By using the Framework you will learn architectural best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective systems in the cloud.

    SNOWFALL AT WILLOW LAKE Sophie Bellamy has dedicated her life to helping people in war-torn countries. But after narrowly escaping a hostage situation, she yearns to return home to Avalon. There, Sophie discovers the surprising rewards of small-town life—including an unexpected passion for Noah Shepherd, the local veterinarian. FIRESIDE Baseball hopeful Bo Crutcher is about to get his shot at the majors. But when life throws him a curveball in the form of AJ, the son he's never met, Bo and his newly hired publicist Kimberly van Dorn begin to realize that they both have a lot to learn about the game of life…and putting love first. LAKESHORE CHRISTMAS Maureen Davenport is finally getting her shot to direct Avalon's annual holiday pageant, but her storybook notion of Christmas is disrupted when Eddie Haven is assigned to assist her. As they spar over every detail of the pageant, their passion for the perfect performance begins to blossom into something more.

    Knights of blood and of war bring forth the very worst that Medieval brutality has to offer, but in that darkness, there is a ray of hope. Women of brightness shine the most when confronting the darkness within men. Be shocked at nothing within the pages of this collection, for these novels will take you into the blackness and back again, where love reigns supreme, even over evil.Romance comes in many shades, in many ways.This set contains:DarkWolfe – A de Wolfe son puts a tragic past behind him and finds love with an enemy.DarkMoon – A special ops knight finds an unexpected romance. Will it cost him a life-long friendship?Dark Steel – A happenstance creates a new duke – who falls into a surprising romance.The Dark Lord – The darkest lord of all finds a woman to tame his vicious ways.Guardian of Darkness – A noble knight and a Scottish hostage find love amidst a web of royal lies.The Dark Lord’s First Christmas – Bonus book! The Dark Lord discovers the meaning of Christmas.The original Medieval Romance novels with no cliffhangers, no cheating, and always with a Happily Ever After.

    Reanimated ahead of schedule, Adam Hassler, former Delta Force officer, leads the first expedition out of David Pilcher's mountain superstructure. His mission is simple. Guide and protect a team of surveyors and scientists, while they study the surrounding area and collect data for the reconstruction of Wayward Pines. A few hours into the trek, Hassler suspects that the operation has been compromised--by the very people that ordered it.With daylight fading, Hassler's team faces an unknown threat, on unfamiliar ground--in front of an impatient audience.The GENESIS connection to Blake Crouch's bestselling Wayward Pines series:David Pilcher predicted mankind's fall. The world as he knew it would be gone when his "volunteers" emerged from suspension--and they would rebuild it.He'd reboot humanity in Wayward Pines, Idaho--a cozy, idyllic town situated deep inside a sheltered mountain valley. The residents of Wayward Pines would be protected: isolated from the dangers of the new world.Only one obstacle stood in the way. An enemy far deadlier than Pilcher ever imagined possible. A powerful, uncompromising adversary--immune to fear and devoid of mercy. Humankind's worst nightmare.With the odds overwhelmingly stacked against his project, and time running out, Pilcher takes a wild chance on an unpredictable member of his team. Adam Hassler, former Delta Force officer, is woken from suspension ahead of schedule and ordered to explore the valley. The task sounds simple to Hassler, but there's a catch. He is unaware of the danger lurking in the forest beyond the hatch--and nobody plans to warn him.The vicious struggle to build Wayward Pines unfolds in the definitive prequel to The Wayward Pines series.This ebook was published through an agreement with the author of Wayward Pines, Blake Crouch. Mr. Crouch has not necessarily read or endorsed this story.

    

    Become entranced with the basic struggle of good vs. evil as you travel to a galaxy far, far away.

    based agency, asks for help. Owing his life to former Commander Jameson Knight, Sam is eager to help retrieve a mutual friend from a dangerous cartel, until he learns the operative assisting him is Knight’s oldest daughter, Lisa—Sam’s former lover. Elisabeth Knight has waited over eight months to get into the field, and just her luck, her first mission hits close to home in more ways than one. Not only does it involve rescuing her friend, a former NIO like herself, but her father assigns one of his former SEALs to assist—the one she’d given her body and heart to five years ago. Sam had walked away when he’d realized who her father was, and she let him, not wanting to see the sexy man shot, or worse, assigned to Antarctica…permanently. Completing their current mission isn’t the issue, the danger lies in their inability to fight their resurrected attraction and keeping that failure from her father.

    But when he’s double-crossed and marooned on a desert island, he quickly learns he needs to care about one thing: survival! The origin tale of the Emerald Archer begins here!

    And the tattoo on her skin and under her skin, which read “property of Z”, had to go. At the Three C’s ranch, she was determined to learn how to fight hard and how to step into a new life. She’d go to the required classes and otherwise keep to herself. The last thing she was looking for was a new man. She was too busy hiding from her violent ex and his motorcycle club, for if Z found her; she knew he would kill her. Sergeant Tim “Timbers” Watson USMC opted not to re-enlist in order to stay home when he learned his dad had six months to live. After his father’s death, when an offer came in from the Brotherhood Protectors, he stepped up. Providing security would be a breeze compared to his time in Iraq. Little did she know that when she met Timbers, her walls would start coming down. He wasn’t put off by Red’s attitude or the walls she’d put up. He’d take those logs down slowly and show her the difference between her controlling, violent ex and this Marine who fought for his country and his women to be independent.

    More information to be announced soon on this forthcoming title from Penguin USA

    When Riley is forced to give up her cell phone and talk face-to-face with her crush Lucas, will she connect or will she shut down? Then, when another girl tries to get Lucas's attention, can Maya help her best friend win back her guy?

    For almost three years, the Federation and the Klingon Empire, allied under the Khitomer Accords, have contended with the nascent coalition on a predominantly cold-war footing. But as Starfleet rebuilds itself, factions within the Typhon Pact grow restive, concerned about their own inability to develop a quantum slipstream drive to match that of the Federation. Will leaders such as UFP President Bacco and RSE Praetor Kamemor bring about a lasting peace across the Alpha and Beta Quadrants, or will the cold war between the two alliances deepen, and perhaps even lead to an all-out shooting war? Raise the Dawn After the disastrous events in the Bajoran system, Captain Benjamin Sisko must confront the consequences of the recent choices he has made in his life. At the same time, the United Federation of Planets and its Khitomer Accords allies have come to the brink of war with the Typhon Pact. While factions within the Pact unsuccessfully used the recent gestures of goodwill—the opening of borders and a joint Federation-Romulan exploratory mission—to develop quantum-slipstream drive, they have not given up their goals. Employing a broad range of assets, from Romulus to Cardassia, from Ab-Tzenketh to Bajor, they embark on a dangerous new plan to acquire the technology they need to take control of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants. While UFP President Bacco and Romulan Praetor Kamemor work feverishly to reestablish peace, Captains Sisko, Jean-Luc Picard, and Ro Laren stand on the front lines of the conflict...even as a new danger threatens the Bajoran wormhole as it once more becomes a flashpoint of galactic history. Brinkmanship The Venette Convention has always remained independent, but it is about to become the flashpoint for a tense military standoff between the two power blocs now dominating interstellar space—the United Federation of Planets and the recently formed Typhon Pact. The Venetan government turns to the Typhon Pact’s Tzenkethi Coalition for protection in the new order, and has agreed to allow three of their supply bases for Tzenkethi use. But these bases—if militarized—would put Tzenkethi weapons unacceptably close to Federation, Cardassian, and Ferengi space. While Captain Ezri Dax and the crew of the U.S.S. Aventine are sent to investigate exactly what is happening at one of the Venette bases, Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the U.S.S. Enterprise are assigned to a diplomatic mission sent to the Venette homeworld in order to broker a mutually acceptable resolution. But the Cardassian delegates don’t seem particularly keen on using diplomacy to resolve the situation, which soon spirals out of control toward all-out war. . .

    On 3rd August 2012, Tia Sharp, a 12-year-old school girl, was reported missing from her grandmotherOCOs house in New Addington, south London. A call by her mother alerted the police to TiaOCOs disappearance and a massive search operation began. A nationwide appeal was launched to find Tia and her family, including her step-grandfather, 37-year-old Stuart Hazell, made a public appeal to find her. It was reported that Tia had disappeared after being dropped off at a train station to go shopping, but in the days that followed a very different story emerged. Only seven days after Tia was reported missing the terrible news came that her body had been found; wrapped in bin bags and hidden in her grandmotherOCOs attic. The truth that unfolded over the course of the day horrified the public; not only had the police searched the house on three separate occasions before discovering TiaOCOs body, late the following evening, Stuart HazellOCothe man who Tia trusted, the man who appealed for her returnOCoas change with murder. Nigel Cawthorne examines the appalling case of an evil step-grandfather who betrayed his familyOCOs trust, deceived friends and neighbors, and cut short the life of a young, well-loved girl."

    After nine long years of trying to grow their family into the perfect dream come true, fated mates, Ryan and Layna, are ready to give up. Not on each other but on their dreams. When they're given the chance to help an abandoned baby temporarily, they're faced with a pain harsher than what they've already been through. The pain of hope. But this little one isn't what any of them expected, and when the fiery truth comes out, hearts are bound to melt.A visit from a shadow of Christmas past, a lost child, and the reunion P. Jameson fans have been asking for, all wrapped up with a shiny bow as we revisit the Ouachitas in Merrily Ever After.

    And certainly what Melville did for whaling Austen does for marriage--tracing the intricacies (not to mention the economics) of 19th-century British mating rituals with a sure hand and an unblinking eye. As usual, Austen trains her sights on a country village and a few families--in this case, the Bennets, the Philips, and the Lucases. Into their midst comes Mr. Bingley, a single man of good fortune, and his friend, Mr. Darcy, who is even richer. Mrs. Bennet, who married above her station, sees their arrival as an opportunity to marry off at least one of her five daughters. Bingley is complaisant and easily charmed by the eldest Bennet girl, Jane; Darcy, however, is harder to please. Put off by Mrs. Bennet's vulgarity and the untoward behavior of the three younger daughters, he is unable to see the true worth of the older girls, Jane and Elizabeth. His excessive pride offends Lizzy, who is more than willing to believe the worst that other people have to say of him; when George Wickham, a soldier stationed in the village, does indeed have a discreditable tale to tell, his words fall on fertile ground. Having set up the central misunderstanding of the novel, Austen then brings in her cast of fascinating secondary characters: Mr. Collins, the sycophantic clergyman who aspires to Lizzy's hand but settles for her best friend, Charlotte, instead; Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Mr. Darcy's insufferably snobbish aunt; and the Gardiners, Jane and Elizabeth's low-born but noble-hearted aunt and uncle. Some of Austen's best comedy comes from mixing and matching these representatives of different classes and economic strata, demonstrating the hypocrisy at the heart of so many social interactions. And though the novel is rife with romantic misunderstandings, rejected proposals, disastrous elopements, and a requisite happy ending for those who deserve one, Austen never gets so carried away with the romance that she loses sight of the hard economic realities of 19th-century matrimonial maneuvering. Good marriages for penniless girls such as the Bennets are hard to come by, and even Lizzy, who comes to sincerely value Mr. Darcy, remarks when asked when she first began to love him: "It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley." She may be joking, but there's more than a little truth to her sentiment, as well. Jane Austen considered Elizabeth Bennet "as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print". Readers of Pride and Prejudice would be hard-pressed to disagree. --Alix Wilber