Showing results by narrator "Natasha Soudek" in All Categories

Love is an extravagance Darcy Williams can't afford. She prefers the simple life, which includes waitressing at The Love Shack and avoiding temptation. But when a forbidden part of her past steps off the ferry, her safe, guarded existence is turned upside down. Kincaid Foster has never gotten over his first love. When he sees the wild, beautiful blonde again, dancing her way around The Love Shack, the memories of Darcy's soft skin, gentle touch, and heated kisses come rushing back.

Three heartwarming, interconnected stories of faith, love, and restoration, brought to you by three Louisiana-native authors. Will a rare snowy Louisiana Christmas bring restoration and hope to the hometown and hearts of three women from the town’s founding family?

For more than four decades, between 1969 and 2010, the remote former mining town of Trinidad, Colorado, was the unlikely crossroads for approximately 6,000 medical pilgrims who came looking for relief from the pain of gender dysphoria. The surgical skill and nonjudgmental compassion of surgeons Stanley Biber and his transgender protege Marci Bowers made the phrase "going to Trinidad" a euphemism for gender confirmation surgery in the worldwide transgender community.

Self-care is the practice of taking an active role in protecting one's own well-being and happiness. In order to do so, we must get in touch with who we are at our core. Only then can we realize how we need to show up in the world—how we want to express, without any apologies, our most authentic selves. Lessons from the Empress focuses on what the tarot can teach us about ourselves and provides exercises to strengthen our confidence in our own creative expression.

The neighborhood of the Little East is a collision of cultures, languages, and traditions, hidden away in the city of Maradaine. A set of streets to be avoided or ignored. When a foreign dignitary is murdered, solving the crime falls to the most unpopular inspectors in the Maradaine Constabulary: exposed fraud Satrine Rainey, and Uncircled mage Minox Welling.

In small-town Michigan, Abby Graven leads a solitary life. Once a bright student on the cusp of a promising art career, she now languishes in her childhood home, trudging to and from her job as a supermarket cashier. Each day she is taunted from the magazine racks by the success of her former best friend, Elise, a rising Hollywood starlet whose life in pictures Abby obsessively scrapbooks. When Abby encounters Elise again at their high school reunion, Elise’s unexpected faith in Abby reignites in her a dormant hunger.

Ginny Mathis had no intention of staying rooted in the Outer Banks—then war broke out. While working as a clerk for Oregon Inlet ferry, naval officers ask her to be watchful for German U-boats reportedly spotted in the area. To help occupy her younger sister, Ginny enlists the Girl Scout troop she leads to help watch for suspicious activity. Soon the girls are sneaking around, hiding a shipwreck survivor. Ginny must take charge, but is this man the enemy, or does he hold secrets that could turn the tide of the Battle of the Atlantic in the allies' favor?

After the death of her fiancé, Catherine Johnson, a New York schoolteacher in 1902, travels to Nebraska to teach in a one-room school. When violence erupts in the sleepy town, Catherine saves deaf stable hand Jim Kinney from torture by drunken thugs. As she begins teaching Jim to read and sign, attraction grows between them. The warmth and humor in this silent man transcends the need for speech, and his eyes tell her all about his feelings for her. But the obstacles of class difference and the stigma of his handicap are almost insurmountable.

First published in 1926, this book is Willa Cather's sparest and most dramatic novel, a dark and prescient portrait of a marriage that subverts our oldest notions about the nature of domestic happiness.

After decades of the Cold War and renewed tensions, in the wake of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, cooperation between the United States and Russia seems impossible to imagine - and yet, as Douglas Smith reveals, it has a forgotten but astonishing historical precedent. In 1921, facing one of the worst famines in history, the new Soviet government under Vladimir Lenin invited the American Relief Administration, Herbert Hoover’s brainchild, to save communist Russia from ruin.

The best teen zombie werewolf witchy faerie fantasy murder mystery you've ever heard, by debut author Hal Schrieve. Genderqueer 14-year-old Z Chilworth has to adjust quickly to their new status as a zombie after waking from death from a car crash that killed their parents and sisters. Always a talented witch, Z now can barely perform magic and is rapidly decaying. Faced with rejection from their remaining family members and old friends, Z moves in with their mother's friend, Mrs. Dunnigan, and befriends Aysel, a loud would-be goth classmate who is, like Z, a loner.

It is 1940. For the past decade, Walter Benjamin - the German-Jewish critic and philosopher - has been writing his masterpiece in a library in Paris, a city he loves. Now Nazi tanks have overrun the suburbs, and Benjamin is forced to flee. With a battered briefcase that contains his precious manuscript of a thousand handwritten pages, he sets off for the border and is led by chance to a young anti-Nazi who is taking Jews and other refugees over the Pyrenees into Spain, where they may (with luck) make their way to freedom in Portugal or South America.

Eight years have passed since Stella last saw Ivo, but when he returns, the reunion of their unconventional family will change the course of her ordinary life. As children, Stella and Ivo grew close as their parents embarked on an affair that would shatter both families. Later, as teenagers, their own relationship would be the cause of further scandal. Now, as adults, they set out on an odyssey to uncover the truth about another family’s past—and to understand their own.

A one-night stand with a handsome stranger wasn't a problem - until he tries to steal her company. Ambitious, high-powered CEO Lauren Bradley is one press release away from catapulting her company to new heights. Rival CEO Antonio Forte is arrogant, controlling, and sexy. She should know, since Antonio's a one-night stand she thought she'd never see again. Antonio wants to take over more than her company, he wants her as part of the acquisition. Let the games begin....

With a particular focus on obsession and the abnormal, We So Seldom Look on Love explores life at its quirky extremes, pushing past limits of convention into lives that are fantastic and heartbreakingly real. Whether writing about the dilemma of a two-headed man who attempts to expunge his own pain or the shock of a woman who discovers she has married a transsexual, Gowdy convinces us with incisive detail, only to disarm us with black humor.

Only last year, Fannie O’Brien was considered a beauty with a brain, and her future shone bright, despite the war in Europe. With her father’s sudden death and her brothers overseas, Fannie must now do the work of three men on their 200-acre farm—until eight German prisoners arrive and, just as Fannie feared, trouble comes too. Someone seems intent on causing “accidents,” and Fannie is certain the culprit is one of the two handsome older Germans—or possibly both. Can she manage the farm, keep the prisoners in line, and hold her family together through these turbulent times?

Apprentice Flick thought the Elite Academy was the answer to all her problems. But the revelation of her past turned everything upside down. Now, she is caught between two worlds set on a collision course. Will she embrace the chaotic memories that flood her every waking moment? Or will she run to the security of her Elite training?

Emma is a wolf-shifter on the run from humans who killed her parents 15 years ago. When she steps on an old trap in the Tennessee woods, she is truly screwed. Hungry and tired from weeks of running, she assumes she's going to die. Liam and Jaden are also wolf-shifters. They're staying in a cabin in the wilderness for the summer to catalog the plant life in the area. Hoping to spend lazy months enhancing their own relationship and escaping women altogether, they are surprised to find a trapped female wolf on their first day at the cabin.

Three long years have passed since Anna, First of Tomas, survived the purge in Malijad after being forced to use her scribe sigils to create an army of immortals. Safely ensconced in the shelter of the Nest, a sanctuary woven by one of her young allies, Anna spends her days tutoring the gifted yet traumatized scribe, Ramyi, and coming to terms with her growing attachment to an expatriate soldier in her company. Away from her refuge, war drums continue to beat. Thwarted in her efforts to locate the elusive tracker and bring him to justice, Anna turns to the state of Nahora for help.

As a newcomer to the Greenland werewolf pack, Dee has struggled to find her place. She's too outspoken, too smart, too independent to play mate and second fiddle to the male wolves. But belonging is important and life as an outsider too rough, so all this wolf wants for Christmas is a mate and a home of her own. You'd think shopping for a wolfie playmate would be easy - and you'd be wrong. Because available wolves are in short supply and the only other candidate she's met? Carr's a big, violent Viking werebear who can't wait to hit the road.