Gold Leaf and Sawdust
A New Adult Romance

About this book:

Maeve Holloway has three months to save a century of gold leaf from a carousel that's been rotting in a leaky warehouse since the Eisenhower administration. Bram has eleven months to rebuild forty-two thousand pounds of timber and iron before the Fourth of July crowd arrives. She sees art; he sees load paths. She speaks in pigment analysis and reversible adhesives; he speaks in scarf joints and through-bolts. When the town council demands a miracle, the conservator and the carpenter have to decide whether the masterpiece is the paint—or the machine that makes it move.

The 1912 Looff menagerie doesn't care about their credentials. It only cares that the center pole holds, that the sweep arms don't shear, that the gilded palominos don't shake themselves to kindling when the motor kicks on. Every frozen nut, every rotted tenon, every layer of institutional white latex forces them closer: under the belly of a snarling hare, balanced on a six-by-eight joist twenty feet up, arguing over walnut keys and penetrating oil while the Puget Sound fog rolls through the clerestories. The friction between them isn't academic anymore. It's the heat of two people who've never met anyone who speaks the language of the work.

*Gold Leaf and Sawdust* is a slow-burn new adult romance set in the grease and glory of a real restoration—where the past isn't a museum piece, it's a heavy, living thing that demands both the scalpel and the sledge. For readers who love *The Nature of the Beast* or *The Simple Wild*, here's a love story built on competence, dust, and the quiet revelation that preserving something beautiful might require letting it run wild again.