

He buried his wife and his son ten years ago. He never meant to want anything again.

Etta Briggs drives onto Calder Ranch with eleven hundred dollars, her dead father's saddle, and forty-one thousand in debt she didn't make and can't outrun. Holt Calder needs a ranch hand, not a heartbreak — and the girl working off her father's markers is half his age and twice as brave as any man on his place.

He's a breeder. Reading bloodlines, pairing the right ones, keeping what's his — that's the whole of what he knows. What he doesn't know is how to stop wanting the soft, sharp-tongued girl sleeping in his bunkhouse. Then one flooded night washes the last rule between them away.

When two pink lines turn up on a tack-room shelf, the man who lost everything to a delivery room has to decide: is he brave enough to want it all again, or coward enough to send her away to keep her safe?

A widowed rancher with a locked room and a ten-year wound. A girl who has spent her whole life being used up and moved on. A baby neither of them planned. And the one love he swore he would never risk again.

She came to work off a debt. She was never supposed to be the thing he couldn't let go.

The Stud is a standalone older man, younger woman romance set on an isolated Texas Hill Country ranch, featuring a grieving widower hero, a curvy heroine who is celebrated rather than fixed, a slow-burn forbidden affair, breeding and pregnancy, and a possessive but tender claiming. No cheating, no cliffhanger, and a hard-won happily ever after. Contains explicit sexual content and is intended for readers 18 and older.