Red Dust Fever

The thing about rock bottom is that nobody tells you it comes with a boarding pass.When Gemma Whitfield’s partner takes a junior associate across his desk and her company ships her to the Australian outback as a 'development opportunity,' she knows exactly what it really is: exile. Ninety days on a remote mining site in the Pilbara. Forty-two-degree heat. Five hundred workers who don’t want her there. And shared accommodation - shared bathroom, no lock - with the most infuriating man she’s ever met.Lachlan Drummond hasn’t let anyone close in three years. Not since his wife walked out with their daughter on her hip and a sentence that still lives between his ribs: You love those machines more than us. Now he’s a FIFO mechanic who works sixteen-hour shifts, calls his five-year-old every night at six, and does dinosaur voices through a phone screen because that’s the only fifteen minutes of his day that actually matters. He doesn’t need a compliance auditor in his kitchen. He especially doesn’t need one who argues back, reorganizes his bathroom shelf, and drinks his French press coffee every morning when she thinks he doesn’t notice.He notices. He notices the mug moves three centimetres to the left. Every single morning.The Pilbara doesn’t care about professional boundaries. The walls are thin enough to hear a man breathe. The coffee appears on the counter before dawn, handle facing out. And somewhere between the red dust and the cyclone that locks them in together, two people who swore they’d never let anyone in again start building something neither of them planned - something that could cost him custody of his daughter and cost her the career she almost lost once before.She came to survive ninety days. She didn’t expect a man who shows love in Post-it notes and French press coffee. A five-year-old who saves her a plastic Stegosaurus. A crew that calls her Gem. Or a landscape so vast and ancient it strips away every wall she’s built and shows her who she actually is underneath.Red Dust Fever is a slow-burn, forced-proximity contemporary romance set in the Australian outback. It features a grumpy-soft single dad hero, a heroine rebuilding herself from the ground up, a five-year-old dinosaur expert who steals every scene, thin walls, a bathroom that doesn’t lock, and a love story built one cup of coffee at a time.Some stains don’t wash out. Some aren’t supposed to.