There are a million and one reasons why I shouldn't fall for my BFF's twin... Too bad love isn't reasonable. Zane is my total opposite. He dates a steady string of women who are nothing like me. And there's no way I would risk Zoey's friendship over my teensy, tiny, baby crush on her brother. But when Zane hires me to help fix a glitch with his startup's software, I run into two problems: Someone on the inside seems to be sabotaging it Working with Zane every day sends my feelings into overdrive My master plan is to sniff out the rat, help Zane save the company, and get out while my heart is still intact. No biggie. But somehow, I get roped into an investors' spa trip. Which means spending a whole weekend with Zane and sharing a room with his date. Kill. Me. Now. This might serve to destroy my crush once and for all. If it doesn't destroy me first ...
I know how this story ends. And it's NOT with the best friends falling in love. Even if Chase checks all my boxes--and then some. He's the perfect guy, and he deserves the perfect girl. Which, to be clear, is not me. I knew one day I would have to let him go. I just didn't know it would be so soon. Or that my traitorous friend would be the one setting him up with a string of potential girlfriends. Now, I have an impossible choice to make... I can watch Chase find love with someone else. Or I can throw my hat in the ring and face my biggest fear, one not even he knows. One that might make him run for the Texas hill country. But if I don't make a play, I might lose my best friend and my only chance at love...
What happens when the man I love to hate becomes the man I must pretend to love? I can't seem to escape Thayden Walker and his infuriating charm. Even his mother and his Great Dane seem bent on playing matchmaker. But I'm totally immune. Until I'm presented with an offer that puts my ability to withstand him to the test. If I marry Thayden, all my student debt goes poof, and he'll take over the family firm. There's so much more at stake than money or a job, especially when I start to see the man beneath the mask. Playing house with Thayden is the most dangerous game of all. And we're both set up to lose more than we could ever win. Unless we've been on the same side all along ...
People who say keep your enemies closer never took a road trip with a guy who hated their guts. A month ago, my identity as Dr. Love was a secret. A month ago, I thought I was getting engaged. A month ago, I wasn't stuck with the guy who hates me most in the world. Now... if I don't make nice with my #1 hater, I might lose my book deal. Without that, I'm not sure what I have left. But when I'm forced on a publicity tour with everyone's favorite guy, the guy who says I ruined his relationship, I didn't know how low I could go. At every stop, I get roasted and he gets more revered. You would think after a while, I would hate him too. And you would be very, very wrong... Falling for Your Enemy is a laugh-out-loud, heartwarming romcom with an epic road trip, a grumpy-sunshine romance, and a happy ending to end all happy endings for this five-book series. The Love Clichés books are closed door romcoms with plenty of sizzle.
We used to call ourselves The Three Musketeers.I know it's clich�, but we were only kids. They usually took turns being in charge, which was fine with me. I was just happy to go along with them. After all, I thought I was the luckiest little girl in the whole world. Most of my classmates only had one best friend, but I had two: my best friend Izzy and her twin brother. Back then, I hoped things would never change, but that's the problem with more. Once I saw a glimpse of it, it was impossible to stop wanting it. Especially when it came to Shane.**This standalone best friend romance has no cheating, no cliffhangers, and is intended for a mature audience.
I am not that woman. The one who falls for her much older, extremely handsome, and totally unavailable boss. That's what I keep telling myself, anyway. I've watched the other women in the office fawn over Gavin, who just so happens to be one of Texas' richest and most desirable bachelors. But I'm interested in business. Totally professional. Which is why Gavin has helped me so much in my career ... right? Not because he's attracted to me. But when his past slams into his present, the lines between business and personal suddenly become very hazy. Now all my carefully crafted plans are totally destroyed, and I have to decide what I want most: my career or the man who has helped me build it ...
My twin brother's talked me into a lot of crazy things, but taking his place on a road trip with his girlfriend so he can party with his friends is a whole new level of insanity. What's even more insane is I somehow find myself agreeing to it--thanks, alcohol, guilt, and bribery. I'm determined to undo the arrangement, but then I meet Gwen, this sexy redheaded hurricane of energy and brains. And then she kisses me. Just like that, I'm driving her up the coast, on our way to a wedding with a mess of complications. With each hour and each stop, I'm falling harder and harder for a woman who doesn't know my actual name. I'm trying to do the right thing. Or the lesser of the wrong things. All my life I've had to clean up my brother's messes, but for the first time ever, I've landed the upper hand in one of our switcheroo schemes. Now I've just got to come clean and convince Gwen that I'm the brother she should be with.
"Most of us will have many friends throughout our lifetimes—friends of all shapes, sizes, and callings. Many of these are wonderful, meaningful friendships. Some are difficult. But some magic few of these are connections that have gone right to our soul. These five or seven or ten friendships have been powerful keys to determining who we have become and who we will become. . . . These are the people I call Soul Friends." As the Senior Scholar-in-Residence for over 25 years at the renowned Kripalu Center, Stephen Cope has spent decades investigating—and writing about—the integration of body, mind, and spirit and the rich complexity of our relationships with others, and with ourselves. Perhaps the central truth that arises from his work is this: human beings are universally wired for one thing—vital connection with one another.Soul Friends invites us on a compelling journey into the connectivity of the human psyche, the study of which has fascinated scholars, philosophers, and thinkers for centuries. Cope seamlessly blends science, scholarship, and storytelling, drawing on his own life as well as the histories of famous figures—from Eleanor Roosevelt to Charles Darwin to Queen Victoria—whose formative relationships shed light on the nature of friendship itself. In his exploration, he distills human connection into six distinct yet interconnected mechanisms: containment, twinship, adversity, mirroring, identification, and conscious partnership. Then he invites us to reflect on how these forms of connection appear in our own lives, helping us work toward a fuller understanding of "who we have become and who we will become."Without a doubt, the journey to our most fulfilled selves requires us to look within. But in order to truly thrive, we must make the most of who we are in relation to one another as well. Unsparingly honest, deeply wise, and irresistibly readable, Soul Friends gives us a map to find our way.
With his stunning debut novel, She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb won the adulation of critics and readers with his mesmerizing tale of one woman's painful yet triumphant journey of self-discovery. Now, this brilliantly talented writer returns with I Know This Much Is True, a heartbreaking and poignant multigenerational saga of the reproductive bonds of destruction and the powerful force of forgiveness. A masterpiece that breathtakingly tells a story of alienation and connection, power and abuse, devastation and renewal--this novel is a contemporary retelling of an ancient Hindu myth. A proud king must confront his demons to achieve salvation. Change yourself, the myth instructs, and you will inhabit a renovated world. When you're the same brother of a schizophrenic identical twin, the tricky thing about saving yourself is the blood it leaves on your bands--the little inconvenience of the look-alike corpse at your feet. And if you're into both survival of the fittest and being your brother's keeper--if you've promised your dying mother--then say so long to sleep and hello to the middle of the night. Grab a book or a beer. Get used to Letterman's gap-toothed smile of the absurd, or the view of the bedroom ceiling, or the influence of random selection. Take it from a godless insomniac. Take it from the uncrazy twin--the guy who beat the biochemical rap. Dominick Birdsey's entire life has been compromised and constricted by anger and fear, by the paranoid schizophrenic twin brother he both deeply loves and resents, and by the past they shared with their adoptive father, Ray, a spit-and-polish ex-Navy man (the five-foot-six-inch sleeping giant who snoozed upstairs weekdays in the spare room and built submarines at night), and their long-suffering mother, Concettina, a timid woman with a harelip that made her shy and self-conscious: She holds a loose fist to her face to cover her defective mouth--her perpetual apology to the world for a birth defect over which she'd had no control. Born in the waning moments of 1949 and the opening minutes of 1950, the twins are physical mirror images who grow into separate yet connected entities: the seemingly strong and protective yet fearful Dominick, his mother's watchful "monkey"; and the seemingly weak and sweet yet noble Thomas, his mother's gentle "bunny." From childhood, Dominick fights for both separation and wholeness--and ultimately self-protection--in a house of fear dominated by Ray, a bully who abuses his power over these stepsons whose biological father is a mystery. I was still afraid of his anger but saw how he punished weakness--pounced on it. Out of self-preservation I hid my fear, Dominick confesses. As for Thomas, he just never knew how to play defense. He just didn't get it. But Dominick's talent for survival comes at an enormous cost, including the breakup of his marriage to the warm, beautiful Dessa, whom he still loves. And it will be put to the ultimate test when Thomas, a Bible-spouting zealot, commits an unthinkable act that threatens the tenuous balance of both his and Dominick's lives. To save himself, Dominick must confront not only the pain of his past but the dark secrets he has locked deep within himself, and the sins of his ancestors--a quest that will lead him beyond the confines of his blue-collar New England town to the volcanic foothills of Sicily 's Mount Etna, where his ambitious and vengefully proud grandfather and a namesake Domenico Tempesta, the sostegno del famiglia, was born. Each of the stories Ma told us about Papa reinforced the message that he was the boss, that he ruled the roost, that what he said went. Searching for answers, Dominick turns to the whispers of the dead, to the pages of his grandfather's handwritten memoir, The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from Humble Beginnings. Rendered with touches of magic realism, Domenico's fablelike tale--in which monkeys enchant and religious statues weep--becomes the old man's confession--an unwitting legacy of contrition that reveals the truth's of Domenico's life, Dominick learns that power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed, and now, picking through the humble shards of his deconstructed life, he will search for the courage and love to forgive, to expiate his and his ancestors' transgressions, and finally to rebuild himself beyond the haunted shadow of his twin. Set against the vivid panoply of twentieth-century America and filled with richly drawn, memorable characters, this deeply moving and thoroughly satisfying novel brings to light humanity's deepest needs and fears, our aloneness, our desire for love and acceptance, our struggle to survive at all costs. Joyous, mystical, and exquisitely written, I Know This Much Is True is an extraordinary reading experience that will leave no reader untouched.
