About Lorelei Layne
I left finance to write about falling in love.
Former corporate finance. Now a writer in Flagstaff, Arizona — where the ponderosa pines are very tall and the WiFi is good enough. I write second-chance romance about class, longing, and the people who were always the right fit — just at the wrong time.
The longer version.
I spent most of my twenties in finance — not unhappily, but with a persistent sense that the work I was supposed to be doing was somewhere else. I read obsessively: literary fiction, romance, anything with characters who felt like they actually existed. Eventually the reading pressure got high enough that I had to start writing.
I moved to Flagstaff a few years ago. There are worse places to be a person who stares at a screen all day. The altitude is dramatic, the seasons are real, and the sky does something different every afternoon. It turns out this is a good place to write stories about longing.
The Hearts & Tailwinds series came from a question I couldn't stop turning over: what happens when two people get the timing wrong, live full lives in the gap, and then the world hands them a second door? Not a neat resolution. A real second chance, with all the history still attached.
That's what I'm writing. Slowly, carefully, and with great pleasure.
Hearts & Tailwinds
The series that started as a late-night idea about a man who repos planes.
The series began the way most fiction does: with one image that wouldn't leave. A man walks onto a private airstrip. He's there to repossess the plane. He doesn't expect to know the person whose name is on the tail number.
From there the world built itself. Alex Mercer is blue-collar in the truest sense — skilled, self-made, comfortable in engine bays and FBOs and the margins of wealthy spaces without belonging to them. Astrid Calloway has grown up owning those spaces, and has spent years quietly wondering what she gave up when she let Alex walk away the first time.
The series is about class without making it a lesson. About longing that's had time to mature into something more honest. About second chances that don't come gift-wrapped — they come complicated, late, and exactly right.
Full-length novel · Hearts & Tailwinds, Book 2
Loving Astrid
Years later, a job brings Alex back. This time there are no easy exits.
Available now
New books, new essays, nothing you didn't ask for.
About the bookHearts & Tailwinds Newsletter
Keep in touch.
Occasional notes from Flagstaff. New books, new essays, nothing you didn't ask for.
Hearts & Tailwinds Newsletter
The quiet letters I send.
Occasional posts from a desk in Flagstaff. No noise. Just what I'm writing, thinking, and reading. Sign up and I'll leave the rest to the work.
I publish rarely and deliberately. You won't hear from me unless I have something worth saying.