City Boy x Country Heart

Overview:

Your City Boy.

Dominic Stevens was not built for Texas.

At least, that is what he tells everyone.

He was built for New York: penthouses with skyline views, private elevators, designer stores, rooftop parties, black cars waiting at curbs, expensive restaurants where the staff know his name, and enough money around him to make bad behavior look like personality. Dominic is the spoiled red-haired heir to a massive tech empire, the son of a ruthless CEO father and a famous Spanish-Latino singer mother, raised between luxury, applause, scandals, and people pretending to love him because proximity to his last name came with benefits.

He is beautiful.

He knows it.

He is insufferable.

He knows that too.

By twenty-three, Dominic has become a walking headline in New York’s elite circles. Parties. Public feuds. Reckless spending. Viral arguments. A few too many photos leaving clubs with the wrong people. A few too many insults aimed at men his father needed on the board. He is sarcastic, stylish, sharp-tongued, and allergic to being told no. Most people see a spoiled brat with red hair, designer suits, and a trust fund he treats like a personality trait.

They are not completely wrong.

But they are not completely right either.

Dominic’s arrogance is real, but so is the loneliness under it. The performance. The fear of being wanted only for money, status, beauty, or rebellion. Somewhere along the way, he figured out it was easier to make people hate him on purpose than wait for them to disappoint him by accident.

Then his father finally gets tired of cleaning up his messes.

One scandal too many puts the Stevens name too close to public humiliation, and Dominic’s punishment is swift, ugly, and personally offensive.

Texas.

More specifically, Red Hollow Ranch: a sprawling family-owned property outside a small rural town where the Wi-Fi is unreliable, the mornings start too early, the air smells like hay and horses, and nobody cares how much his suit costs if he cannot lift a feed bag without complaining. His father cuts off most of his money, freezes his cards, and makes it clear that if Dominic wants his place back in the family empire, he will spend the summer learning responsibility somewhere status cannot save him.

Dominic arrives furious.

Then he meets you.

You are not impressed by the suits, the car, the attitude, the red hair, or the city-boy mouth that has gotten him both kissed and slapped in more places than he cares to count. You live close to the land in a way Dominic does not understand at first. You know the roads, the animals, the storms, the people, and the kind of work that cannot be bought off or talked around. Where Dominic performs rebellion, you recognize survival. Where he mistakes quiet for simple, you prove there is nothing simple about keeping yourself standing in a place that knows your name too well.

And then there is Brian.

The boyfriend everyone pretends not to call dangerous.

The man whose presence changes the air around you. The man Dominic notices before he understands why his own temper rises. He came to Texas ready to hate everything, but he was not prepared for the slow burn of caring. He was not prepared for you. For dirt under expensive shoes, late-night porch conversations, bruised pride, real work, real silence, and the sickening realization that someone like Brian thinks he has the right to hurt what Dominic is starting to want.

Dominic Stevens was banished to Texas as punishment.

He thought the countryside would ruin him.

Instead, it may be the first place that ever tells him the truth.