Sunshine City Paperback – February 16, 2026

Catherine Mitchell spent thirty-one years as Richard Ashford's wife. Polished. Silent. Invisible. She planned his galas, managed his social calendar, and absorbed his criticism until she forgot there had ever been a woman underneath the performance. When he left her for a younger woman, she took the settlement, dropped his name, and moved to a high-rise overlooking the bay in St. Petersburg, Florida - a city where no one knew her and no one expected anything.She was fifty-four years old and had no idea who she was.Then her doctor prescribed hormone replacement therapy, and everything changed. The body she'd stopped believing was hers woke up - demanding, insistent, alive in ways she hadn't felt in decades. The desire she'd buried under years of obligatory sex and emotional neglect came roaring back, and it didn't care about propriety or timing or whether she was ready.She wasn't ready. She went looking anyway.What she found was more complicated than she expected. A man who offered exactly what she needed - no strings, no pretense, just honest physical connection with someone steady enough to hold her without trying to own her. It was simple. It was good. It should have been enough.It wasn't.Because something else was building - something she didn't plan for and couldn't control. A connection that started with pendant lights and cocktail menus and turned into long afternoons and shared secrets and a pull so strong it terrified her. The kind of wanting that had nothing to do with hormones and everything to do with being seen - truly seen - for the first time in her life.The problem was that wanting him could destroy the one relationship that had saved her. The best friend who'd talked her through the divorce. Who'd welcomed her to Florida. Who'd given her a place to land when her whole world collapsed. That friendship was the foundation of Catherine's new life, and the man she was falling for threatened to crack it wide open.Catherine had spent three decades editing herself - curating what she showed the world, managing how people saw her, performing a version of herself that kept everyone comfortable. Now she was caught between the woman she'd been pretending to be and the woman she was becoming, and the distance between them was getting harder to hide.Sunshine City is a story about what happens when a woman stops performing and starts living. About the difference between being desired and being known. About the lies we tell the people we love and the price of telling the truth. About a body reclaimed, a city discovered, and a life rebuilt from the wreckage of one that was never really hers.It is explicit, emotional, messy, and unapologetic.For readers who want heat with substance. Desire with consequence. A heroine who is fifty-four, imperfect, hungry, and done waiting for permission. Read more