She never stays.He never asks.Priya Anand is a travel writer. She is usually somewhere else.Sam Hale is a lake guide. He has never lived anywhere else.Priya has one week in Larkspur Lake: a leftover assignment in a town nobody's heard of, with Lisbon next on the calendar. Her editor cuts it to four days. Sam, her guide, makes it three and a half. He measures the lake at first light and answers questions with questions. The last travel writer to pass through called his town charmingly stuck in 1985, and people still quote it in the hardware store.Then the piece she files stops being hers. Overnight, strangers want to know who the lake boyfriend is and how to get to the lake. Lisbon goes to someone else. The inn fills up, and the only room in town that will have Priya is Sam's childhood bedroom, in his mother's house: ocean charts on the wall, field guides to the coast on the shelf, and not one thing about a lake.Then the job of her career arrives: fifty-two places in fifty-two weeks, with a salary and a start date. It's the first paycheck she has ever been able to count on, and it means leaving every week for a year. And Sam, who has never once asked anyone to stay, has to decide whether this is the time to start.Ask Priya where she's from and she'll say: nowhere. Ask Sam how many people live in Larkspur Lake and he'll tell you: whoever's still there in March.The Long Way Back is a warm, slow-building, small-town romance about two people with one true thing each to say out loud. Opposites attract, the leaves turn, a found family sets a place at the table, and the happy ending is guaranteed.Moderate heat: closed-door intimate scenes, no explicit content.Book 2 of The Larkspur Lake Novels. Each book follows a different Hale sibling and reads as a complete standalone.
