California Romance

Based on everything in the manuscript, here's a full back cover description:---**She didn't come to the desert to fall in love. She came to disappear.**Arlowe Calloway has spent a decade building the perfect life - the Manhattan penthouse, the powerful partner, the curated world where nothing was out of place and nothing could touch her. When it all unravels, she does the only thing that feels honest: she buys a 1959 butterfly-roof bungalow in Palm Springs and drives west without looking back.The Mojave, however, has its own ideas about fresh starts.On her first day, a dusty National Park Service truck rolls up her gravel drive and a ranger named Silas Vance tells her, without apology, that her ferns won't last the week, her privacy screen is an obstruction, and the desert doesn't care about ownership - only what lasts.Arlowe is not impressed.But Silas knows something about her house that she doesn't. Something buried beneath the terrazzo floors, hidden in sixty-year-old blueprints, and protected by a family secret that has been waiting three decades for the right person to find it. What begins as a battle over permits and easements becomes something neither of them expected - a reckoning with the past, a fight for the land itself, and the slow, stubborn discovery that some things are only built to last when they stop pretending to be something they're not.Set against the blazing beauty of Palm Springs, the star-drenched silence of the high desert, and the hidden pulse of the Mojave aquifer, *A California Romance: The Desert Escape* is a story about the architecture of a life rebuilt - in dust, in starlight, and in deep, rising water.Some people come to the desert to hide. Arlowe Calloway came to wake things up.