She swore she'd never return when she left the place in her rear-view mirror a decade back. Then a public offering left her wealthy and without a purpose in life. So she returned to the only other home she'd ever known in search of a new purpose in life. What she found was Christine. Christine had built a good life in that town Laura never wanted to come back to. She did good business selling overpriced renovations to rich people with more money than time, and she was content with the quiet life she’d built for herself in the small town. Until she drove past Laura’s house one morning and saw that the big city had come to pay a visit, bringing back painful memories she’d thought dead and buried a decade back. To say Laura and Christine have a complicated past would be an understatement, but it’s a past they’ll have to untangle as sparks fly between them all over again!

    But the Circle Bar B ranch isn't the haven she expects it to be. Malicious rumors about Libby are circulating through the ranch, and worse, her lifelong opponent, rancher Jess Barlowe, believes them. The cowboy is as sexy and rugged as ever…but now he's promised to keep a very close eye on her… The more time Jess spends with Libby, the harder it is to resist her. He can't get her out of his mind, but his doubts linger. Are the rumors true? Is he the man she really wants? And in the end, can a proud cowboy like Jess love a woman he can't completely trust?  FREE BONUS STORY INCLUDED IN THIS VOLUME!  A Wife for a Westmoreland by New York Times bestselling author Brenda Jackson Derringer Westmoreland is haunted by memories of a woman whose face he cannot recall. When he finally traces his mystery woman, Lucia Conyers, she's less than impressed with his charms. For the first time in his life, if he wants to win a woman's heart, he'll have to risk his own.

    Romance author Serenity Woods and best selling author Mark Dawson provide ten short tips to help the eager beginner interested in turning their hobby of writing romance stories into a way to earn a living.

    . . What will Mack Stafford do for the money?Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection Ford County.

     Follow along as the Tate siblings find love. Each Steamy, Sweet, Short Story has an alpha man, curvy woman, and a happily ever after.

    From David Gerrold's "The Martian Child" (winner of the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Locus Award, and HOMer Award) to brand new works published here for the first time by David Gerrold and Lawrence Watt-Evans to modern masterpieces by Pamela Sargent and Jay Lake to classics by E.E. "Doc Smith" and Alan E. Nourse -- we have everything a science fiction fan could want. Almost 1,500 pages of great reading!Fiction:TORQUING VACUUM, by Jay LakeCOLLECTORS, by Pamela SargentVICTORY, by Lester del ReyTHE TREE OF LIFE, by C. L. MooreYE OLDE RESIGNATION, by Rhys HughesFACE TO FACE, by Adrian ColeBEYOND THE THUNDER, by H. B. HickeyCAPTIVES OF THE THIEVE-STAR, by James H. SchmitzTHE DEEPS, by Keith RobertsMADMEN MUSTERED, by Connor Freff CochranEXILE FROM SPACE, by Judith MerrilTHROUGH TIME AND SPACE WITH FERDINAND FEGHOOT: THE CHAIRMAN DANCES, by David GerroldTHE FROZEN PLANET, by Keith LaumerTHE TAIL-TIED KINGS, by Avram DavidsonTHE GRAIN KINGS, by Keith RobertsHIS MASTER'S VOICE, by Randall GarrettBACK TO JULIE, by Richard WilsonBRIGHTSIDE CROSSING, by Alan E. NourseTHE SECRET OF THE SCARAB, by Ron GoulartREINVENTING CARL HOBBS, by James GlassTHE OLD SHILL GAME, by H.B. FyfeNOTES TOWARD A NEW TRAIT AS REVEALED BY CORRELATION AMONG ITEMS OF THE MMMPI, by M. Purrzillo, U. R. A. Ferball, and C. KitirunTHE SLEEPER IS A REBEL, by Bryce WaltonTHE TEACHER FROM MARS, by Eando BinderNIF'S WORLD, by Lawrence Watt-EvansA MAN OBSESSED, by Alan E. NourseFIRST LENSMAN, by E.E. “Doc” SmithREINCARNATE, by Lester del ReyTHE MAN WHO LIVED FOREVER, by R. DeWitt Miller and Anna HungerTHE MARTIAN CHILD, by David GerroldPoetry:I’VE NEVER SEEN, by Hannes Bok (poem)THOUGHT AND SPACE, by Ray BradburyNovel Serial:FIREBIRD, by Tony Rothman (part 1 of 3)If you enjoy this MEGAPACK™, don't forget to search your favorite ebook store for "Wildside Press Megapack" to see the 240+ other entries in this series, including science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, adventure, horror, westerns -- and much, much more!

    One sleeping bag and a storm that leaves them without power will set into motion a few events that have been waiting to occur.

    Success with her business may have been keeping her busy, but deep down, Riley craved more. In the past, everything she’d ever known had left her, leading Riley to believe she was destined to be alone and fearing she would never be good enough for another woman again. New Yorker, Nicole Taylor, had moved her life to follow her career. With the promise to herself that work was her number one priority, her only love, she had no plans to change that when it came to looking for or wanting more. But life changed when she stepped inside her local bar…

    Comprised of tell-all interviews and personal essays, historical analysis, cartoons, and some quite fetching photos, this book is for those who swear by roles as well as those who just don't get what all the brouhaha is about Down and dirty, kind and generous, Dagger is a celebration of lesbian sexuality and bravery.What is butch? Rebellion against women's lot, against gender-role imperatives that pit boyness against girlness and then assigns you-know-who the short straw. Butch is a giant fuck YOU! to compulsory femininity, just as lesbianism says the same to compulsory heterosexuality.What is butch? Sexual power of a kind that no women is supposed to have, active power. Prowess. The calm eye of a whirlwind of pleasure, getting from giving."Female maleness," "female masculinity": these simplistic ways of reading butch energy do not entirely miss the mark, but they do mislead. Maleness isn't male on a female, honey - it's something else again, a horse of another color, something our gender-impoverished language doesn't offer us words to describe.Roxxie: Can straight men learn anything from butches? JoAnn: Sure. Straight men could learn a lot about how to take care of women both sexually and emotionally.At that time they were having all those Wonderbread commercials, where they said you could build muscles twelve ways. So I started eating tons of Wonderbread, and my parents were saying, "What's this sudden craze for Wonderbread?" I thought if I ate enough Wonderbread I'd bulk up and turn into a guy."Review from Whole Earth Review, Winter, 1994 by Louise Rafkin

    endings. The heroes and antiheroes of these tales find themselves, sometimes unexpectedly, arriving at major turning points in their lives – turning points that are quite often catastrophic, surreal, tragic. These stories are alternately triumphant and terribly sad, but they are always human.This collection includes the following previously published stories:Wolf SkinThe CaretakerThe Winter LandsNebulaeOnyxThe Last Rail-RiderThe Dark AgeDeep Breath Hold Tight will be published in the spring.

    Willow Creek may be a sleepy little frontier town but the characters who live there are as untamed as the land itself! Book 1: The Lawman On the run from her ex-lover… Jilted by a no-show husband… And now mistaken for a whore in the Diamond Back Saloon… Abigail Thornton doesn’t think things can get any worse. That is until a single slap to a man’s face starts a barroom brawl that lands her in the last place she expected to be. Book 2: The Outlaw Sarah Hartford always dreamed of a grand adventure. She just never expected to find it in the arms of an outlaw. Book 3: The Gambler Emmaline Hunt only had one thing she could call her own. A piece of land that held a secret not even her drunken stepfather knew about. When he gambles it away in a high stakes poker game, Emmaline hatches a plan to get it back. She wants her land, and Tristan Averys money, and she’ll do whatever it takes to get them. All she has to do is convince him she’s there to stay, outwit him, find a way back home and not let a single soul know she has a gold mine bursting at the seems with untapped wealth. Book 4: The Rancher Laurel Montgomery wanted a new life, one that didn’t include a man. She’d had enough of their pretty lies and broken promises but one night of reckless abandon weeks before taking a job as the new schoolteacher in Willow Creek would come back to haunt her. The man she thought to never see again turns out to be the father of one of her new students. A man so handsome and rugged he takes her breath away. Too bad she’s sworn off men forever. If only the stubborn man would take no for an answer.

     Billie Page. IndyCar racing’s darling. To the outside world, she seems put together. Determined. Serious. Only she and the ones close to her know the truth. Billie’s a failure. She works every day to change that, to strengthen her mind and her body for the grueling demands of her job. Everything is about racing. It has to be. It’s all she has left. Then a woman makes her laugh. Krysta Ekert lives life on the whims of the wind. She doesn’t know where her next paycheck will come from and doesn’t care. She does what she wants, when she wants it, and asks for forgiveness rather than permission. The moment she meets Billie Page she knows whose bed she’ll be sleeping in that night and it’s not her own. When Krysta is hit by a car, her accident binds the women together in a way neither of them could have predicted. It’s dangerous for both to stay—Billie may lose her career, Krysta her independence—but leaving becomes less and less of an option the longer they wait. Will they find a way to make it work? Can one really have it all? Heartwarming and often humorous, Rocky Road is an emotional look at two women searching for happiness in all the wrong places and discovering how much more life offers when you open your heart.

    side at the top, and shot into the next hollow, twisting in the descent. A huge swell pushed up exactly under her middle, and her bow and stern hung free with nothing to support them. Then one joking wave caught her up at the bow, and another at the stern, while the rest of the water slunk 251 away from under her just to see how she would like it; so she was held up at her two ends only, and the weight of the cargo and the machinery fell on the groaning iron keels and bilge-stringers. "Ease off! Ease off, there!" roared the garboard-strake. "I want one-eighth of an inch fair play. D' you hear me, you rivets!" "Ease off! Ease off!" cried the bilge-stringers. "Don't hold us so tight to the frames!" "Ease off!" grunted the deck-beams, as the Dimbula rolled fearfully. "You've cramped our knees into the stringers, and we can't move. Ease off, you flat-headed little nuisances." Then two converging seas hit the bows, one on each side, and fell away in torrents of streaming thunder. "Ease off!" shouted the forward collision-bulkhead. "I want to crumple up, but I'm stiffened in every direction. Ease off, you dirty little forge-filings. Let me breathe!" All the hundreds of plates that are riveted to the frames, and make the outside skin of every steamer, echoed the call, for each plate wanted to shift and creep a little, and each plate, according to its position, complained against the rivets. "We can't help it! We can't help it!" they murmured in reply. "We're put here to hold you, and we're going to do it; you never pull us twice in the same direction. If you'd say what 252 you were going to do next, we'd try to meet your views." "As far as I could feel," said the upper-deck planking, and that was four inches thick, "every single iron near me was pushing or pulling in opposite directions. Now, what's the sense of that? My friends, let us all pull together." "Pull any way you please," roared the funnel, "so long as you don't try your experiments on me. I...

    This genre-spanning collection of 16 short stories features familiar characters like Kate and Jim, Liam and Wy, and Bill and Moses, but also ranges farther afield than many readers will expect, leaping from modern-day Anchorage to 22nd-century Mars to the fantasy kingdom of Mnemosynea. Remarkably disparate, but indisputably Stabenow, whose fertile imagination is anything but predictable.Titles in this collection: "Nooses Give," "Conspiracy," "Under the Influence," "Wreck Rights," "Cherchez la Femme," "Siren Song," "The Eyak Interpreter," "Any Taint of Vice," "On the Evidence," "Missing, Presumed…," "The Perfect Gift," "Gold Fever," "Cheechako," "No Place Like Home," "Justice is a Two-edged Sword," and "A Woman’s Work."

    Her signature voice made songs such as, "I Only Want to Be With You," "Son of A Preacher Man," and "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me," international hits. In Dancing With Demons, two of her closest friends, Valentine and Wickham, capture, with vivid memories and personal anecdotes, a Dusty most people never glimpsed in this no-holds-barred yet touching portrait of one of the world's true grand dames of popular music.