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Burning: Book 1: Operations Romance
She's been reading rooms her whole life. She just never had anywhere to take the readings.
For two years, Lucy cleaned hotel rooms in Los Angeles — cataloguing everything, reporting to no one. Then a woman named Lauren left a card in one of Lucy's rooms, and Lucy called the number, and everything that came before stopped mattering.
Lauren runs an operation out of a ranch in West Texas. The kind that doesn't exist on paper. The kind built to do what the federal system can't reach fast enough — dismantle the networks that move people across the border and the powerful men who protect those networks from above. She's been building it for two years. She needs one more person. The right shape for the right space.
Lucy is the right shape.
Rhodd is already there — eighteen months in, twenty years older, carrying the weight of seventeen names the way people carry things they've decided never to set down. He is the most honest person Lucy has ever been in a room with. She isn't sure yet what to do with that.
What follows is a ranch outside Presidio, a ledger page photographed at risk, a chain of indictments built link by careful link, and three people who are not supposed to be what they become to each other — but do anyway, slowly, correctly, in the dark.
BURNING is a dark romance and a justice thriller. It is a book about what it costs to do the right thing outside the law. About a woman finding the shape she was always supposed to be. And about what happens when three people moving in the same direction realize they were building toward each other the whole time.
For readers who want the heat and the weight both.
Dual-timeline slow burn. Morally complex. Explicit. Violence on the page. The names of the dead are always said aloud.
For two years, Lucy cleaned hotel rooms in Los Angeles — cataloguing everything, reporting to no one. Then a woman named Lauren left a card in one of Lucy's rooms, and Lucy called the number, and everything that came before stopped mattering.
Lauren runs an operation out of a ranch in West Texas. The kind that doesn't exist on paper. The kind built to do what the federal system can't reach fast enough — dismantle the networks that move people across the border and the powerful men who protect those networks from above. She's been building it for two years. She needs one more person. The right shape for the right space.
Lucy is the right shape.
Rhodd is already there — eighteen months in, twenty years older, carrying the weight of seventeen names the way people carry things they've decided never to set down. He is the most honest person Lucy has ever been in a room with. She isn't sure yet what to do with that.
What follows is a ranch outside Presidio, a ledger page photographed at risk, a chain of indictments built link by careful link, and three people who are not supposed to be what they become to each other — but do anyway, slowly, correctly, in the dark.
BURNING is a dark romance and a justice thriller. It is a book about what it costs to do the right thing outside the law. About a woman finding the shape she was always supposed to be. And about what happens when three people moving in the same direction realize they were building toward each other the whole time.
For readers who want the heat and the weight both.
Dual-timeline slow burn. Morally complex. Explicit. Violence on the page. The names of the dead are always said aloud.
338 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 22, 2026
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