Young newlyweds out to discover a new life in the sage desert of central Wyoming stumble upon uncharted territory within their relationship that is more beautiful and more hazardous than the rigorous terrain.In this short story, recently married twenty-year-old Zach and eighteen-year-old Allison, accompanied by their Brittany spaniel Gina, leave the comfort and security of their New England home in search of new opportunities in the far-off wilderness of central Wyoming.While camped in that wilderness they discover unexpected challenges within their relationship and in the unforgiving countryside that threaten both their marriage and their lives.This familiar theme of youthful idealism colliding with worldly realities and constraints is rendered in clear refreshing prose and placed in an original setting where the sage desert of Wyoming becomes a virtual character in the drama, complete with its demands and surprises.

Dean is faced with the prospect of living alone, after a nasty divorce, only to find an unexpected roommate.NYC Midnight hosts an annual short story writing competition. I competed with over 1,400 writers in the first round of the 2015 writing challenge. Writers are placed random in heats and are given a genre, subject, and character assignment. They then have 8 days to write an original story no longer than 2,500 words. Heat 9, my heat, was assigned Ghost Story for the genre, Agoraphobia for the subject and Divorce Lawyer for the character. I came up with two stories that I liked, Liberty Meadow and Do Us Part. I submitted the former. For your reading pleasure here is the latter.Synopsis: Dean is faced with the prospect of living alone, after a nasty divorce, only to find an unexpected roommate.

Once Upon A Time...In a rustic Mississippi tavern, a beautiful exiled princess was forced to dance for the pleasure of others unaware of her regal birthright...and infuriated by a magnificent golden-eyed devil who crossed an ocean to possess her. From A Far Off Land... A bold and brazen prince came to America to claim his promised bride. But the spirited vixen spurned his affections while inflaming his royal blood with passion's fire...impelling virile Stefan Barany to take in sensuous and searing conquest the love Tatiana vowed never to yield.

SHHH….IT’S A SECRET! For over forty-five years, singles have been secretly flocking to The Happy Pants Café. And what are they searching for? It’s not coffee. And it’s not pants. It’s true love, and everyone who goes, finds it! So what, exactly, is the café’s big secret? Harper Branton, a columnist for the San Francisco Tribune, who’d sooner believe in unicorns than in true love, is about to find out. And it’s the perfect story to save her train wreck of a career. Too bad she’s got competition. He’s sexy, he’s arrogant, and he thinks she’s crazy. ("What kind of person doesn’t believe in love?") And this coming from a man! When these two rivals go head to head, it's more like a WWF smackdown. A shared history binds them in wonderful, terrible ways quickly turning their duel into more than just a fight for a story. Will they tear each other apart for the win or end up as two more satisfied Happy Pants customers? Note: Stand-alone story

BEYOND THE REALM OF DREAMS IS A WORLD SHE NEVER IMAGINED Masayi Sairu was raised to be dainty, delicate, demure . . . and deadly. She is one of the emperor’s Golden Daughters, as much a legend as she is a commodity. One day, Sairu will be contracted in marriage to a patron, whom she will secretly guard for the rest of her life. But when she learns that a sacred Dream Walker of the temple seeks the protection of a Golden Daughter, Sairu forgoes marriage in favor of this role. Her skills are stretched to the limit, for assassins hunt in the shadows, and phantoms haunt in dreams. With only a mysterious Faerie cat and a handsome slave—possessed of his own strange abilities—to help her, can Sairu shield her new mistress from evils she can neither see nor touch? For the Dragon is building an army of fire, and soon the heavens will burn.

Tension. Aggression. Betrayal. How much stress can the human body endure before it folds in on itself? Whatever it is, I’m definitely reaching the peak. Things are supposed to be downhill from here, but my brother is hell-bent on saving a girl who isn’t his in the first place... ...and he can’t do it alone. Do we even have what it takes to bring Joel's girl back from depths of the hell Skull has imprisoned her in? Or will our attempt be thwarted by Skull and the men he controls? It’s a dangerous game Joel's playing, and it’s one that affects us all.

There is only one thing a woman can think of when looking at a man like him. Sex. But Lilac never guesses that bringing a stray cat into her home will soon have her stroking the most wanted man in 1811 London.

The Paul et Virginie (or Paul and Virginia) is a novel. The novel's title characters are very good friends since birth who fall in love. The story is set in the island of Mauritius under French rule, then named Île de France, which the author had visited. Written on the eve of the French Revolution, the novel is hailed as Bernardin's finest work. It records the fate of a child of nature corrupted by the false, artificial sentimentality that prevailed at the time among the upper classes of France.

Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing. Credulity is not wooed through the impressionable senses; nor have we recourse to the small circular glow of the watchmaker's eye to raise in bright relief minutest grains of evidence for the routing of incredulity. The Comic Spirit conceives a definite situation for a number of characters, and rejects all accessories in the exclusive pursuit of them and their speech. For being a spirit, he hunts the spirit in men; vision and ardour constitute his merit; he has not a thought of persuading you to believe in him. Follow and you will see. But there is a question of the value of a run at his heels. Now the world is possessed of a certain big book, the biggest book on earth; that might indeed be called the Book of Earth; whose title is the Book of Egoism, and it is a book full of the world's wisdom. So full of it, and of such dimensions is this book, in which the generations have written ever since they took to writing, that to be profitable to us the Book needs a powerful compression. Who, says the notable humourist, in allusion to this Book, who can studiously travel through sheets of leaves now capable of a stretch from the Lizard to the last few poor pulmonary snips and shreds of leagues dancing on their toes for cold, explorers tell us, and catching breath by good luck, like dogs at bones about a table, on the edge of the Pole? Inordinate unvaried length, sheer longinquity, staggers the heart, ages the very heart of us at a view. And how if we manage finally to print one of our pages on the crow-scalp of that solitary majestic outsider? We may get him into the Book; yet the knowledge we want will not be more present with us than it was when the chapters hung their end over the cliff you ken of at Dover, where sits our great lord and master contemplating the seas without upon the reflex of that within

Everyone is expecting Beth Bradley's successful boyfriend, Charlie, to be her date at her best friend's wedding, but there's a hitch. He isn't real. Alex Tanner needs a cover to finish his search for a traitor. When Beth tries to blackmail him into pretending to be Charlie, he thinks he's found the solution. But when the man Alex hunts comes after Beth, Alex has to choose between duty and love.Beth Bradley has a problem. Everyone is expecting her successful music executive boyfriend, Charlie, to be her date for her best friend’s wedding. There’s one hitch: Charlie doesn’t exist. Unless she can think of something fast, she’s headed for the most humiliating weekend of her life.Alex Tanner has a problem. The former Navy SEAL's search for a double agent lands him at the Kensington Hotel, and he needs a cover to finish the job. When the sexy maid of honor blackmails him into pretending to be her lover, he thinks he's been handed the solution.Except Beth has a way of stumbling into trouble, and when the man Alex is hunting starts targeting Beth, Alex has to decide between duty and the woman who has stolen his heart.

*If A Maddox boy falls in love, he loves forever. But what if he didn't love you, first? * No-nonsense Liis Lindy is an agent of the FBI. Deciding she is married only to her job, she breaks off her engagement and transfers from Chicago to the field office in San Diego. She loves her desk. She is committed to her laptop. She dreams of promotions and shaking hands with the director after cracking an impossible case. Special Agent in Charge Thomas Maddox is arrogant, unforgiving, and ruthless. He is tasked with putting away some of the world’s toughest criminals, and he is one of the best the Bureau has to offer. Though, as many lives as he’s saved, there is one that is beyond his reach. Younger brother Travis is faced with prison time for his involvement in a basement fire that killed dozens of college students, and the media want a conviction. Travis’s only savior is his unusual tie to the mob. In a deal that will spare his brother, Thomas has agreed to recruit Travis into the FBI. Liis is stubborn, defiant, and yet somehow softens Thomas’s rough edges, making her the perfect agent to accompany him to the ceremony. Posing as a couple, they must travel to Travis & Abby’s beach vow renewal and give him the news, but when the pretending ends, she finds herself wondering if they were pretending at all. *In the second installment of the **Maddox Brothers** books, experience firsthand the mysterious world of the elusive Thomas Maddox, and how good love can be when you’re not the first, but the last. *

*Would you risk your life--on the love of a lifetime? * Charleston, 1799: A daughter of Southern gentility and a gifted painter, Catherine Edilean Harcourt has no lack of suitors at home in Virginia, waiting to fulfill her dream of marriage and family. But Cay's adventurous spirit, fostered by growing up with her three brothers, is piqued while visiting her godfather in South Carolina. Bedridden with a broken leg, he asks Cay to fill in for him on an urgent task: on her way to a fancy dress ball, she must deliver a packed horse to an old friend's son--who also happens to be an escaped convict charged with murdering his wife! Cay agrees to the plan, which doesn't go at all as planned . . . whereupon she finds herself fleeing Alexander McDowell's captors, riding blind into the night with the fugitive Scotsman. Though she should fear him, Cay finds herself overwhelmingly attracted to Alex, and drawn into his tale of misguided justice and his innocence as they seek refuge in the steamy Florida everglades. Will trusting him be the worst mistake of her life? Or will falling in love be the salvation both of them have been looking for?

"A chilling tale of love and betrayal." --RT Book Reviews Broad and all-powerful, a man who knows how to thrive in the wild--and bring to the edge of ecstasy the woman he claims as his own . . . Determined to defend her late father's work, Amber Green heads into the heat of the Nevada canyons to prove the existence of the Yaguara, a shape-shifting race of jaguars. There she meets the one man more hell-bent on protecting the jaguars than she is: Jareth, a force of raw male nature to be reckoned with--an animal worth pursuing . . .

"Will you marry me?" Pericles asked her. And Morag, aware of his needs for his young twin son and daughter, agreed. Pride forbade her revealing the fact she'd fallen in love at first sight with this understanding and devastating man. But she vowed she would be all that a Greek expected of his wife. Then she discovered this was not enough -- she wanted his love, too. That's why she dreaded the arrival of her beautiful stepsister, Delia, who had always taken everything