Is he her shelter from the storm...or her biggest mistake? Valencia Donovan’s plan to dazzle the wealthy investor she needs for her horse rescue start-up takes an unexpected turn when a tornado strands her with Lorenzo Cortez-Williams. Giving in to attraction in a desperate moment only makes them hungry for more. After blowing away all boundaries, Valencia’s treacherous feelings for the guarded ranching heir could jeopardise her lifelong dream. But closing the deal — while walking away from their intimate affair — could cost her even more... Mills & Boon Desire — Luxury, scandal, desire — welcome to the lives of the elite.
My name is Texas and this is my story. The daughter of a Southern Baptist pastor, I ran away from home when I was 17. For 28 years I traveled a path that took me to places from which few return. Unhealthy relationships and unbridled lusts corrupted my view of freedom and left me cornered in addiction--financed by crafty manipulation and drug dealing. My tainted knowledge of love and polluted desire for escape kept me on a treacherous treadmill that continually fed the heartache of those I loved. But, through it all, the One who loved me unconditionally remained. This is my unvarnished account of the years I spent running and what brought that season to its redeeming end.
A vivid history of America's biggest, baddest prison system and how it came to lead the nation's punitive revolution In the prison business, all roads lead to Texas. The most locked-down state in the nation has led the way in criminal justice severity, from assembly-line executions to isolation supermaxes, from prison privatization to sentencing juveniles as adults. Texas Tough, a sweeping history of American imprisonment from the days of slavery to the present, shows how a plantation-based penal system once dismissed as barbaric became the national template. Drawing on convict accounts, official records, and interviews with prisoners, guards, and lawmakers, historian Robert Perkinson reveals the Southern roots of our present-day prison colossus. While conventional histories emphasize the North's rehabilitative approach, he shows how the retributive and profit-driven regime of the South ultimately triumphed. Most provocatively, he argues that just as convict leasing and segregation emerged in response to Reconstruction, so today's mass incarceration, with its vast racial disparities, must be seen as a backlash against civil rights. Illuminating for the first time the origins of America's prison juggernaut, Texas Tough points toward a more just and humane future.
“If Chaucer were a Texan writing today . . . this is how he would have written and this is how he would have felt.”— New York Times In Leaving Cheyenne (1963), which anticipates Lonesome Dove more than any other early novel, the stark realities of the American West play out in a mesmerizing love triangle. Stubborn rancher Gideon Fry, resilient Molly Taylor, and awkward ranch hand Johnny McCloud struggle with love and jealousy as the years pass.
From the imagination of legendary animator and two-time Oscar nominee Don Hertzfeldt comes a hilarious fever-dream vision of the apocalypse, now available in wide release for the first time since the rare original edition sold out. Created during sleepless nights while he worked on his animated films, The End of the World was illustrated entirely on Post-It notes over the course of several years, slowly taking shape from all the deleted scenes, bad dreams, and abandoned ideas that were too strange to make it to the big screen, including essential early material that was later developed into the animated classic World of Tomorrow. Hertzfeldt's visually striking work transcends its unusual nature and taps into the deeply human, universal themes of mortality, identity, memory, loss, and parenthood . . . with the occasional monstrous biting eel descending from the sky.
From its earliest days of human habitation, the Texas coast was home to seemingly endless clouds of ducks, geese, swans, and shorebirds. By the 1880s Texas huntsmen, or market hunters, as they came to be called, began providing meat and plumage for the restaurant tables and millinery salons of a rapidly growing nation. A network of suppliers, packers, distribution centers, and shipping hubs efficiently handled their immense harvest. At the peak of Texas market hunting in the late 1890s, Rockport merchants shipped an average of 600 ducks a day in a five-month shooting season, and in the last year of legal market hunting, an estimated 60,000 ducks and geese were shipped from Corpus Christi alone. Market men employed efficient methods to harvest nature’s bounty. They commonly hunted at night, often using bait to concentrate large numbers of waterfowl. The effectiveness of the hunt was improved when side-by-side double barrel shotguns and large-gauge swivel guns gave way to repeating firearms, with some capable of discharging as many as eleven shells in a single volley. Their methods were so efficient that, by the late 1800s, Texas sportsmen and others blamed the alarming decline of coastal waterfowl populations on the market hunter’s occupation. In 1903, after a long fight and many failures, the first migratory bird game law passed the Texas legislature. Though the fight would continue, it was the beginning of the end of the year-round slaughter. Most market hunters quit, and those who didn’t became outlaws. In this book, R. K. Sawyer chronicles the days of market hunting along the Texas coast and the showdown between the early game wardens and those who persisted in commercial waterfowl hunting. Containing an abundance of rare historical photographs and oral history, Texas Market Hunting: Stories of Waterfowl, Game Laws, and Outlaws provides a comprehensive and colorful account of this bygone period.
Lucy Pier Stevens, a twenty-one-year-old woman from Ohio, began a visit to her aunt’s family near Bellville, Texas, on Christmas Day, 1859. Little did she know how drastically her life would change on April 4, 1861, when the outbreak of the Civil War made returning home impossible. Stranded in enemy territory for the duration of the war, how would she reconcile her Northern upbringing with the Southern sentiments surrounding her? Lucy Stevens’s diary—one of few women’s diaries from Civil War–era Texas and the only one written by a Northerner—offers a unique perspective on daily life at the fringes of America’s bloodiest conflict. An articulate, educated, and keen observer, Stevens took note of seemingly everything—the weather, illnesses, food shortages, parties, church attendance, chores, schools, childbirth, death, the family’s slaves, and political and military news. As she confided her private thoughts to her journal, she unwittingly revealed how her love for her Texas family and the Confederate soldier boys she came to care for blurred her loyalties, even as she continued to long for her home in Ohio. Showing how the ties of heritage, kinship, friendship, and community transcended the sharpest division in US history, this rare diary and Vicki Adams Tongate’s insightful historical commentary on it provide a trove of information on women’s history, Texas history, and Civil War history.
Mario is a star running back for Foggy Creek High. But when his classroom performance falls short, he risks missing the biggest game of the year. This problem is weighing on him when he runs headlong into a sinkhole, and he finds himself trapped. Chaos erupts in Foggy Creek as they search for the missing teen. Will Mario make his way out of the pit and back to the most important game of his high school career?
His most important mission brought him to Texas—and reunited him with the son he never met… Black ops soldier Hunter Graham knew the rules: no family, no friends, no life outside the mission. But he never anticipated a woman like Erin Jamison. Two years ago, after a mission gone wrong, he met the brilliant scientist and they shared a week of passion before he vanished back into his secret life. Now, with Erin and their son the targets of an international terrorist plot, Hunter will go against his better judgment and break every agency rule to save the family he never knew he wanted. Coming out of hiding carries consequences far beyond this assignment, but he'll do anything to keep them safe—including kidnapping them.…
