Desert Rose, a contemporary romance from J. Arlene Culiner

Please help us give a very warm welcome back to the blog this week to J. Arlene Culiner. J. Arlene Culiner is here to share her contemporary romance Desert Rose with us. Welcome, J.Arlene! We are thrilled you are joining us again with another book that just sounds fabulous!

Strange and Ghostly Places
by Arlene Culiner

Bored? Are you joking? I don’t even mind being confined — and here in the area just outside Paris, we’re in our fifth week of confinement. But, even in normal times, I’m not even fazed by dull dinner parties, awful waiting rooms, or even chilly bus shelters. Why? Because I simply go off on journeys, travel into the secret places inside my head Yes, people realize I’m not one hundred percent there, that I’m not paying attention to dull monologues or cocktail chitchat, but do I care? No way.

I haven’t invented my secret places. I’ve been to all of them (although my imagination does add a few interesting details) but my higgledy-piggledy life has led me to clapboard, rusty trailer towns decorated by bullet holes; to abandoned manors where ceilings soar high; to dreary bars where eccentrics dish up tall tales, and suspicion; to nowhere ghost towns where wooden doors tap in the wind, and bare stalks scratch.

Am I ever scared? Well…sometimes…especially when I suspect someone is watching from some hidey-hole, but strange and ghostly places should come equipped with thrills and chills. However, if you don’t feel like going to them in real life, I’ll share a few with you in my books. For example, one rusty trailer semi-ghost town has become Blake’s Folly, the setting for my contemporary romance, Desert Rose, and it’s well worth a visit:

“This place was a rusty trailer, scrapyard, abandoned car, clapboard shack, sagging old house community: a dead end if there ever was one. This was nowhere. This was the end of the line, socially speaking. This was a has-been. This was home.”

Romance in Blake’s Folly: Desert Rose

Men love Rose Badger, and if the other inhabitants of dead-end Blake’s Folly, Nevada, don’t approve, she couldn’t care less. With a disastrous marriage far behind her, settling down is the last thing she intends to do. Isn’t life for fun? Doesn’t a stable relationship always mean predictability and boredom? Well… perhaps things might be different with Jonah Livingstone, but he isn’t available. So, why fret? Rose has another, quite secret, life, and she’ll never give that up for any man.

The last person Jonah Livingstone expected to meet in a semi-ghost town is Rose Badger. She’s easy-going, delightfully spontaneous, and Jonah is certain their attraction is mutual. But Rose is always surrounded by a crowd of admirers and doesn’t seem inclined to choose a favorite. No problem: Jonah is too independent to settle into a permanent relationship again. He’s leading his own, very secretive life, and secrets are an excellent protection against love. But just in case he can’t resist…how can he catch his Desert Rose?

Desert Rose Links:

About the Author:

Long ago, J. Arlene Culiner set out to have a life of adventure, not one of security and comfort. She has crossed much of Europe on foot, traveled, by bus, train, car, or truck throughout North and Central America, Europe, and the Sahara, has lived in a Hungarian mud house, a Bavarian castle, a Turkish cave dwelling, on a Dutch canal, in a haunted stone house on the English moors, and presently in a 400-year-old former inn in a French village. Her experiences in out-of-the-way communities with their strange characters and very odd conversations are incorporated into all her stories.

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