Short Family

You can’t have faith with the spirit of fear. The ancestors cannot reach you if you aren’t strong enough to believe. REINA is excited about leaving her hometown of Houma, LA. Away from the legends, stares, and whispers that run rampant about her family. She just wants to get away and feel normal for once in her life. Her parents OSCAR and ESMERALDA fear losing their daughter to her independence, not knowing a more menacing force awaits her. After settling into the private university in Alabama, she embraces her freedom. A day trip with one of her roommates, NIKKI, turns into a nightmare...

Sevastiano Cantarelli can barely believe Amy Taylor is real. After the lifetime of betrayal he’s experienced, her surprising sweetness is the ultimate threat to his cynical worldview! Unwrapping her innocence was a gift he couldn’t forget...but one he knows it wouldn’t be fair to repeat. Their encounter left Amy exhilarated - and wanted for the first time. She knows that walking away from the commanding Italian is the safest way to keep her heart intact. Yet it’s the one thing she can’t do...because she’s pregnant with Sevastiano’s twins!

Shelby is struggling with parenthood, marriage, a passive-aggressive mother, and unemployment. But she also has a sweet escape in her beloved Hallmark movies. When a secret admirer promises to sweep her away into a world of those same romantic tropes, the temptation is so heady, Shelby can already smell the pumpkin spice. But this rom-com dream has a whiff of conspiracy....

The second novel and first quick-listen title from Sunday Times and New York Times best-selling author Cathy Glass. My Dad's a Policeman is a dramatic and engaging story of a young boy with an alcoholic mother. Lonely, bullied and desperate for a life of happiness and security he tells everyone he meets his dad's a policeman. Fast paced and compelling, this short story from Cathy Glass follows the experiences of a Ryan, a small and lonely 12-year-old boy who struggles to fit in.

One night four lives entered the world by the hands of an Amish midwife just outside North Star, Pennsylvania. Rebekah's babies, as they are called, are now grown adults, and in four heartwarming novellas each young person experiences a journey of discovery, love, and the wonder of Christmas.

Unity, Texas — May 1887. A grieving daughter. A hopeful journey. A love tested by secrets. Can love survive secrets, ambition, and the wild brutality of the frontier? After the sudden death of her father in the spring of 1887, Clary Wilson is left with little more than two battered stagecoaches—and the care of her younger sister. With no prospects back home, she answers a mail-order bride advertisement and heads west to Unity, Texas, hoping for a second chance at life and love. Thomas Forster, the man she’s been corresponding with, is even more handsome and kind than Clary dared ...

Una niña solitaria se enamora del amante de su madre y practica misteriosas ceremonias rituales; una mujer permanece medio siglo encerrada en un sótano, víctima de un caudillo celoso; en el fragor de una batalla, un hombre viola a una muchacha y mata a su padre.

Livia Andersen was a woman who held her family together with a quiet smile and an iron will. It’s only been months since her death and the four children she leaves behind continue to grapple with the shifting changes in their lives now that she’s gone especially her youngest daughter, Claire. Claire Andersen Slavik came to her lakeside cabin shortly after her mother’s death. She needed the refuge it offered her at a time when little else did. She’s had several visitors over the last several months including Scott Patterson, a close friend of her brother and the rest of the Andersen ...

In 1998, an apparently ordinary Australian man is arrested and charged for a series of brutal murders. The news shocks the nation, bringing both horror and resolution to the victims’ families, but its impact travels even further: into the past, as the murders rewrite personal histories, and into the future, as true crime podcasts and biopics tell the story of the crimes. Highway Thirteen, Fiona McFarlane’s newest collection, takes murder as its starting point, but it unfolds to encompass much more.

Erotic Sex Short Stories is a scintillating, explicit collection of forbidden and taboo sex stories for adults, including domination, first time, rough sex, MILFs, virgins, threesomes, hot cuckold, bisexual, anal sex and much more. Sexual fantasies are a great and healthy way to explore our sexuality and learn new things about ourselves. In your mind, there’s no taboo that’s forbidden or wrong. And while pornography can offer some release, there’s nothing like an erotic story to inspire you, time and time again.

They protect the streets, but when it comes to the women they want, all bets are off. Five fierce cops. Five curvy women who never saw them coming. From forbidden crushes to runaway brides, single moms to sweet shop owners, these men don’t just uphold the law - they rewrite it for love. Officer Julian – He’s her best friend’s older brother… and the man she’s always wanted. When Savannah tempts him past the point of no return, he makes her one promise—she’ll never be anyone else’s. Officer Anders – Elaina’s just trying to raise her daughter and run her business. But ...

In The Girl of the Lake, Bill Roorbach conjures vivid, complex characters whose layered interior worlds feel at once familiar and extraordinary.

Exposing his father’s transgressions in a tell-all was the ethical, righteous--and profitable--thing to do. What’s left but to slink back home for a humbling face-to-face with the man whose secrets he sold? He was a notorious government whistle-blower. Depending on whom you ask, he’s a treasonous felon, a folk hero, a validated patriot, or a national disgrace. To his son, Michael, he’s the father who threw his family into upheaval. Now, having moved back home at the age of thirty-four, Michael is getting to know him as a man.

A battered woman is the last thing Oliver Chapman expected to see when he was scouting on the range. He knew he had no choice but to take her home to his ranch to allow her to heal. But getting close to Willow is proving more difficult than the horses that run wild on the prairie.

In these ten interrelated stories Atwood traces the course of a life and also the lives intertwined with it, while evoking the drama and the humour that colour common experiences—the birth of a baby, divorce and remarriage, old age and death. With settings ranging from Toronto, northern Quebec, and rural Ontario, the stories begin in the present, as a couple no longer young situate themselves in a larger world no longer safe. Then the narrative goes back in time to the forties and moves chronologically forward toward the present.

Uwem Akpan's stunning stories humanize the perils of poverty and violence so piercingly that few listeners will feel they've ever encountered Africa so immediately. The eight-year-old narrator of "An Ex-Mas Feast" needs only enough money to buy books and pay fees in order to attend school. Even when his twelve-year-old sister takes to the streets to raise these meager funds, his dream can't be granted. Food comes first. His family lives in a street shanty in Nairobi, Kenya, but their way of both loving and taking advantage of each other strikes a universal chord.

I’m the ex-SEAL with unfinished business. She’s the one I walked away from—and I’ve regretted it ever since. Back in college, Callie was the spark I never saw coming—fierce, stubborn, and impossible to ignore. But I had my future mapped out: follow in my family’s footsteps, become a Navy SEAL, and leave everything—and everyone—behind. So I walked away from her without looking back. Now, years later, I’ve traded combat zones for a co-ownership in The Kill Zone, where I can keep my life simple and my heart locked down. Or at least, I could—until Callie shows up, throwing ...

If you are a French language learner looking to advance your reading skills and enhance your vocabulary, then this book will guide you through dialogue and story listening in your second language. We often are instructed with conventional activities in the form of worksheets, overlooking that words are 20 times more likely to be remembered if they are a part of a story (Bruner, 2017). Language learners retain more in the context of a story and become accustomed to the natural syntax of that language.

Abby: I have one job. That’s it, just one: Babysit the bad-boy soccer hero for a week, so that he doesn’t embarrass the entire country before his knighthood ceremony. Everything goes according to plan until I somehow end up in his bed and on the cover of every tabloid in England, my heart shattered in a million pieces and my job in jeopardy. Brilliant, Abby. Rory: What reason do I have to believe that this curvy blonde is any different from every other woman I’ve met? Sure, she’s smart and beautiful and funny and amazing in bed and… did I mention those luscious curves? Right, I am...

It's the holidays, and Samantha Moon and her family are ready to get together and celebrate. No, they may not be your average family, but the love is just as real. It's two days before the big Thanksgiving meal when Sam receives a most unusual guest. Unusual because she hasn't seen her brother, Clayton, in twenty years. Turns out, he isn't just here for the pumpkin pies and yams. He's got a problem. He's been cursed and thinks his little sister is his best chance to fix it. With pie baking put on hold, Sam and company set out to break his curse, locate a kidnapped baby, and save the day. ...