Book picks similar to
Wild Embers by Anita Bunkley


historical
book-lust
historical-fiction
romance

Go with Your Heart


Savannah J. Frierson - 2010
    

The Taming of Jessi Rose


Beverly Jenkins - 1999
    With his rugged, handsome face and muscular bronze body, Griffin Blake can draw a sigh from a lady's lips almost as fast as his strong, sculpted arm can draw a gun from its holster. But Jessi Rose has no intentions of falling for his charms. No, her relationship with him is strictly business.Until He Came AlongRobbing the railroad is Griffin Blake's game, but he has no choice. Either he agrees to help Jessi Rose or he gets sent back to jail-so he arrives at the ranch ready to help the ornery female protect her land. But underneath Jessi's all-business exterior is a femininity she's kept hidden for far too long-making Griffin think it might be time to tame this wild Texas rose.

The Cost of Hope


G.S. Carr - 2013
    Or even a happy one for that matter. The only thing she wants is safety for her daughter. But when even that seems impossible she takes matters into her own hands. Only life has a different plan, sending her into the arms of a handsome plantation owner. The strangest part is, he claims to already love her.Alexander Cummings had long ago accepted that love was lost to him. After picking up the pieces of his broken heart, he threw himself into the duties of owning one of the largest plantations in Elba, Alabama. But life shows him mercy when the woman he thought he lost appears back in his life as if conjured from his deepest desires. Only she returns far from the same and with secrets he never imagined.As society threatens, and lives could be lost, only together can they both get what they want. But neither will come out unscathed and they must ask themselves, is the cost of love to high?

Lazaretto


Diane McKinney-Whetstone - 2016
    The Lazaretto’s black live-in staff forge a strong social community, and when one of them receives permission to get married on the island the mood is one of celebration, particularly since the white staff—save the opium-addicted doctor—are given leave for the weekend. On the eve of the ceremony, a gunshot rings out across the river. A white man has fired at a boat carrying the couple’s friends and family to the island, and the captain is injured. His life lies in the hands of Sylvia, the Lazaretto’s head nurse, who is shocked to realize she knows the patient. Intertwined with the drama unfolding at the Lazaretto are the fates of orphan brothers. When one brother commits a crime to protect the other, he imperils both of their lives—and the consequences ultimately deliver both of them to the Lazaretto.In this masterful work of historical fiction, Diane McKinney-Whetstone seamlessly transports us to Philadelphia in the aftermath of the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination, beautifully evoking powerful stories of love, friendship and humanity amid the vibrant black community that flourished amid the troubled times.

Nicademus: The Wild Ones


Sienna Mynx - 2014
    Her only desire is to become a healer like her dead father once was and to protect the people she loves. Life is sweet. That is until an outlaw by the name of Jeremiah ‘One Finger’ Polk was found unconscious on her land. Annabelle’s initial curiosity over his presence and desire to heal him from his serious wounds blooms into a forbidden encounter that will threaten the towns’ very existence and even her own. Jeremiah Polk is a wanted man. Driven by the need for vengeance and retribution, he barely escapes the hangman’s noose and gun. When he wakes and finds a beautiful brown skin woman nursing him back to health, he thinks it’s a dream. He soon learns of the free people of color and the hidden town at the foot of the mountain that could be his sanctuary. He also finds himself drawn to the promise of redemption. But will his demons, both real and imagined, rob him of the chance? Can love survive the racial tensions between Annabelle and him post-civil war? Miss Kitty is what they call her. However, her Christian name is Cora, and she runs the saloon and whores of Nicademus. Escaping New Orleans and the chains of a placage, she has founded a home and thriving business in Nicademus. However, the unwanted desires of the town’s sheriff, her passionate affair with her Chickasaw lover, and the new threat of the dangerous man who hunts her from her past all collide in Nicademus and threaten to destroy her. Red Sun, Chickasaw, and the lone survivor of his tribe out of White Rock Mountain, trusts no one. He brings the orphaned Annabelle and himself to the town of Nicademus for a chance to start again. Ten years later the bitter memory of his slain people keeps him locked in the past. However, his new love affair for his ‘soiled dove’, Cora, keeps him sane. Nicademus is his home. He will risk it all to protect the town and the woman he loves. In 1866, a town run by freed slaves, called Nicademus, is the promise of the future. The story of the town and the passionate, dangerous, and infamous exploits of its citizens are still whispered from the lips of people today. This fictionalized tale reflects some of their story. You will search for truth in it.

Let's Get It On


Dyanne Davis - 2006
    Hamid has promised his father that he'll return home and help his community, while Heaven is determined to make her business pay off. Soon they must decide whether to break the vows they made to each other, or the promises they made to themselves...

The Guy Next Door


D.L. White - 2019
    The attraction between them at first sight is immediately electric. When a storm ravages Potter Lake, and they're forced to share close quarters, they can no longer resist each other.But... now what? Evonne is on a mission to prove that she isn't the screwup that was sent home from Spelman College ten years ago. Taj is floundering, trying to tamp down a desire that can't be stifled. The last thing either of them wants is an emotional attachment to a temporary relationship.. but does it have to stay temporary?On a rainy night in Georgia, two hearts meet. They're never the same again. Grab this fun and funny small town Black romance in ebook, paperback (COMING SOON TO AUDIO!).

The Other Woman


Eric Jerome Dickey - 2003
    The central couple's biggest challenge is timing: He works days; she works nights. Instead of growing together, they're rapidly drifting apart, coexisting on stolen phone calls from work, punctuated by occasional bedroom encounters that leave them both feeling even emptier and more alone. When she finds out about his affair-and starts her own-the delicate fabric of their marriage is torn irrevocably asunder. Or is it? In Dickey's expert hands, what begins as a seemingly unforgivable betrayal segues into the sexy and searing story of a man and a woman at a pivotal turning point in their relationship. Only time will tell whether they'll let it all go...or can hold on to the love that drew them together in the first place.

Still


Nia Forrester - 2017
    But Leslie doesn’t lament the meager number, she only truly mourns the second one. In her youthful arrogance, she turned him away, thinking there would be many more chances. Now, she lives two lives—one in the present, and another plagued by bittersweet memories of the past. But maybe, even now, it might be possible to reconcile the two.

The Fancy


Mercedes Keyes - 2006
    However, at hearing how close he'd come to losing his mother - his priorities, his plan shifted. Dr. Quinton Thaddeus Caine had saved his mother's life - for this deed, the young surgeon deserved the best that he could give in compensation. A gift - the best - a Fancy. To his reasoning, what better gift could one man offer another? Especially considering that the new doctor had arrived and settled in their small town off the Port end of Connecticut - with practically nothing. He would need help, in more ways than one - thus - the placing of Suga - his most valuable possession - her skills far exceeded many of those whom were purchased simply to fill ones bed. According to her master, she'd been taught to serve in many more ways... than that one - as her new owner, Quinton Caine would come to find out.

The Last Blue


Isla Morley - 2020
    Two government-sponsored documentarians from Cincinnati, Ohio—a writer and photographer—are dispatched to penetrate this wilderness and record what they find for President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration.For photographer Clay Havens, the assignment is his last chance to reboot his flagging career. So when he and his journalist partner are warned away from the remote Spooklight Holler outside of town, they set off eagerly in search of a headline story.What they see will haunt Clay into his old age: Jubilee Buford, a woman whose skin is a shocking and unmistakable shade of blue. From this happenstance meeting between a woman isolated from society and persecuted her whole life, and a man accustomed to keeping himself at lens distance from others, comes a mesmerizing story in which the dark shades of betrayal, prejudice, fear, and guilt, are refracted along with the incandescent hues of passion and courage.Panning across the rich rural aesthetic of eastern Kentucky, The Last Blue is a captivating love story and an intimate portrait of what it is like to be truly one of a kind.

Three Impossible Wishes


Anmol Malik - 2020
    Her jugaad and privilege puts her directly in the path of a hardworking scholarship student– Vladimir Petrov, the vodka to her hot chocolate. Their tumultuous friendship is affected by global events, the landscape around them ever changing. And slowly, the Russian winter begins to melt for the Indian summer.Funny and endearing, Three Impossible Wishes is a heart-warming book about finding love and learning to love yourself.

Beautiful Assassin


Stephanie Nicole Norris - 2017
    When Celine took her marital vows, she exchanged the life of guns, drugs, and violence for the peaceful life as Caleb's wife. However, not all things buried stay hidden. When Celine’s past comes knocking, it rattles her world and forces her back into the life she vowed to give up. Now she is turning up the heat on the streets of Chicago, showing no mercy to the men who’ve undoubtedly marked themselves.

Monsoon Summer


Julia Gregson - 2014
    Kit Smallwood, hiding a painful secret and exhausted from nursing soldiers during the Second World War, escapes to Wickam Farm where her friend is setting up a charity sending midwives to the Moonstone Home in South India. Then Kit meets Anto, an Indian doctor finishing his medical training at Oxford. But Kit’s light-skinned mother is in fact Anglo-Indian with secrets of her own, and Anto is everything she does not want for her daughter. Despite the threat of estrangement, Kit is excited for the future, hungry for adventure, and deeply in love. She and Anto secretly marry and set off for South India—where Kit plans to run the maternity hospital she’s helped from afar. But Kit’s life in India does not turn out as she imagined. Anto’s large, traditional family wanted him to marry an Indian bride and find it hard to accept Kit. As their relationship begins to fray, Kit’s job becomes fraught with tension as they both face a newly independent India, where riots have left millions dead and there is deep-rooted suspicion of the English. In a rapidly changing world, Kit’s naiveté is to land her in a frightening and dangerous situation... Based on true accounts of European midwives in India, Monsoon Summer is a powerful story of secrets, the nature of home, the comforts and frustrations of family, and how far we’ll go to be with those we love.

And This Too Shall Pass


E. Lynn Harris - 1996
    What happens when rising stars collide?In And This Too Shall Pass, Harris takes us into the locker rooms and newsrooms of Chicago, where four lives are about to intersect in romance and scandal. At the heart of the novel is the celibate Zurich, a rookie quarterback for the Chicago Cougars whose trajectory for superstardom is interrupted by a sexual assault charge by Mia, a sportscaster with her own sights on fame. With his career in jeopardy, Zurich hires Tamela, a high-powered attorney, to defend him, while Sean, a gay sportswriter, covers the story and uncovers his heart. All of these characters face the challenge of keeping the faith--in themselves and in God--while Harris's heartfelt storytelling reveals how the love of family can help one to face the terrible legacy of long-held secrets. Throughout these characters' search for self-knowledge, Harris weaves the stories of MamaCee, Zurich's grandmother, whose lessons of faith teach one and all that "this too shall pass." Breaking new ground in contemporary fiction, And This Too Shall Pass entertains and affirms with its stirring message about the healing power of family and faith.