Nell Ruthven thought she'd missed her chance to be a mom when, at age nineteen, she was forced to give up her baby for adoption. Now Nell's discovered she has a tiny grandson in need of care. And her teenage sweetheart, cattleman Jacob Tucker, is in town…. At thirty-nine, this couple never thought they'd be parents, let alone grandparents! They never even thought they'd see each other again. But taking care of baby Sam gives them a second chance—maybe even a second chance to fall in love….
Brock Sullivan is a navy SEAL—he lives by his own code of honor and he won't see Jesse, pregnant and alone, struggle. He doesn't have to help her, but he knows he can offer her security while he's away fighting for his country. The proposal is convenient and the marriage— paper only! Jesse would do anything for her baby, even if it means signing away her own dreams of happily ever after and becoming Brock's convenient bride. But, injured in battle, Brock is suddenly home, and what was a simple marriage of convenience is now becoming a whole lot more complicated.
Penniless, pregnant and alone, Iona Lockwood wants to settle and put down roots. Life's delivered her a few hard knocks lately.… When wealthy architect Daniel Hamilton finds Iona living in the empty building he's bought, he knows he should be asking her to leave. But Daniel can't turn his back on a pregnant woman, and offers her a job as his housekeeper. Stepping into his beautiful home, Iona feels like Cinderella. But she knows dreams don't come true. She's there to keep house, not to fall in love with the millionaire who saved her.
Nanny Holly O'Mara has formed a close bond with her late cousin's little twins. When their estranged father, rough, rugged Australian cattleman Gray Kidman, arrives to take them home to the outback, Holly senses that he is out of his depth. Holly soon falls for mysterious Gray. Seeing him light up his children's world makes her spirits leap and even begins to heal her own emotional bruises. Yet something is making Gray push her away….With her help, will he find the courage to love again?
Beginning with infertility and one couple’s struggle with building their family, Stretch-mark My Heart dives headlong into the fragmented world of the US foster care system. Following the adoption journey of Matt and Niki Tschirgi (pronounced Sure-Gee), this book lays the groundwork from start to finish regarding what it takes to have a child permanently placed in your home for adoption. Through fostering, private adoption, open adoption, and foster-to-adopt, Niki recounts the lonely and grievous road of infertility, her and her husband’s decision-making process to choose adoption, the hard work and perseverance to get licensed to be foster parents, and the finalization of six adoptions. Discover how the Tschirgis became a blended family over the course of six years and doubled their family size while moving from Washington to Texas. Stretch-mark My Heart will immerse you in the complicated process of accepting and loving into your home children who were born out of trauma, abuse, and neglect. See how each child was uniquely meant to be a part of this family. Travel along this bumpy yet inspiring road and explore many facets of adoption, including sibling-group, multiracial, infant, and older-child adoption. Although heartbreak, trials, and the unknown are present throughout this book, triumph, miracles, unconditional love, and belonging overshadow the pain and loss of infertility, as well as the brokenness inherent in being a child in foster care. Stretch-mark My Heart will help you understand the intricate and detailed plan that God had for a family to be built together by the power of choice… the choice of adoption.
As untamed as the Outback land he masters, cattlemanJake Connors is a mystery to Laila. Something hiddeninside him calls to the woman in her, in a way no otherman ever has.… In the heart of the Outback, Laila Robbins discoversthe heady power of a brooding man. Jake doesn''t wantLaila''s wealth or her family name, but before he cangive her his heart he has to stop running from the darkdemons of his past. Is Laila''s pregnancy surprise the miracle they both need?
This collection focuses on child welfare in its specific sense: welfare and social interventions with children and young people undertaken by State bodies or NGO's. The term 'child welfare' is deployed differently in diverse international settings. In the United Kingdom child welfare tends to refer to individualised programmes for children who have experienced problems in their lives. In India, to take a contrasting example, it can also refer to major housing and nutrition programmes. This collection takes an inclusive approach to international perspectives.The collection is completed by a new general introduction by the editor, individual volume introductions, and a full index.Titles also available in this series include, Medical Sociology (November 2004, 4 Volumes, 495) and the forthcoming collection Health Care Systems (2005, 3 Volumes, c.395).
When police found the body of Edward Baldock by the shores of the Brisbane River, he had been so savagely murdered his head was nearly severed. And there were strange marks on his neck. There seemed no reason for this horrific crime, but as they searched the scene the police found a bank keycard tucked neatly into the victim's shoe. The card was soon identified as belonging to Tracey Avril Wigginton. In one of the most sensational and bizarre cases in Australia's criminal history, Tracey Wigginton's three female companions that night told the police that Baldock was killed 'to feed Tracey's blood-lust' because she was a 'vampire'. Was Tracey Wigginton the first vampire for over 300 years? Or was there a deeper, darker reason for her crime? Why was it that during police interviews it was clear that one part of Tracey knew what happened but another didn't? The Vampire Killer unravels the tragic and at times horrifying true story of Tracey Wigginton and her desperate cry for help.
This volume discusses the question of presence and/or absence from a transdisciplinary perspective, and intends to provide insights into how a wide range of disciplines addresses this issue which has been at the centre of philosophical, theoretical and critical debates in the past decades. As the essays in the volume prove, apparently diverse areas can have a lot in common and talk to each other in sometimes surprising ways. The topics discussed include modals in various languages and black slave funeral sermons, pragmatic markers and the Australian Stolen Generation, the transcendental in poems by Ann Bradstreet, Arthur Symons and Philip Larkin, short stories by Katherine Mansfield, generic presences in Virginia Woolf and contemporary journalism, haunting presences in fin-de-siècle ghost stories and in a contemporary horror film, mythical structures in John Cowper Powys and Margaret Atwood, and gender politics in Pat Barker and Sarah Waters. The analyses, as they talk to each other, create multiple dialogues without imposing closures and ultimate interpretations on the plethora of possible meanings emerging from the juxtaposition of these essays. This transdisciplinary volume, written in an erudite but reader-friendly language, will be of great interest to both the academic world, as well as a broader readership interested in how linguistic phenomena in general, cultural myths of all kinds, various cinematic, literary and journalistic genres from diverse periods can be approached and opened up to new readings and meanings from the perspective of presences and absences.
