Love blooms in Blake’s Folly – #Secrets #NevadaDesert @JArleneCuliner

Blurb

Secrets are the best protection against love

Rose Badger is the local flirt, and if the other inhabitants of backwoods Blake’s Folly, Nevada, don’t approve, she couldn’t care less. With a disastrous marriage and a dead-end career far behind her, settling down is the last thing she intends to do. Newcomer Jonah Livingstone is intriguing, but with his complicated life, he’s off limits for anything other than friendship. Besides, Rose has a secret world of her own—one she won’t give up for any man.

The last person geologist Jonah Livingstone expected to meet in a semi-ghost town is the sparkling and lovely Rose Badger. But Rose, always surrounded by many admirers, doesn’t seem inclined to choose a favorite. So why fret? Jonah keeps his personal life well hidden…and that's the best way to avoid disappointment.

Excerpt

“I didn’t really think you’d keep your promise to show me fossils and—” She stopped and caught her bottom lip in her pearly teeth, as if she had said too much, had confessed something she’d rather have kept hidden. He didn’t want there to be secrets between them. He liked her too much already, and he wished he could tell her that. Knew he couldn’t.

How well did he know her? Not at all. How much did they really have in common? He’d offered her friendship the other night, yet knew perfectly well his attraction was also sexual. He was willing to admit she fascinated him; a little inner voice warned him that, if he let himself go, the feeling might run deeper than that. Was that what he wanted? Why had he been so determined to see her again so quickly? Why had he invented the story about needing to be out at the mine this morning?

“And?”

She watched him from under her lashes. “And…well, I guess I didn’t think you’d remember you’d made the promise.”

He snickered. “I admit we geologists have the reputation of being absent-minded. We deal with time sequences of a hundred million years or so, so we have some difficulty with small-time quanta such as centuries and decades. Some of us refer to ancient civilizations as ‘all that recent crap on the top.’ As for deadlines, we’re absolute duds.” He put down his spoon, leaned back in his chair, smiled at Rose. “But I never forget a promise.”

Purchase Links

https://books2read.com/RosesDesert

https://mybook.to/RosesDesert

About the Author

Writer, photographer, social critical artist, and impenitent teller of tall tales, J. Arlene Culiner was born in New York and raised in Toronto. She has crossed much of Europe on foot, has lived in a mud house on the Great Hungarian Plain, a Bavarian castle, a Turkish cave dwelling, a haunted house on the English moors, and on a Dutch canal. She now resides in a 400-year-old former inn in a French village of no interest where, much to local dismay, she protects spiders, snakes, and all weeds. She particularly enjoys incorporating into mysteries, non-fiction, and romances, her experiences in out-of-the-way communities, and her conversations with very odd characters.