It is written in my stars: to be one of the greatest ballerinas that the New York City Ballet has ever seen; my whole life, my mother's ambition has driven me, the precious and untouchable Scarlet Ricci to this point.
 
But I'm not any of these things once I remove my pointe shoes. I yearn for independence,escape, and the freedom just to be me...and to have him, Tyler Wilson.
 
Tyler may be the star striker for New York FC and an insouciant womanizer. But underneath his frivolous bravado, I see the real Tyler - the kind, protective man I've known since childhood. Though he still sees me as a fragile, an untouchable princess.
 
Now we're kind of working together, I feel the crack of electric, sexual tension in the air with each glance shared. I will show Tyler I'm not just a ballerina in a box, and together, we will defy everyone and break the rules.
 
But we can never, ever be caught.
 
Author's Note: This is a standalone from the Love and Play Series. It's HEA, No cheating contemporary coming of age romance with some sports, a loving alpha dominant male, strong female lead, and lots of silliness and steam: D

Lifetimes of family secrets. Threats from every direction. A young woman forced to discover the truth.

The SECOND fast-paced medical thriller in The Gina Mazzio Series.
STOP ME BEFORE I KILL AGAIN
That’s the plea RN Gina Mazzio hears when she gets an anonymous call the night before her wedding. The cops say it’s a crank call. Her fiancé says she’s altar-shy. Her fellow workers call her “crazy.”

But Gina has a bad feeling…

Then two of her fellow nurses at San Francisco’s Ridgewood Hospital go missing. Instead of a honeymoon, Gina's plunged into the dark world of the black market trade in human body parts. This is not a medical thriller for the faint-hearted.

When a third nurse, Gina’s redheaded friend Megan Ann Hendricks, fails to show up at work after a date with a charismatic pharmaceutical salesman, Gina’s suspicions begin to dovetail with those of SFPD's Inspector Pepper Yee.

Gina ends up a kidnap victim offered up to a serial killer with extremely grisly propensities—and a lucrative sideline in black market body parts. Should we say it again? Don’t come near this fast-paced medical mystery if you're the least bit squeamish!

Fans of hard-boiled medical thrillers will love it, though, as will lovers of serial killer fiction, strong women sleuths, hospital mysteries, and all medical fiction. Think Tess Gerritsen, Carolyn McCray, Eileen Dreyer, and Robin Cook. It should delight devotees of Patricia Cornwell too.

Abby Ashford was a student at the Psion Academy, a school dedicated to training the young and talented to become psions - telepathic and telekinetic warriors who dedicate their lives in service to the United Freeworlds. However, Abby proved to be a bit of a handful at the academy, and her life took a dramatic turn when she was shipped out to learn from Master Jax Idor as his apprentice.

But Abby's time in training may prove to be short-lived. There is a crisis brewing on the planet of Mentallos - an influential member of the Freeworlds. Can Master Idor and Abby contain the situation? Or will they find themselves overhwelmed?

Yes sugar - we're going all the way.
I was forced to leave Austin.
And my sweet Caroline brought me back.
I broke her heart once, but I've come back to claim what's mine:
Her V-Card.

She's every cowboy's wet dream.
A perfect blend of sex and southern innocence.
How can I forget that night on the Ferris wheel?
She had her first real 'O'.
I've got plenty more in store.
I let her go once -- I won't make that mistake again.
So hold tight darling - we're going on a ride.

Jack Kelly. Driven. Volatile. Lonely. He grew up believing that some kinds of love are just wrong…

“No Kelly has ever been worth a damn in this town until me. But the money? I can’t talk to it, I can’t fuck it, and believe me, it’s a damn cold bed partner to wake up next to.”

Dylan Smith. Sensual. Nurturing. Bisexual. He sees nothing wrong with enjoying the pleasures in life…

“Just let yourself go. It’s okay to let me love you. To let both of us love you.”

Cate MacMillan. Curvy. Smart. Frustrated. She’s ready to shake off her insecurities and stop denying herself…

“No one else has ever made me feel like this. Wanton. Shameless. Free.”

Three friends who grew up together…

Their childhoods were shaped by one man, their resentments fueled by two misunderstandings, and all three will be pulled back into each other’s lives by a loss that affects them all. What they’ll find together isn’t what any of them expects… but it might be exactly what each of them needs.

MINE is a 104,000 word steamy, standalone MMF bisexual ménage romance with no cliffhangers. It’s intended for readers who enjoy explicit scenes of MF, MM, and MMF on the way to the kind of HEA that combines sweet with heat… and doesn’t let up until everybody is fully satisfied.

A man's need for revenge. A woman's career ambition. Will their love change everything?

Ex-con Jeff Torres trusted the wrong guy, and now he wants revenge. After five years in prison, he knows he can't pull off his scheme alone. But who can he trust?

L.A. publicist Ariana Carlson is an ambitious career woman. Working seven days a week has led to cold sheets at night. When she meets the strong, confident, and secretive Jeff, she wonders if her evening luck might be changing…

Jeff enlists her help in his quest for revenge, but Ariana can tell that something is off. Of course, she's got a few secrets of her own that could make romance impossible. As Jeff begins to crave Ariana more than his payback, will the publicist's true motives take their love to the next level or send the ex-con back to jail?

Hard Time is a standalone romantic suspense novel. If you like sizzling chemistry, fast-paced thrills, and tales of revenge, then you'll love bestselling author Kristen Luciani's passionate story.

Buy Hard Time to learn if love can overcome revenge today!
 

An imperfect hero battles his inner demons in a race against time to save the woman he loves...

First he had to rescue her. Then he'd try to win her back.
A Marine serving in the galactic frontier, Lieutenant Lukas Frank has a lot in common with a street dog named Bang-Bang; they both started off as scrappy orphans fighting to survive--and beat the odds. Things change when Bang-Bang leads Lukas to starpilot Captain Carlynn Riga. The tough war hero learns what it means to surrender--his heart. Lukas's struggles with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, threaten to tear the three of them apart, but nothing threatens them more than when Carlynn goes missing in action. Now the rugged, emotionally scarred Marine and his K-9 partner must find Carlynn and bring her home, or risk losing everything he has finally found worth fighting for.

(Expanded from the novella "Stray", originally published in the Pets in Space 1 Anthology)

A note from the Author:
Star Hero is a stand-alone HEA novella in the world of the Star Series. It's not necessary to read this one in series order (it contains no spoilers) but if you would like to know the suggested reading order, Star Hero takes place simultaneously with Star Champion (previously titled The Champion of Barésh) and after "The Prince, the Pilot, and the Puppy" from Embrace the Romance: Pets in Space 2. I hope you enjoy this latest installment in the Star Series!

MURDER MOST VIRAL!

It’s a chilly November in 1994, and thirty-one-year-old Geoff Kavanagh surreptitiously splits his time between science fiction novels and cyberspace in his parents’ dilapidated, overgrown, uptown New Orleans mansion. Until his mother finds him dead from a suspicious fall off a ladder. Maybe he should never have posted about seeing his father murdered … because way too many people on the TOWN, a pre-Facebook virtual community, knew things about his family he didn’t even suspect. Decades-old skeletons start falling out of closets after Geoff’s untimely death, thanks to New Orleans Detective Skip Langdon. Langdon finds Geoff’s gorgeous mom strangely uninterested in her son’s fatal fall, but Mom’s apparently the only one. It seems the post has gone viral. Suddenly all the TOWNSpeople have theories—and ambition as cyberdetectives. What’s a murderer to do but kill his way out?

Calling the windup “a virtuoso spin on Rashomon,” Kirkus noted that, along the way, “Smith worms her way deeply and painfully into her cast's layers and layers of past relations, getting deeper than ever into Skip as well.”

Written in the mid-90s, Death Before Facebook is a suspenseful online murder mystery blast from the past: THE NET meets Prime Suspect.

"If you haven't discovered Smith yet, now is the time to do so . . . Move over, Sara Paretsky." —KPFA-FM (Berkeley, CA)

“A poisonous bouquet from a still-rising star.” -Kirkus

Excerpt:
“When Geoff was four years old, he and his mother came home one night to find his father dead on the bedroom floor. Shot with his own revolver—he was a cop.”

“A cop!”

“In your very own department. Geoff thought he could remember coming home—climbing the stairs with his mother, going into the bedroom, and finding the body. But once he’d asked her, and she said it wasn’t like that at all. She said Geoff ran right up the stairs and went to the bathroom; meanwhile Marguerite—that’s his mother—went into the bedroom and turned on the light. It was all she could do to keep from screaming, but she didn’t want little Geoffrey to know what was going on, so she turned out the light, closed the door, and went downstairs to call the cops.”

“Pretty damn cool.”

“Well, who knows what really happened? That’s just what she told Geoff. Anyway, it got him to thinking his own memory was bogus—or might be. And after he had that dream, he kept getting these weird flashbacks, if you want to call them that, like incest survivors are supposed to have—little half-memories. Like being in bed and hearing an argument. Running down the hall. His mother’s face. His dad on the floor… actually, he had that one all the time, from before his mother told him he’d never seen that. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

“He posted this stuff?’

“Yes.”

“Under his own name?”

“You can’t hide your identity on the TOWN—you have a user ID, but anyone can check you out in about two seconds. Geoff was Vidkid.”

“So if it was true, if he really had witnessed the murder, or had even been in the house when one was committed, he was putting it out there for the world to know. Is that what you’re saying?”

“That was our reasoning, yes. When we found out about the ‘accident’.”

Skip could see why this was the talk of the TOWN.

A collection of ten short stories of heroism and tragedy set during the long years of war between 1793-1815.

Outpost - A prelude to Blood on the Snow with Jack Hallam.
The Emerald Graves - Lorn Mullone at the Battle of Vinegar Hill.
Pipe and Drum - The Battle of Assaye seen through the eyes of a Highlander of the 78th Foot.
Plains Wolf - A prelude to Marksman with Rifleman Cadoc.
Summer is Coming - The horrors of the French retreat, winter, Russia, 1812.
The Diabolical Circumstance of Captain Bartholomew Chivers - A hero who is a rogue, adulterer and all-round knave.
Flowers of Toulouse - A spine-chilling story.
Lamentation - A redcoat looks back on his life after the Battle of New Orleans.
Enemy at the Gates - The bloody defence of Hougoumont.
The Bravest of the Brave - Ney's final moments at Waterloo.

Taking it easy has never been this hard.

Go ahead. Ask me what’s on my mind.

It’s cash.

Specifically, the Cash family business. I’m in charge of our entire real estate empire, and I’ve worked harder than anyone to stay on top.

So it’s no wonder that every woman I meet wants a piece of me. Too bad—I’m wedded to the job.

I’ll say it right now: Josephine Paxton doesn’t have a chance.

I hated her in school. Now she’s all grown up and tormenting me on the one vacation I’ve taken…ever.

I’m not here to make friends. I’m definitely not here to fall for her.

But damn it, I can’t resist her luscious body. She’s the kind of hot that money can’t buy.

Enemies with benefits? Sure.

And that’s all. When we leave this island, it’s over.

I swear…

Hard Cash is a steamy full-length billionaire novel with adult language and an HEA that will have your heart beating…hard.

The sequel to Operation Underpants. Feared assassin Claudia hesitates and lowers her pistol. She can’t go through with it and instead of killing 87-year-old secret agent Max, she takes him with her - putting her at war with herself and a past she hoped to forget.
Meanwhile, Olivia must escape the watchful eye of MI6 and track her beloved husband Max across Europe, leaving in her wake a delicious trail of chaos.
Claudia is more than a spy story, it’s a grand adventure.
 

She stops at nothing to maintain a veneer of Victorian respectability. But the consequences of infidelity prove far worse than mere exposure. After straying into the arms of Doc Foster and becoming pregnant, small-town civic leader Louise Morrissey faces ruin if anyone— especially her husband— finds out.

When infection steals the eyesight of her newborn baby, Louise knows it is punishment for her sin. What she doesn't know is that the web of deceit she weaves to safeguard her marriage and reputation will eventually ensnare her husband and daughter with tragic consequences.

Guilt-ridden and seeking redemption, Louise risks revelation of her secrets as she joins Helen Keller, who dares to "speak the unspeakable," in a grassroots movement to end the blinding scourge known as "babies' sore eyes."

In a confessional moment, Louise signs in Helen's hand: "When you wrote 'they enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin,' you were writing about me."

A fictional version of real events, the story pits Louise, Helen, and others against society's taboos as they champion what would become one of the greatest public health triumphs of the twentieth century.

The story is one of romantic love at its most complicated, tragic, and poignant.

DISCUSSION GUIDE INCLUDED

Stop Being A People Pleaser! Learn How To Set Boundaries And Say NO - Without Feeling Guilty!

Are you fed up with people taking advantage of you? Are you tired of coworkers, friends, and family members demanding your time and expecting you to give it to them?

If so, THE ART OF SAYING NO is for you.

Imagine being able to turn down requests and decline invitations with confidence and poise. Imagine saying no to people asking you for favors, and inspiring their respect in the process.

DOWNLOAD The Art Of Saying NO: How To Stand Your Ground, Reclaim Your Time And Energy, And Refuse To Be Taken For Granted (Without Feeling Guilty!)

Amazon bestselling author, Damon Zahariades, provides a step-by-step, strategic guide for setting boundaries and developing the assertiveness you need to maintain them. You'll learn how to say no in every situation, at home and in the workplace, according to your convictions. And best of all, you'll discover how to get your friends, family members, bosses, coworkers, and neighbors to respect your boundaries and recognize your personal authority.

In THE ART OF SAYING NO, you'll discover:

• my personal struggle with being a people pleaser (and how I overcame the habit!)


• the top 11 reasons we tend to say yes when we know we should say no


• 10 simple strategies for turning people down with finesse


• why saying no to people doesn't make you a bad person (the opposite is true!)


• the best way to develop the habit of setting personal and professional boundaries


• how to know whether you're a people pleaser (and how to gauge the severity of the problem)

 

PLUS, BONUS MATERIAL: dedicated sections on saying no to your spouse, kids, friends, neighbors, coworkers, clients, bosses, and even strangers!

If you're sick and tired of being taken for granted, grab your copy of THE ART OF SAYING NO today! Start taking control of your life by learning how to say that simple, beautiful word: "No."

Scroll to the top of the page and click the "BUY NOW" button!

Damn, I’m not supposed to fall in love…
My billion-dollar Texas oil company just had a spill.
Nothing like forced time off.
Meeting Fiona while visiting my small home town was an unexpected surprise.
Beautiful curves fit snugly into tight jeans and enough confidence to take on a lion.
Just being near her has got me all tongue twisted.
She’s not too impressed by my Texas charm, which turns me on even more.
She doesn’t remember me, but my company put her father out of business.
Like a jerk, I lie about my identity.
If she finds out, I’m screwed.

This steamy contemporary romance will keep you company tonight, tomorrow, and the day after. No cheating and a satisfying happily ever after!

Shifters and switches are the perfect match; she hunts vampires, he keeps her from destroying entire populations in a fit of magical rage. These love connections, once common, have died out in modern times. A disaster for humanity.

Until...

The first switch seen in a hundred years flees a room full of shifters, leaving chaos in her wake.

this will be a full novel, approximately 65,000 words.

Jameson Montreat is a lonely wolf shifter who had one job that was essential to the protection of the human species. A job he was unable to do. Now, with more vampires throwing their hat into the political ring every day, he can't stop it. He can't kill vampires, none of the shifters can. Only a switch can kill a vampire, and they died out a hundred years ago. But then an impossibly captivating switch walks right into the anti-vampire meeting, turning every shifter head in the place. She is not meant for him, as much as he might need her to be.

Coralie Hamilton is a normal woman, living a normal life, waiting for something big. What that something is, she has no idea, but when some base part of her brain causes her to go temporarily insane and try to stab a politician in the throat with a fountain pen, her future suddenly becomes crystal clear. She's a natural born killer, and the only thing that can calm her killing instincts in the moment is the love of a shifter male who is strong enough to handle her.

Yesterday, she didn't believe in shifters. Today, she's got to choose the one who will keep her sane.

"A bright fantasy for readers who are tired of exaggerated violence and slippery morals." -- Kirkus Reviews

Lana can draw arcane powers from gemstones. When she started reading the folklore, it sounded farfetched. She should have closed the books right then and walked away. Special abilities are nothing but trouble. Someone always wants you to do something impossible. Or dangerous. Usually both. Like going through a portal to save an oppressed race in another world. In this case, gnomes, whose ruler happens to be a gem master, with gem powers that dwarf the ones in the folklore books. Never mind about the gem master's goblin-like servants, or the flying serpents, or the mutant insects. When you're in this deep, because you just couldn't say no, what's a few more unthinkable horrors?

Readers will enjoy this unique fantasy. Lana's story begins in our present-day world as she prepares to take over the family jewelry store, but most of her adventures take place in the dangerous and fascinating gnome world.

This is a standalone novel without loose ends or a cliffhanger ending, but the resolution opens the door for further adventures. 

I've been bought by the billionaire,
And now he wants a return on his investment...

Emily:

It didn’t take long for things to get out of hand.
Thrust on stage in front of a crowd of wealthy, powerful masked men,
And they’re selling me to the highest bidder!


Kyle:

The moment I saw her, I knew she’d be mine.
The sexiest lot on the stage.
Anyone’s, for a price.
When that hammer comes down,
I’m going to be the one buying.

Trussed up and put up for sale,
Emily’s about to discover that everyone has their price…

This is a full-length romance, with steamy love scenes, a beautiful HEA and utterly no cliffhangers. Also included are some previously released bonus books, completely free!

Ravensdale, a remote seventh century castle on Ireland’s windswept west coast, is shunned by the locals because of its dark history. Strange stories abound in the castle, tales of battles, bloody sieges, dissolute novelists and terrible crimes. Only the ravens come here, circling over the crumbling castle. turning the sky black every evening as they fly home to roost.

Determined to immerse herself in the life of the castle, Gothic scholar, Lucy Donoghue, abandons the comfort of her Dublin life to become tour-guide at Ravensdale for the summer. On arrival at the castle, she is shocked at its dilapidation, but her spirits are lifted by Owen, the young caretaker, who forms a bond of friendship with her.

But their peace is shattered when they’re joined by the world famous, dashing actor, Dylan Winters and his film crew as well as Owen’s formidable grandmother. Lucy now has to deal with an intense actor prowling the hallways as he prepares for his role as Jonathan Harker in Dracula, and teenage girls thronging the castle to catch a glimpse of their idol. Lucy tries to hide her own blossoming attraction to the actor.

When a girl suddenly disappears, all fingers point at Dylan but Lucy defends him. But as the summer unfolds, and sunny days turn to stormy weather, Lucy is left wondering whether she’s been blinded by infatuation and made a dreadful mistake. Can she uncover the truth to rectify her mistake in time, and what is the truth anyway?
Inspired by Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, this atmospheric tale with a twist of mystery is bound to enthrall Gothic literature and Gothic romance lovers alike.

Scroll up to get on Kindle or at the introductory price of $0.99 today.

Vampires and giants and turtles — oh, my!

On a recent trip to Vegas, Katrina Parker really crapped out. Married, widowed, and with no memory of either event, Kat suddenly develops the ability to communicate with comatose people. But what happens in Vegas doesn't always stay there — especially when it comes to the supernatural. Even back in Houston, trouble still haunts her. 

After agreeing to try to help the coma-stricken daughter of a mob boss, Kat discovers the assault that placed the poor girl in the hospital was only the beginning. Aided by her amnesic vampire housemate, a former Vegas detective, a spunky turtle, and a man who may or may not have a neck, Kat vows to discover who is behind it all … before she becomes the next victim.

Grab a copy of Mind If I Come In - the first book in the Kat Parker paranormal cozy mystery series.