Here you'll meet Peggy Paula, who works the late shift at Perkins and envies the popular girls who come in to eat French fries and brag about how far they let the boys get with them. You'll meet a woman in her midthirties pining for her mean-spirited, abusive boyfriend, Del, a nine-year-old who is in no way her actual boyfriend. And just try to resist the noir story of a reluctant, Afrin-addled detective. Self-loathing, self-loving, and otherwise trapped by their own dumb selves, these characters make one cringe-worthy mistake after another.
Edited by Louise Downie. Essays by James Stevenson, Katharine Conley, Gen Doy, Claire Follain, Tirza True Latimer, Jennifer Shaw and Kristine von Oehsen.
Look Duncan, you're a journalist. One day you'll write a book about this club. Or, more to the point, about me. So you may as well know what I'm thinking and save it up for later when it won't do any harm to anyone.
When recently-dumped Charlotte and Anthony cross paths at the airport in New York City and get caught there by a blizzard, the two set out into the city with a self-help book from the gift shop with the intention of getting over their heartbreaks.
Everyone said eloping was a bad idea… Abby and Tom's whirlwind romance led to a quick marriage, despite their families' misgivings. Abby's childhood was marked by her parents' divorce and subsequent failed relationships, while Tom grew up expecting a fairytale ending like his parents and grandparents. Two years into their marriage, the couple finds themselves drifting apart, with divorce looming on the horizon. However, they decide to postpone breaking the news until after a family cruise celebrating Tom's grandparents' 60th wedding anniversary. As Abby and Tom struggle to maintain the facade of a happy couple, they're forced to confront their true feelings for each other. Will this voyage merely delay the inevitable, or could it be the lifeline their marriage desperately needs? Set against the backdrop of a family celebration and the vast ocean, this story explores the complexities of love, commitment, and the courage it takes to fight for a relationship when all hope seems lost. *** The Healing Hearts series focuses on marriage, second chances, and the role that faith plays in the process. Each book is a standalone story, and they can be read in any order. Book 1: Calming the Storm (A Marriage of Convenience) A marriage of convenience isn't exactly what she had in mind. Through love and patience, can he help Rachel realize that, even when she experiences storms in her life, she's never alone? Book 2: I Still Do (A Second Chance Romance) Through love and patience, can he help Rachel realize that, even when she experiences storms in her life, she's never alone? Book 3: Don't Kiss Me Goodbye (A Second Chance Romance Novella) Everyone said eloping was a bad idea… As Abby and Tom struggle to maintain the facade of a happy couple, they're forced to confront their true feelings for each other.
Carian Cole delivers a sweet but sexy slow burn, age gap, marriage of convenience romance with major swoony feels!I guess you could say I was a damsel in distress, and he was my knight in shining armor. But more accurately, I was a girl with a lot of bad luck, and he was a guy with a lot of muscles and tattoos.Jude "Lucky" Lucketti wasn't just a sexy, brooding construction worker. He was my own personal hero who seemed to be in all the right places at the right times. Like when my car broke down and I needed a ride home, and when I face planted on the sidewalk right in front of him and had to be taken to the emergency room.Those weren't exactly my best moments, but they were his.We became friends, and it didn't matter that he was sixteen years older than me. We had a lot in common-like our love of old rock music and vintage fast cars, and our aversion to relationships. When he approached me with a crazy idea to help me out, I couldn't say no.The arrangement was supposed to be temporary. A marriage on paper and nothing else.It should've been easy, but it wasn't. Because here I am, eighteen years old, still in high school, and married to a man I was never supposed to fall in love with.We had just one rule-no kissing the bride. But we broke that rule, and it sealed our fate forever.
Wynn Jamison is turning thirty. Her career has made her rich, but her love life is sorely lacking. She’s okay with that until she spends her birthday dinner with the woman who could’ve changed it all. There’s only one problem. She’s married to Wynn’s sister. Carly Evans is tired of her wife ignoring her needs to put her career first. Family has always been important to her, and Jordan just doesn’t seem to care. A freak thunderstorm rages during the night, and Wynn finds herself catapulted back in time to the day she made the worst decision of her life—stepping aside to let her sister romance Carly. Reliving the day over and over again, Wynn must decide what is most important: success, loyalty, or love. Given a second chance at happiness, will she take the opportunity and change her destiny?
What do you do when you're the reigning kissing booth champion but the only person you want to kiss is your best friend's brother? Let me make this clear right here, right now: I, Halley Dawson, do not care that Preston Wright is kissing other women. Not a lick. Not at all. Nuh-uh-freakin'-uh. I do care that he's doing it six feet away from me behind a gaudy velvet curtain--making him my competition in this year's kissing contest. Why do I care, you ask? Because I've had an unfortunate crush on the insufferable idiot since I was sixteen years old, but I also know it's never going to happen. He's the Creek Falls bachelor to die for, and I'm the Creek Falls racoon lady who puts peanut butter sandwiches out for them every night. I'm not going to let him break my four-year-long reign--no matter how many times he breaks the rules and slides the curtain across to do the one thing he's not allowed to: Kiss me.
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A Best Book of Fall at The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, BUST, and more "Dark yet sensitive explorations of family and love—of all kinds—from a masterful writer. The women at the centers of these stories are sharp-edged and complicated and irresistible; you won’t be able to look away." —Celeste Ng Bold and unapologetic, Karen Shepard’s Kiss Me Someone is inhabited by women who walk the line between various states: adolescence and adulthood, stability and uncertainty, selfishness and compassion. They navigate the obstacles that come with mixed-race identity and instabilities in social class, and they use their liminal positions to leverage power. They employ rage and tenderness and logic and sex, but for all of their rationality they're drawn to self-destructive behavior. Shepard’s stories explore what we do to lessen our burdens of sadness and isolation; her characters, fiercely true to themselves, are caught between their desire to move beyond their isolation and a fear that it’s exactly where they belong.
