★★★★★

A world I enjoy being lost in

"Stories that mean this much to me come around so rarely. The characters built through Wilder's books are so full of young passion and electricity that you don't want to pull away. Characters like these I hold close to my heart, so that on a slow day years from now you may recall them as old friends and wonder what became of them."

Though she spent most of the rare happy moments of her childhood at a ranch camp, Jordan never thought there was space for horses (or cowboys) in her adult life.

Jordan thinks she's doing pretty well. She survived childhood with an abusive mother. Now she's holding down a job and getting herself through the day-to-day slog of modern living. But her only social outlet is an online game where her partner is a horse named after the one she lost as a kid.

Jordan is well aware racking up so many hours in a fantasy world isn't exactly healthy; her brother is constantly hounding her to get out more. When another player in the game starts making friendly overtures, she can even concede this might be a bad sign. So when an ad pops up in her work queue about a ranch offering riding lessons, she decides she needs a new outlet. She heads to the Tipped Z, where she meets her instructor, Erin, and a ranch hand named Grant.

Grant proves to be interesting, and not just because he seems potentially interested in her. Though he's clearly a cowboy, he mysteriously refuses to get on a horse. When Jordan sets out to figure out why, she realizes she's going to have to deal with some of her own unaddressed trauma if she wants things with Grant to evolve.

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A Man Who Heals can be read as a stand-alone novel, but it is the third book in the Tipped Z series. These novels combine horsemanship, family, love, and the Tucson desert into sweet, thoughtful, heart-warming reads. Discover them all:

• A Man Who Rides
• A Man Who Starts
• A Man Who Heals
• Vaquera's Haven
• Vaquera's Bronc
• Vaquera's Gold (coming in 2021)

The short story Thrown is also available. An extended epilogue to A Man Who Rides, Thrown is exclusive content offered for free to members of Wilder's mailing list. Learn more at stefaniwilder.com. Stefani Wilder writes heartwarming and sweet contemporary western romance set in the unique and beautiful Sonoran desert of southern Arizona. She draws deeply on her own extensive experience with training horses, along with details from her life growing up in a wild, rural landscape. Her novels are vivid, authentic, and impossible to put down.