To: Jared From: Kelly Re: More shocking news for the Richmond Gazette As director of the Tiny Blessings adoption agency, I appreciate the unbiased way you've reported all the scandalous information that's come out recently in the Gazette. Now I have another exclusive for you: investigator Ross Van Zandt broke the news to me last night—I am the missing baby, the child taken from her mother at birth. It was quite a shock, but with God's help, I can come to terms with this. I'm hoping Ross will help me uncover my biological father's identity, but he seems hesitant.... Off the record—the handsome P.I. has caught more than my professional interest.
With a happy marriage, a thriving business and a beautiful young daughter — Shelby Kinkaid and her husband had the perfect life. Until he was killed in a mysterious accident. After that, Shelby's life revolved around little Aimee. But then Aimee vanished from her bedroom in the middle of the night. Neighbor Tim Austen, who had a painful past himself, was a constant support for Shelby. Yet as the list of suspects grew and her fear escalated, Shelby would have to use all her investigative skills to save her daughter's life…and her own.
It's been eight years since rugged cowboy Anthony Duke shared one very special night with sassy Zoe Ryan. That night changed his life — or did it? Zoe doesn't think so. She still believes that Anthony later cheated on her. But despite marrying Anthony's rich uncle on the rebound, inheriting millions upon his death and skipping town to escape the scandal, Zoe can't stop thinking about the man who crushed her heart. Now widowed and vulnerable, Anthony's not sure he'll ever be able to love anyone besides his little boy, Noah. But when Anthony bumps into Zoe on vacation in Greece, he knows his meddlesome mother has duped him. Maybe this match made in Texas has got some staying power, after all.
“A beautifully written and well-researched cultural criticism as well as an honest memoir” (Los Angeles Review of Books) from the author of the popular New York Times essay, “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This,” explores the romantic myths we create and explains how they limit our ability to achieve and sustain intimacy. What really makes love last? Does love ever work the way we say it does in movies and books and Facebook posts? Or does obsessing over those love stories hurt our real-life relationships? When her parents divorced after a twenty-eight year marriage and her own ten-year relationship ended, those were the questions that Mandy Len Catron wanted to answer. In a series of candid, vulnerable, and wise essays that takes a closer look at what it means to love someone, be loved, and how we present our love to the world, “Catron melds science and emotion beautifully into a thoughtful and thought-provoking meditation” (Bookpage). She delves back to 1944, when her grandparents met in a coal mining town in Appalachia, to her own dating life as a professor in Vancouver. She uses biologists’ research into dopamine triggers to ask whether the need to love is an innate human drive. She uses literary theory to show why we prefer certain kinds of love stories. She urges us to question the unwritten scripts we follow in relationships and looks into where those scripts come from. And she tells the story of how she decided to test an experiment that she’d read about—where the goal was to create intimacy between strangers using a list of thirty-six questions—and ended up in the surreal situation of having millions of people following her brand-new relationship. “Perfect fodder for the romantic and the cynic in all of us” (Booklist), How to Fall in Love with Anyone flips the script on love. “Clear-eyed and full of heart, it is mandatory reading for anyone coping with—or curious about—the challenges of contemporary courtship” (The Toronto Star).
The Book of Secrets is a step by step guide to find the best meditation suitable for you. 112 methods of meditation are described and introduced here with helpful background information to give contemporary people a door to meditation. Reading this book, not only will your outlook on life change, but so will your life. If you want to know more about life and yourself this is your book. Each chapter that focuses on describing specific meditation techniques is followed by a chapter of questions from those who were present during the talks. In most cases, their questions relate to the techniques given in the previous chapter. So, as you start to experiment with a technique, it will be helpful to look into these chapters for some extra hint, some greater depth of understanding, or response to a question that might have arisen for you in your experiments.
Special Forces agent Carter Rawlings was back — and Dani Marlow's world was spinning in his wake. The local arson attacks for which she was being blamed were only part of the problem. The feelings Carter's reappearance had ignited threatened far more dangerous territory — a past she tried to keep hidden, especially from him. With the trouble on her land and Carter's tantalizing presence, Dani had to think about her future. Did she want to keep avoiding the truth — that she loved Carter and wanted to make a life with him — or could she finally face the stakes head-on, deal with her enemies and seal her heart to that of the only man she's ever loved?
On Sarah A. Chrisman’s twenty-ninth birthday, her husband, Gabriel, presented her with a corset. The material and the design were breathtakingly beautiful, but her mind immediately filled with unwelcome views. Although she had been in love with the Victorian era all her life, she had specifically asked her husband not to buy her a corset—ever. She’d heard how corsets affected the female body and what they represented, and she wanted none of it. However, Chrisman agreed to try on the garment . . . and found it surprisingly enjoyable. The corset, she realized, was a tool of empowerment—not oppression. After a year of wearing a corset on a daily basis, her waist had gone from thirty-two inches to twenty-two inches, she was experiencing fewer migraines, and her posture improved. She had successfully transformed her body, her dress, and her lifestyle into that of a Victorian woman—and everyone was asking about it. In Victorian Secrets, Chrisman explains how a garment from the past led to a change in not only the way she viewed herself, but also the ways she understood the major differences between the cultures of twenty-first-century and nineteenth-century America. The desire to delve further into the Victorian lifestyle provided Chrisman with new insight into issues of body image and how women, past and present, have seen and continue to see themselves.
The articles in this volume of collected essays, written over the last two decades and all revised, updated, and supplemented with unpublished material, are grouped around two themes: Divine Secrets and Human Imaginations. The first essays deal with the production, initiation, use and function, the abduction, repatriation, and the replacement of divine images, their outer appearance, and the many facets of the divine presence theology in Ancient Mesopotamia. The essays on the second topic deal with human imaginations, human constructs, and constructed memories, which assign meaning to the past or to things or experiences that are beyond human control. Thematically, several aspects of the human condition are examined, such as the ideas associated in the Old Testament and the Ancient Near East with death, corporeality, enemies, disasters, utopias, and passionate love.
How would your life be if nothing threatened, opposed or had power over you and your highest good? How would you feel if you knew that this moment is absolutely perfect in every way, and you are absolutely perfect in every way? You are infinitely expanding ecstatic love, this truth within you cannot be threatened, it is your permant, constant Truth. This book provides a simple and practical path that reveals where you are blocking your inner divine Presence from immersing your present moment awareness. Through correcting and disappearing all the blocks within your own mind, your natural divine radiance and boundless joy will bless and transform every aspect of your life; you will experience a joy and rapture beyond anything your mind can imagine. You become the indescribable peace and bliss that is innately and infinitely within you, your life flows and overflows with miracles and wonder, synchronicity and grace. You live each moment as the ecstatic love and boundless joy that you truly are. You become your unlimited Divine Self, one with all that is and at peace with all beings and all circumstances unconditionally. You live in the constant ecstatic state of rapture and grace. I wish that you could know how exquisitely beautiful you are. The vastness, beauty, and magnificence of each human being is profoundly awesome beyond all description. I wish for you to love yourself with a love so complete and perfect. That you choose for yourself a path of love, a path of ease, beauty, and grace because you are worthy of nothing less. It doesnt matter what you have done in your life, you are worthy of the highest joy and fulfillment, far greater than your mind can conceive. Your will and your Creators will for you are the same; a constant state of ecstatic love, rapture, joy, and perfect peace. If you could glimpse for one moment how magnificently beautiful and holy you and your fellow humans are, you would bow down in humility and weep with tears of joy. You are infinite creative energy, beauty, love, and magnificence. You are so boundless that words cannot begin to touch the wonder of who you are. Love and honor yourself as your Creator loves you; a love that is endless, constant, and eternal. The only thing that is certain in this world is that everyone will awaken to an eternal, divine, and constant state of indescribable ecstatic love. Everyone awakens to the infinite grace of who they truly are; everyone returns home.
