Showing results by narrator "Rae" in All Categories

It’s been nearly a year since everything happened between Magnolia Parks and BJ Ballentine on the steps of the Mandarin Oriental, and since then it seems like everything has changed. Magnolia has a life in New York now and BJ appears to have finally let go and moved on. But when they both wind up back in London and are thrust together once again, they find themselves asking their age-old question: How many loves do you actually get in a lifetime, and, most important—are they each other’s?

On the eve of her 18th birthday, Nora Leston meets Julian Esguerra, and her life changes forever. Stolen away to a private island, she finds herself at the mercy of a powerful, dangerous man whose touch makes her burn...a man whose obsession with her knows no bounds.

Mirror, mirror, who's the fairest of them all? I still cringe when I hear that line. A fairy tale that had girls pretending they were the fairest, the most beautiful, and the most entitled. A fairy tale most couldn't grow out of turned my haunted childhood memories into a living nightmare. Girls who grew up believing that pile of garbage became the meanest of all mean girls. And those mean girls were right. It was a line meant for all the beautiful people in the world, and I knew the answer would never be me.

My biological clock just exploded. Eighteen months. That's how long I have to make a baby happen before it becomes one more broken dream. Fate has a sick sense of humor, though. Its name is Hayden Shaw. Yes, the Hayden Shaw. Billionaire developer, scandalously gorgeous, his hard-headed ego only eclipsed by his enormous...reputation. He needs a bride to fool the world. I need a baby. It's simple business. Strictly professional.

Nate: It's nearly impossible to be surrounded by love but not understand it. My parents, my sister, and just about everyone around us has no trouble accepting that love. To give your trust to someone else and believe they would die before hurting you. I've witnessed it - I've seen the power of it - but I've also seen the pain. Because for me, I've only loved someone I could never have, and my biggest fear is that by giving her my love, all I would do is ruin her.

"My name is 'J' and I'm awkward--and Black. Someone once told me those were the two worst things anyone could be. That someone was right. Where do I start?" Being an introvert in a world that glorifies cool isn't easy. But when Issa Rae, the creator of the Shorty Award-winning hit series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, is that introvert--whether she's navigating love, work, friendships, or rapping--it sure is entertaining.

I loved once. I gave everything that I had to that love, blindly believing that nothing could ever take that feeling away from me. Away from us. And when my little world of happiness was ripped from my fingers, I felt a loss that still haunts me to this day. Now I use that lingering grief as a shield to keep my heart from loving again. It's that fear that keeps me from letting anyone, except my daughter, get close enough to make it hurt. To make my heart bleed when I inevitably lose again.

I have three cardinal rules: Never mix business with pleasure. Never let a woman spend the night. Never date a woman with kids. Kids freak me out. God only knows how many this baby daddy has. Man, what was I thinking when I was in college? Me, Drake Hanson. Aka Donor 5262. It was a piece of cake and $1,500 a month for my deposits (in sperm bank speak) came in handy. I just didn't think about the consequences. One day, some kid is going to call me Daddy, and I'm going to get hit up for child support.

All twenty-year-old Daisy Haites has ever wanted is a normal life, but as the heiress to London’s most notorious criminal empire, it’s just not in the cards for her. Raised by her older brother, Julian, after their parents were murdered, Daisy has never been able to escape the watchful gaze of her gang-lord brother. But Julian’s line of work means that Daisy’s life is . . . complicated. And things don’t become any easier when she falls hard for the beautiful and emotionally unavailable Christian Hemmes, who happens to be one of the few men in London who doesn’t answer to Julian.

Magnolia Parks and BJ Ballentine are meant to be, and everyone knows it. She dates other people to keep him at bay; he sleeps with other girls to get back at her for it. But at the end of every sad endeavor to get over one another, it’s still each other they crawl back to. But now their dysfunction is catching up with them, pulling at their seams and fraying the world they’ve built; a world where neither has ever let the other go completely.

Magnolia and BJ are reeling from a devastating loss as they try to plan what’s been dubbed “the wedding of the century”. As family tensions mount and their respective pasts begin catching up to them, they finally have to look the truth in the eye: Can they learn to trust and be with one another again, or will they die trying?

One drunken night turned a joke into a life-changing moment. He warned me not to fall for him, and I should've listened. He intoxicated me. He made me crave him. He ruined me. In the end, I'll never be the same.

"You can either choose love or you can choose hate, because where one lives, the other will die." Kidnapped a day short of her twenty-fourth birthday, Skye Sedgewick struggles to uncover her captor's motives. Damian Caballero is not only impossible to read, but also dark, troubled, and unflinchingly brutal. For twenty-one days, Skye holds on. But on Day Twenty-Two, she yearns for the sweet slumber of death. Because on Day Twenty-Two, Skye realizes that her only way out means certain death for one of the two men she loves.

He was just a hookup. I wasn't supposed to see him again. He wasn't supposed to be my boss. Or Dad's new business partner. We weren't supposed to keep doing this, night after sheet-clenching, heart-pounding, lip-biting night.

In the Western Australian wheatbelt, refugees Anushey, Shahab and their daughter find safety in the sleepy town of Nunich. But when their daughter disappears without a trace and the town is plunged into chaos and violence, their newfound sense of security is shattered. Suspicions flare, slurs are hurled and tensions rise. Suddenly, Nunich and everyone in it find themselves caught in a storm of media frenzy, political corruption and even terrorist threats. Then another little girl goes missing.

Once, Lucus Shaw was my everything. First kiss. First surrender. First man to promise me a ring, children, a life together. I remember his rogue smirk, his soul stinging kiss, the blistering words that always made him a little dangerous. I gave him my body for one insatiable night. He gave me secrets, heartbreak, and hatred. Friends to lovers to mortal enemies. Our tragic destiny. But I survived. Adapted. Moved on. Fate doesn't care. Luke's back, and I have to pretend we still have a Cinderella romance to save my career.

Once upon a cold, dark night, a Russian killer stole me from an alley. I’m dangerous, but he is lethal. I escaped once. He won’t let me do it twice. The revenge is his. The betrayal is mine. But so are the lies to protect the ones I love. We’re cut from the same twisted cloth. Both merciless. Both damaged. In his embrace, I find hell and heaven, his cruelly tender touch destroying and uplifting me at once. They say a cat has nine lives, but an assassin has just one. And Yan Ivanov now owns mine.

All children misbehave for a variety of reasons, sometimes simply to test how far they can go or to get the attention they crave. Other children are more difficult to parent than others because they are impulsive, hyperactive, inattentive, or delayed in some aspect of their development. This invaluable handbook provides parents with guidelines to help prevent behavior problems from occurring; and also with strategies to promote children's social, emotional, and academic competence.

Wild Life follows Rae on her adventures and explorations in some of the world’s most remote locales. Hers is a story about a nearly twenty-year career in the wild—carving a niche as one of very few Black female scientists—and the challenges she had to overcome, expectations she had to leave behind, and the many lessons she learned along the way.

Forced to join a secret intelligence agency at a young age, Russian interpreter/spy Yulia Tzakova is no stranger to dangerous men. But she's never known one as ruthless and compelling as Lucas Kent. The hard-edged mercenary frightens her, yet she's drawn to him - a man she has no choice but to betray.