Showing results by narrator "Luci Christian" in All Categories

Paint your toes. Pick up the wrong coffee and bagel order. Drive from Brooklyn to Jersey in traffic so slow you want to tear your hair out. It’s amazing all the useless things I can accomplish while on hold for three hours with customer service. Three hours when I should be getting the Date-in-a-Box website ready to launch at the big business expo in a few days. Except my shiny new website is glitching, and my inner rage-monster is ready to scorch some earth...when he finally picks up. Not the robot voice I expected but a real live human named Kal.

I’m good at hiding my feelings. Having to pretend I’m not in love with my best friend? Pfft. That’s child’s play. Here’s how I do it: I avert my eyes when he walks out of his room, shirtless in all his toned glory. I squash the butterflies that fill my stomach every time he slowly unfurls a dimpled smile. Not to brag, but Aiden Smith isn’t hard to resist if you’ve been doing it for as long as I have. In fact, we might have continued as best friends forever if not for the fact that I needed him to play the part of my fake boyfriend.

Scarlet Reed has returned to Polson Falls, convinced that 12 years away is long enough to shed her humiliating childhood identity as the town harlot’s daughter. With a teaching job secured and an adorable fixer-upper to call home, things in her life are finally looking up. That is, until she finds out that Shane Beckett lives next door.

Whitney has been in so many foster homes that she can give a complete rundown on the most common varieties of foster parents - from the look-on-the-bright-side types to those unfortunate examples of pure evil. But one thing she doesn't know much about is trees. This means heading for Foster Home number 12 (which is all the way at the top of the map of California, where there looks to be nothing but trees) has Whitney feeling a little nervous. She is pretty sure that the middle of nowhere is going to be just one more place where a hyper, loud-mouthed kid who is messy and small for her age won't be welcome for long.

I breathed in and out for a few seconds as I waited at the end of the aisle. It felt like I was standing overlooking the edge of a cliff, and the minute I saw my future wife, I was going to freefall. The music started. Shit, I was seriously going to pass out. People stood; Demetri nodded his head and patted me on the back. And then I saw her. It was like seeing her for the first time all over again. Memories of meeting her that first day of school had me grinning from ear to ear.

Life as an ENFP is no walk in the park. Despite the happy-go-lucky attitude they exude, only those who share the specific preference for extroversion, intuition, feeling, and perceiving on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator can truly understand the unique form of chaos that governs this type's restless mind. Embodying a profoundly strange stack of cognitive functions, ENFPs approach the world with both the enthusiasm of a child and the wisdom of an old soul.

Ian is...just my best friend. We're extremely close, stuck so deep inside a Jim-and-Pam-style friendzone everyone at work assumes we're a couple - that is until one day, word spreads through the teacher's lounge that he's single. Fair game. Suddenly, it's open season on Ian. He should be reveling in all the newfound attention, but to our mutual surprise, the only attention he seems to want is mine. He's turning our formerly innocent nightly chats into X-rated phone calls. Our playful banter sports a new, dangerous edge.  

I was issued a warning: stay away from Ben Rosenberg. As Clifton Cove's resident "king", he thinks he's entitled to anyone and anything. The trouble is, I've spent my whole life following the rules and playing it safe. I know what it feels like to be the good girl. I'm the police chief's daughter and a librarian - for adorable children, no less. An all-nighter with a fictional hunk is about as exciting as my life gets until one day, fate decides to take pity on me and shove me straight into the path of Mr. Off-Limits himself.

Emily is a career-driven 30-something with big ambitions and a young family. She is making an impact as a leader at a tech company, but after being passed up for multiple promotions, she finds herself at a loss for how to improve. Fate answers her in the form of a kind - and surprisingly direct - older man in a coffee shop. A well-respected CEO before he retired, David has deep and rich leadership knowledge. Emily needs direction, and David is the perfect mentor. 

Sylvia's had more than her fair share of hardship. Abandoned by her husband, sold into slavery by her father, and now ruled by a harsh master, she's never felt free. But everything changes when she discovers an injured stranger in the woods. Despite his initial hostility and the language barrier between them, Sylvia decides to help him at any cost. She's determined to save him from a cruel fate...and he's become her new secret. But she never realized that he'd be a prince - or that he would kidnap her as his bride!

You don’t know the New York fashion world until you know its haunts. In the months since Pandora English left the small town of Gretchenville to live with her mysterious great aunt in a supernatural Manhattan suburb, her whole world has been turned upside down. Pandora has discovered she is the chosen one, the Seventh Daughter of a Seventh Daughter, and during the impending Revolution of the Dead, she alone will have the power to save all life as we know it. 

I was supposed to keep my hands off her. But I put a baby in her. If word gets out, both of our careers will be ruined. She decided to leave town, so no one would find out. She thought she should keep it a secret, even from me. But, just like when I took her virginity, I always take what I want and claim what's mine. So I vow to find her, and protect them both. But will the stakes be too high for our love to last?

After practicing on robot patients for weeks, the kids at Wah-Kee-Nah Summer Camp for Teenage Psychiatrists are finally getting to work with real humans. But when Andromeda's patient, the mysterious Joe, tells her what's actually going on at Wah-Kee-Nah, she dispenses with her psychiatric training and opts for full-on rebellion.

Julie E. Czerneda's acclaimed Web Shifters series continues with the story of Esen - the last survivor of a unique alien race. Able to take on the form of any creature she observes, Esen has long since broken the cardinal rule of her species: noninterference.

The underground mine fires ravaging Pennsylvania coal country have forced 11-year-old Brigid Howley and her family to seek refuge with her estranged grandparents, the formidable Gram and the black lung-stricken Gramp. Tragedy is no stranger to the Howleys, a proud Irish-American clan who takes strange pleasure in the "curse" laid upon them generations earlier by a priest who ran afoul of the Molly Maguires. The weight of this legacy rests heavily on a new generation, when Brigid, already struggling to keep her family together, makes a grisly discovery in a long-abandoned bootleg mine shaft.

In 1902, Sadakichi Hartmann attempted to transport a theater full of people across a vast ocean using only perfume and an electric fan.

Flo lives an eccentric life - she travels with a popular circus in which the main acts star orphaned children with secret shape-shifting abilities. Once Flo turns 16, she must perform, but she's not ready. While practicing jumping a flaming hurdle in a clearing beside the circus, she spots a dark figure in the trees and fears he saw her shift. The news sends the circus into a panic.

Dani was born with her heart on the wrong side of her body. In her 15 years of life, she’s had more doctor’s appointments, X-rays, and tests, and eaten more green hospital Jell-O than she cares to think about. Fourteen-year-old Amanda is a competitive gymnast, her body a small package of sleek muscles, in perfect health. The two girls don’t know each other, don’t go to the same school, don’t have any friends in common. But their lives are about to collide. Acclaimed author Jill Wolfson tackles this fascinating story with her trademark honesty and wit.

Once in a while, a first novel arrives like a bolt of lightning, commanding attention with an explosion of power, grace, and light. Flying in Place is such a book. As unflinching as The Lovely Bones, as startling as Beloved, it is a work to bear witness - with bravery and compassion - for the experience of millions of readers and their loved ones. Emma is 12, a perfectly normal girl, in a perfectly normal home. With a perfectly normal father...who comes into her bedroom every night in the hours before dawn. Emma will do anything to escape.

In this romantic and evocative fantasy, Najwa is a jinni, training to be a spy in the war against the humans. Zayele is a human on her way to marry a prince of Baghdad - which she’ll do anything to avoid. So she captures Najwa and makes a wish. With a rush of smoke and fire, they fall apart and re-form - as each other. A jinni and a human, trading lives. Both girls must play their parts among enemies who would kill them if the deception were ever discovered - enemies including the young men Najwa and Zayele are just discovering they might love.