Five years ago, Rick Allyn was publicly humiliated when he had his heart broken on the reality dating show True Love. Convincing him to sign up for another round of punishment isn't going to be easy. But with the show's ratings plummeting, producer Elizabeth Maier will have to persuade him to agree ... or she'll be putting in a job application at Rick's small-town diner. Elizabeth is confident this season will be different. With his prominent family, boyish charm and good looks, Rick is the complete package. Finding his soul mate shouldn't be hard. However, as filming continues, she's beginning to suspect that the perfect woman for Rick is her. That leaves Elizabeth with a tough choice: her job at True Love or a shot at the real thing.
Where is rapid economic growth taking us? Why has its spread throughout the world been so limited? What are the causes of the great twentieth century advance in life expectancy? Of the revolution in childbearing that is bringing fertility worldwide to near replacement levels? Have free markets been the source of human improvement? Economics provides a start on these questions, but only a start, argues economist Richard A. Easterlin. To answer them calls for merging economics with concepts and data from other social sciences, and with quantitative and qualitative history. Easterlin demonstrates this approach in seeking answers to these and other questions about world or American experience in the last two centuries, drawing on economics, demography, sociology, history, and psychology. The opening chapter gives an autobiographical account of the evolution of this approach, and why Easterlin is a 'reluctant economist'.
In 1755 Benjamin Franklin observed "a man without a wife is but half a man" and since then historians have taken Franklin at his word. In Citizen Bachelors, John Gilbert McCurdy demonstrates that Franklin's comment was only one side of a much larger conversation. Early Americans vigorously debated the status of unmarried men and this debate was instrumental in the creation of American citizenship. In a sweeping examination of the bachelor in early America, McCurdy fleshes out a largely unexamined aspect of the history of gender. Single men were instrumental to the settlement of the United States and for most of the seventeenth century their presence was not particularly problematic. However, as the colonies matured, Americans began to worry about those who stood outside the family. Lawmakers began to limit the freedoms of single men with laws requiring bachelors to pay higher taxes and face harsher penalties for crimes than married men, while moralists began to decry the sexual immorality of unmarried men. But many resisted these new tactics, including single men who reveled in their hedonistic reputations by delighting in sexual horseplay without marital consequences. At the time of the Revolution, these conflicting views were confronted head-on. As the incipient American state needed men to stand at the forefront of the fight for independence, the bachelor came to be seen as possessing just the sort of political, social, and economic agency associated with citizenship in a democratic society. When the war was won, these men demanded an end to their unequal treatment, sometimes grudgingly, and the citizen bachelor was welcomed into American society. Drawing on sources as varied as laws, diaries, political manifestos, and newspapers, McCurdy shows that in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the bachelor was a simultaneously suspicious and desirable figure: suspicious because he was not tethered to family and household obligations yet desirable because he was free to study, devote himself to political office, and fight and die in battle. He suggests that this dichotomy remains with us to this day and thus it is in early America that we find the origins of the modern-day identity of the bachelor as a symbol of masculine independence. McCurdy also observes that by extending citizenship to bachelors, the founders affirmed their commitment to individual freedom, a commitment that has subsequently come to define the very essence of American citizenship.
Suddenly Reunited Jane O'Malley's young heart broke in pieces when the man of her dreams left town after being rejected by her sister. Years later, Tom Leighton returns home, and Jane's old feelings for him rush back as forcefully as the Tennessee mountain springs. Tom left Gatlinburg behind without a word to allow his hurt heart to heal. Now he's a man with a young niece to raise and amends to make in town to the people he abandoned--especially to Jane. The girl from his past has become a gorgeous, kind woman. Can he prove to her that she's the only woman he wants?
Reunited…And Reluctant Commitment was always a dirty word for Tanner Quinn. He'd seen too much loss growing up. But now his troubled sister was expecting a baby, and he had to make a home for her child—leading him to his high school girlfriend's doorstep, of all places! Candy McCall was still as sweet as her name, and her house was perfect for his purposes—even if she did remind him of a time he'd spent much of his adult life wanting to forget… Barely making ends meet, Candy saw Tanner's offer to buy her house as a godsend. But when he asked her to be the nanny to his niece, the arrangement quickly became too close for comfort. Would just one kiss remind them both of what they once were to each other…and might just be again?
Twins for the bachelor A Daddy for Her Sons by Raye Morgan When Connor McNair watched his best friend marry Jill Darling, he never expected a second chance with the girl who got away. Now she's the single mother of adorable twin babies, and he's back to persuade her to give up her pastry company. It's just business…until Jill's sweet smile has Connor thinking about fatherhood and forever. But that's against all the rules… Doorstep Twins by Rebecca Winters Gabi Turner is on the Greek island of Milos to find Andreas Simonides—the father of her late sister's baby twins. But Andreas knows who the real father is—his brother! Waiting for his brother, Andreas is soon changing diapers and singing nursery rhymes. He and Gabi make a good team. But what will keep them together when the real father arrives? Previously published as A Daddy for Her Sons and Doorstep Twins
