Showing results by narrator "Shirl Rae" in All Categories

Layton Morris and his brother Mike grew up not knowing what it would be like to live in a normal home. With no running water or electricity in their home and no parents around to protect them, they quickly learned how to survive and depend only on each other. When a tragic accident took Mike away from Layton and the only other person that he ever let into his heart walked away from him, leaving his heart shattered, Layton focused all of his time and energy into the ranch he and his brother dreamed of.

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.

Abducted at 18. Held captive for 15 months. It reads like one of those headlines. And yes, I did it. I stole her. Nora, with her long dark hair and silky skin. She's my weakness, my obsession. I'm not a good man. I never pretended to be one. She can love me, but she can't change me. I can, however, change her. My name is Julian Esguerra, and Nora is mine to keep.

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.

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.

A difficult year filled with loss and heartache leaves Allison Scott withdrawn and emotionally disconnected. When she is finally ready to move forward with her life, she embarks on a getaway vacation to Miami, determined to find healing from the painful memories in her past. Damien Wales also has a tragic past that has left him a cold and distant person. However, the moment he sees Allison, he is inexplicably drawn to her, and Damien is a man who will stop at nothing to get what he wants.

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.

I'm starting to want them both, not just my protector... the villain as well. After an eviction notice and one too many apple martinis, I wake, stripped bare and alone in a cell. No, wait, not alone. My evil garbage fire ex, Andrew, who suggested he'd let me stay with him "for a price" is here, too. He's the whole reason I lost my job. My head is throbbing, my vision fuzzy.

Bought. Conditioned. Sold to the enemy. My name is Blaire. I'm head of security to a man who controls the Russian underworld in Europe. His name is Maksim and he's my master. He bought me ten years ago and conditioned me with brutality to worship and protect him. And I have protected him. I've slain everyone who has tried to do him harm. Everyone but a man he loans me to; a man who threatens to break me and everything in which I believe.

I never thought this could happen to me. I never imagined one chance meeting on the eve of my eighteenth birthday could change my life so completely. Now I belong to him. To Julian. To a man who is as ruthless as he is beautiful - a man whose touch makes me burn. A man whose tenderness I find more devastating than his cruelty.

What happens in an alien sex club stays in an alien sex club, right? Well...not if you pen an exposé on the place. And certainly not if you omit the fact that the experiences in the article are your own. Or if the Krinar you’ve hooked up with is the club's owner, whose many kinks involve blackmail and mind games. For a young journalist out to prove herself, it's all about landing the next big story. Until it becomes all about landing in a possessive alien's penthouse bed.

Fifteen years ago, Celeste was eighteen, in love, and on the honor roll. Then she got pregnant. Now, a widow and a single mom, she does her best to give her daughter, Sabrina, a good life. But something is missing in her world. Or someone. Back when he taught her math, Celeste didn't have a crush on Mr. Travis, but that doesn't mean she's not hot for teacher now or able to ignore her rampant fantasies.

She writes me back. I didn't expect that. She tells me she's a lover of chicken pizza and video games, a hot sorority girl with the nickname Sloth. She wants to know something about me in return. She says I owe her. This is how she saves my life. She doesn't even know it.

I survived my depraved master, Maksim. Now, I belong to Charlie Decena, by nature and by nurture. He broke everything I believed in. My life still lingers in the gray zone - dark and light, love and hate, betrayal and murder. I’m battling Maksim’s brutal conditioning to uncover who Blaire is, for Charlie. I adhere to his counsel, indulge in his debauched desires, and pacify his dominance - until he pushes me too far.

It should have been simple. Easy come, easy go, and in between, atonement. She was not who I would have chosen. Gwen was delicate and lovely: a former model with a ruined life, living loudly in the quiet of the Smoky Mountains, healing injured bears. When she laid her hands on me, she healed me too. That's how it began. That's where it went wrong. I knew she could never be mine. But I sinned. I sinned.

There is a love so fierce it cannot be measured. A heart so strong it will never slow. There is a promise so sure it can never lie. He promised me that love forever. Even when it wasn't enough. Forever. Everlasting. Eternal. There is no measure of time. No sounds of the ticking of a clock. Just the rising and falling of the sun and our own sense of forever. But our forever isn't always.

Have you ever felt like you were living your life for a future that was predetermined? Like there was some bigger picture you just prayed you would someday see clearly? That picture has been crystal clear to me since I was old enough to recognize it for just what it was. Or, I should say, recognize him for who he was.

"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.

Army combat veteran and registered nurse Erin Olszewski's most deeply held values were put to the test when she arrived as a travel nurse at Elmhurst Hospital in the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. After serving in Iraq, she was back on the front lines - and this time, she found, the situation was even worse. Rooms were filthy, nurses were lax with sanitation measures, and hospital-acquired cases of COVID-19 were spreading like wildfire.