Especially not random guys in my local coffee shop. I mean, I’m a single working mom, completely devoted to my four-year-old daughter. This so isn’t me. It’s just that his backside is … phenomenal.Turns out his name is Tanner and he’s been watching me right back. Not at the coffee shop, but from his construction site across the street from my apartment. After a couple of flirty encounters, our mutual attraction leads to a no strings attached bargain based purely on convenience and pleasure. This arrangement is totally uncharacteristic for me, but it’s also perfect. Or so I tell myself. Before long, we’re spending time with each other that has nothing to do with our agreement and things between us start to feel all too real. When my swoony, completely unreliable, rock star ex comes back into town begging for a chance to reunite our family, things get … complicated. Suddenly, Tanner is jealous and I’m trying to figure out where I stand and what I want, torn between what makes me happy and what’s best for my daughter. No Strings Attached is a steamy stand-alone romance with a guaranteed HEA by the author of Hula Girl.★ Author's Note: No Strings Attached is based on a previously published short story titled One More Try. The main premise is the same, but there's a whole lot more romance and story to be had with No Strings Attached!

    Obsidian Worlds brings together his 11 best-selling sci-fi shorts into a mind-bending philosophical anthology.In Your Averaged Joe, a man’s headache is large enough to hold the multiverse. Q46F is an obsessive-compulsive android who finds love in a zombie-embroiled apocalypse. The end of the world isn’t all that bad – The Experience Machine will fulfil your every desire (and some you hadn’t considered). A sex bot dares to dream of freedom in Dinner with Flexi. But mind what you eat, because The Photons in the Cheese Are Lost. Don’t fret though: The Cryo Killer guarantees that your death will be painless, or your money back when you’re thawed. Unless, that is, you’re The Man with Two Legs.Plug into Obsidian Worlds for these and other immersive stories, including the hilarious Time-Traveling Chicken Sexer. Your brain will never be the same again.

    While great cities were springing up ih in places with names such as St. Louis, Denver, and San Francisco, the lower peninsula of Florida endured. Here, the panther, the alligator, and the bald eagle remained safe from the restless, meddlesome hands of civilization, continuing as they had for eons past. Renegade Indians, pirates, hurricanes, and man-eating animals – not to mention poisonous snakes and bloodthirsty hordes of mosquitoes – reigned supreme. It took a certain kind of person to boldly venture into such an inhospitable environment, a place where a man had only himself and his family upon which to depend. It took men and women with not only vision, but backbone and grit, people like the MacLeods, Dawsons, and Hackensaws, true pioneers who confronted whatever came their way, together, as a family. From shipwrecks, to Indian uprisings, to buried treasure; from blockade runners, to murderous beach tramps, and the sad, lonely life of the solitary beachcomber, Tales of Old Florida takes the reader back to a singular time and place that will never be seen again. Above all, Tales of Old Florida is an epic saga of survival and prosperity, love and love lost, and most importantly, the power of the human spirit to prevail.

    Eolyn, sole heiress to a forbidden craft, escapes by fleeing to the South Woods. When the mysterious Akmael appears in her forest refuge, Eolyn finds hope in the young man's friendship. But Akmael has a secret: He is the Mage Prince, son and heir to the man who slaughtered Eolyn's family. When their paths separate and intertwine again, Eolyn and Akmael emerge as leaders on opposite sides of a violent conflict, one that will determine the fate of a millennial tradition of magic. When the final battle approaches, Eolyn must decide whether to take up arms against the most powerful mage in the kingdom - and destroy the man closest to her heart. In Book One of this award-winning fantasy trilogy, survivors of the Great Purge become entangled in a web of desire, vengeance, and renewal. At the center, Eolyn, last daughter of an ancient sisterhood, rises up against a realm of brutal wizards, challenging their authority in a desperate bid to restore women's magic.“Vigorously told deceptions and battle scenes, with a romantic thread.” – PUBLISHERS WEEKLY“Headstrong, hopeful, and fiercely loyal to her roots, Eolyn is a character you can’t help but stand behind.” –APEX REVIEWSA “dreamlike, fairy-tale ambiance…immersive political machinations and grand-scale battles.” –KIRKUS REVIEWS“Magnificently written.” –KINDLE BOOK REVIEW

    However, a slight turn of events redirected the odds in her favor. Ultra-sexy and centric Syx was at her wits end. Her New Year's celebration had been strategically planned since her older sister, Sevyn, faced her fears and relocated to the Big City. In New York surrounded by laughter, love, music, drinks and the thrill of the people is where Syx desperately wanted to be. Yet, she found herself missing the very last flight bound for the Big City and stranded in Atlanta, GA. A hint of fate scrambled her way as she returned home after discovering her plans were shot. Amiyah Mallard, with her own agenda in mind, forces her husband to give Syx a lift, compliments of his private plane. A slew of unexpected, yet fortunate, occurrences leaves Syx dazed and confused after waking up on New Year's Day in unknown territory, on a dangerously comforting mattress, tangled in Italian sheets with her beloved boss's life partner. Trough Mallard. *This is a novelette.*

    He’s hungry, wet, and tired. He’s run afoul of the assassin’s guild, lost a bag of stolen goods, and bet his last penny on the local darts champion when he should have bought bread for his kids. Maybe fate needs a little help . . . As a pastiche of Sword and Sorcery, “Darts” represents the core fantasy characters and archetypes that enthusiasts love (and hate), explores their deeper motivations, and reminds us that best friends are hard to come by.

    Amrutananda and Kapiladeva were cunning and extremely sly landlords in two neighbouring villages. They would cheat and ill-treat their labourers, but make a lot of money. However, someone had to teach them a lesson and that’s how Manikya arrived on their doorstep, offering to work for them for free, all set to teach them two very important lessons. Another clever story from the master of funny stories, Two Unforgettable Lessons will amuse you, entertain you and leave you rooting for Manikya and his brains long after you’ve finished the story.

    Olga Grushin is dealing with issues of women’s identity, of women’s choices, that no modern novel has explored so deeply. “Forty rooms” is a conceit: it proposes that a modern woman will inhabit forty rooms in her lifetime. They form her biography, from childhood to death. For our protagonist, the much-loved child of a late marriage, the first rooms she is aware of as she nears the age of five are those that make up her family’s Moscow apartment. We follow this child as she reaches adolescence, leaves home to study in America, and slowly discovers sexual happiness and love. But her hunger for adventure and her longing to be a great poet conspire to kill the affair. She seems to have made her choice. But one day she runs into a college classmate. He is sure of his path through life, and he is protective of her. (He is also a great cook.) They drift into an affair and marriage. What follows are the decades of births and deaths, the celebrations, material accumulations, and home comforts—until one day, her children grown and gone, her husband absent, she finds herself alone except for the ghosts of her youth, who have come back to haunt and even taunt her. Compelling and complex, Forty Rooms is also profoundly affecting, its ending shattering but true. We know that Mrs. Caldwell (for that is the only name by which we know her) has died. Was it a life well lived? Quite likely. Was it a life complete? Does such a life ever really exist? Life is, after all, full of trade-offs and choices. Who is to say her path was not well taken? It is this ambiguity that is at the heart of this provocative novel.

    Vera has grown up straddling two worlds—the madam’s alluring sphere, replete with tickets to the opera, surly henchmen, and scant morality, and the violent, debt ridden domestic life of the family paid to raise her.On the morning of the great quake, Vera’s worlds collide. As the shattered city burns and looters vie with the injured, orphaned, and starving, Vera and her guileless sister, Pie, are cast adrift. Vera disregards societal norms and prejudices and begins to imagine a new kind of life. She collaborates with Tan, her former rival, and forges an unlikely family of survivors. Together they navigate their way beyond disaster.

    In an upstairs bedroom: an elderly woman and the family dog, both of them shot as well. The only person missing is the husband, father, son, and prime suspect, John Hartman, who's got a three-week jump on the police. Through the eyes of almost two dozen characters, including the neighbor who reports the crime, Hartman’s mistress, a dogged state investigator, the family minister, and some of the characters Hartman meets on his escape route, we piece together not only what happened and how these shocking murders affect the community, but how John Hartman evades capture, where he’s headed, and maybe even why he committed this gruesome crime in the first place. Based on the notorious John List murders and already compared to works by Norman Mailer and Russell Banks, Devil in the Hole is gripping, literate, and haunting.

    New York Harbor's immigration and public health authorities are slowly recovering from the war years when a young, pregnant Irish woman disappears from the Isolation Hospital on Ellis Island.Stephen Robbins, a specialist in finding missing persons, is assigned the case. Yet when he arrives at the isolation hospital, he discovers an inexplicable string of deaths and disappearances among immigrant patients...and a staff that seems to be hiding a chilling secret. Stephen finds an ally in Lucy Paul, an undercover nurse who is also investigating the mysterious incidents. Together, they begin to unearth a horrifying conspiracy masked beneath the hospital’s charitable exterior. As Stephen and Lucy get closer to the truth and each other, they are swept directly into the danger haunting Ellis Island and become the next targets themselves.Amidst growing racial tensions in the wake of World War I, My Mistress’ Eyes are Raven Black explores the disturbing lengths to which people will go to protect racial purity and condemn those they fear.

    Petersburg, Russia, in 1913. On the eve of World War I, Nasrosoltan embarks on a journey from his homeland, Persia, to study at the renowned St. Petersburg Conservatory in pursuit of his musical legacy. During this time, through a series of events beyond his control, he becomes acquainted with the Russian royal family and falls in love with a princess. Nasrosoltan suddenly finds himself in a battle between head and heart while being carried forward on a wave of destiny toward an uncertain future.

    But flying is a privilege granted only to the Riders of the king’s Empyrean Cavalry, the aerial warriors who defend the borders of their land from the fallen Kingdom of Laithlann.Each year, Rider hopefuls across Eirelannia compete in the Autumn Tournament for the honor of joining the Cavalry. Aluma, trained to ride and fight by her retired Empyrean Rider father, knows she has what it takes to prove herself worthy—if only her father hadn’t forbidden her from joining their ranks, in the hope of protecting his only daughter from the perils of war. To make matters worse, Thayer, Aluma’s best friend who could be becoming something more, is competing—and if he wins, he’ll leave her behind. When Aluma’s father is tragically injured just before the Tournament, she finds herself unexpectedly thrust into this year’s competition. But as Aluma begins to pursue her dreams, she learns devastating secrets about the king and his never-ending war with Laithlann. In her quest for the truth, Aluma discovers a power deep within herself that may be the only way to save Eirelannia and the people she loves from the darkness that threatens to consume them all.

    At just the hour when most prairie schools were letting out for the day, a terrifying, fast-moving blizzard struck without warning. Schoolteachers as young as sixteen were suddenly faced with life and death decisions: keep the children inside, to risk freezing to death when fuel ran out, or send them home, praying they wouldn't get lost in the storm?Based on actual oral histories of survivors, the novel follows the stories of Raina and Gerda Olsen, two sisters, both schoolteachers--one who becomes a hero of the storm, and one who finds herself ostracized in the aftermath. It's also the story of Anette Pedersen, a servant girl whose miraculous survival serves as a turning point in her life and touches the heart of Gavin Woodson, a newspaperman seeking redemption. It is Woodson and others like him who wrote the embellished news stories that lured immigrants across the sea to settle a pitiless land. Boosters needed immigrants to settle territories into states, and they didn't care what lies they told them to get them there--or whose land it originally was.At its heart, this is a story of courage, of children forced to grow up too soon, tied to the land because of their parents' choices. It is a story of love taking root in the hard prairie ground, and of families being torn asunder by a ferocious storm that is little remembered today--because so many of its victims were immigrants to this country.

    With both her business and her relationship with her sister on the rocks, Morane becomes consumed by one question: what made Rozenn turn her back on her?When she finds an old letter linking her grandmother to Brittany under German occupation, Morane escapes on the trail of her family’s past. In the coastal village where Rozenn lived in 1941, she uncovers a web of shameful secrets that haunted Rozenn to the end of her days. Was it to protect those she loved that a desperate Rozenn made a heartbreaking decision and changed the course of all their lives forever?Morane goes in search of the truth but the truth can be painful. Can she make her peace with the past and repair her relationship with her sister?