Her boss wants her in his office—and as his bride! Adelaide Thibodeaux grew up with Dempsey Reynaud, and she's worked for him for years. But when the billionaire football coach springs a surprise engagement to keep her from resigning, it's a low blow. Just as she's ready to strike out on her own, she's stuck in a fake relationship with her boss, biding her time... But soon Adelaide faces a second blow: she's actually falling for the man! Can a relationship founded on a lie become the real deal? Or will they fumble before the end zone—and stay in the friend zone?

Everywhere, the waters are rising—and that is just the beginning of the world's peril, unless the NUMA crew can beat the clock. The thrilling new NUMA Files novel from the #1 New York Times-bestselling grand master of adventure.An alarming rise in the world's sea levels—much larger than could be accounted for by glacier melt—sends Kurt Austin, Joe Zavala, and the rest of the NUMA scientific team rocketing around the globe in search of answers. What they find at the bottom of the East China Sea, however, is even worse than they imagined: a diabolical plan to upset the Pacific balance of power—and in the process displace as many as a billion people.A rare alloy unlike anything else on earth, a pair of 500-year-old Japanese talismans, an assassin so violent even the Yakuza has disowned him, an audacious technological breakthrough that will become a very personal nightmare for Kurt Austin - from the shark-filled waters of Asia to the...

Leaping from ballet to quiltmaking, from the The Nutcracker to an Annie-B Parson interview, Idiophone is a strikingly original meditation on risk-taking and provocation in art and a unabashedly honest, funny, and intimate consideration of art-making in the context of motherhood, and motherhood in the context of addiction. Amy Fusselman's compact, beautifully digressive essay feels both surprising and effortless, fueled by broad-ranging curiosity, and, fundamentally, joy.

The definitive, never-before-told story of the prep-to-pro generation, those basketball prodigies who from 1995 to 2005 made the jump directly from high school to the NBA. When Kevin Garnett shocked the world by announcing that he would not be attending college--as young basketball prodigies were expected to do--but instead enter the 1995 NBA draft directly from high school, he blazed a trail for a generation of teenage basketball players to head straight for the pros. That trend would continue until the NBA instituted an age limit in 2005, requiring all players to attend college or another developmental program for at least one year. Over that decade-plus period, the list of players who made that difficult leap includes some of the most celebrated players of the modern era--Garnett, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Dwight Howard, Tracy McGrady, and numerous other stars. It also includes notable "busts" who either physically or mentally proved unable to handle...

Nick Carter didn't believe in an abominable snowman — that is, until high in the heart of the Himalayas, in the face of monstrous evidence, he was forced to… Nick Carter didn't believe there was a woman who could shake his cool — that is, until he met the beautiful Khaleen and she made him want to… Nick Carter didn't believe it was possible for one man to stop the Chinese from taking over a country — that is, until he got the assignment in Nepal and realized he had to! Killmaster's logic is no match for ancient superstition in this electrifying espionage adventure that plunges AXE's top operative into brutal Red Chinese intrigue deep in the Himalayas!

The Medici are famous as the rulers of Florence at the high point of the Renaissance. Their power derived from the family bank, and this book tells the fascinating, frequently bloody story of the family and the dramatic development and collapse of their bank (from Cosimo who took it over in 1419 to his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent who presided over its precipitous decline). The Medici faced two apparently insuperable problems: how did a banker deal with the fact that the Church regarded interest as a sin and had made it illegal? How in a small republic like Florence could he avoid having his wealth taken away by taxation? But the bank became indispensable to the Church. And the family completely subverted Florence's claims to being democratic. They ran the city. Medici Money explores a crucial moment in the passage from the Middle Ages to the Modern world, a moment when our own attitudes to money and morals were being formed.To read this book is to understand how much the...

A startling and revelatory examination of Nabokov's life and works—notably Pale Fire and Lolita—bringing new insight into one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic authorsNovelist Vladimir Nabokov witnessed the horrors of his century, escaping Revolutionary Russia then Germany under Hitler, and fleeing France with his Jewish wife and son just weeks before Paris fell to the Nazis. He repeatedly faced accusations of turning a blind eye to human suffering to write artful tales of depravity. But does one of the greatest writers in the English language really deserve the label of amoral aesthete bestowed on him by so many critics?Using information from newly-declassified intelligence files and recovered military history, journalist Andrea Pitzer argues that far from being a proponent of art for art's sake, Vladimir Nabokov managed to hide disturbing history in his fiction—history that has gone unnoticed for decades. Nabokov emerges as a kind of documentary...

Dramatic, bold and racy, Daddy Long Stroke uncovers the shocking and painful reality of some men's belief systems about women and sex. Cairo offers readers a voyeuristic look into the mind of a womanizer who manipulates and seduces women by using what he's got--good looks, chiseled physique, charisma, and sexual prowess--to get what he wants without remorse, or regret. Sexy and thuggish, Alexander Maples, aka Daddy Long Stroke, is a womanizer. Arrogant and self-indulged, he is what every woman secretly craves in the bedroom--rough, rugged, and ravenous. And he is always happy to deliver. Alexander knows no boundaries when it comes to pleasing a woman, leaving no area untouched, not even her heart--or her wallet. But love is the last thing on his mind. Getting paid, and whetting his sexual appetite are the only things that motivate this salacious gigolo. And any woman trying to claim him finds herself on the receiving end of heartache, tears, and drama. Written...