She has spent fifteen years uncovering what the past left behind. She never expected the past to keep her.
Dr. Mara Solis is a pragmatic archaeologist with a failed marriage and one obsession: finding the lost tomb of Nebet-Ra, a minor queen who appears in a single forty-three-word footnote and nowhere else.
When Mara unseals a hidden chamber beneath the Luxor plateau, the carnelian amulet inside pulls her three thousand years into the past.
She wakes in the royal court of ancient Thebes. Her knowledge of the ancient language saves her life. But she has only twenty-nine days before the astronomical window closes — twenty-nine days to find her way back before the thread between here and home goes dark forever.
The court is watching her. The vizier wants her gone. And the pharaoh keeps summoning her for evening debates that grow longer with every night she stays.
He is commanding, brilliant, and lonelier than anyone knows. He has governed an empire since he was nineteen. He has never once been spoken to as if he is simply a man.
Mara speaks to him exactly that way.
What begins as philosophy and astronomy becomes something neither of them planned. Their conversations go past the fourth hour. The lamp is replenished once, then twice. Outside the high windows, the Nile runs at flood and the stars complete their slow arc.
She has a plan. The plan is good. The plan does not account for a man who invented a title to keep her close — or what he does in the dark in the hour before the conjunction, in the room where everything ends.
SANDS OF FOREVER is a slow-burn time travel romance set in ancient Egypt at the height of the New Kingdom:
✦ A heroine who saves herself with expertise, not rescue
✦ Romance that builds through twenty-nine evenings of real intellectual connection
✦ Ancient Egypt rendered with archaeological depth — the Opet Festival, the Karnak temples, the royal court's social architecture, the Nile at flood
✦ A villain whose logic is sound and whose one unguarded moment will stay with you
✦ An ending that is complete, emotionally devastating, and opens the door to Book Two
Perfect for readers who loved the emotional depth of Outlander, the mythological richness of The City of Brass, and the slow-burn intellectual romance of A Discovery of Witches — but have been waiting for ancient Egypt to finally get the story it deserves.
"Three thousand years. One amulet. The wrong moment to fall in love."
