Lucia Wright needs a holiday. After years of caring for her "eccentric" younger brother and sister in the country, she accepts a friend's invitation to spend a few weeks enjoying the season in London only to find that life among the city's elite may be even crazier than at home.Lord Edmund Rutherford needs an escape. Sworn since childhood to a woman he cannot abide, he finds himself trapped by the strictures of society and the expectations of those around him. The solution seems si...

Amanda, her young sister and her unconventional mother move to a small house in a remote village just before Christmas—and discover it lacks furniture and everything else they need. Charles, son of the local squire, bursts in to "rescue" them when he mistakes smoke from the clogged chimneys as a house fire. Although she finds him to be dolt, when she realizes his father is their landlord, Amanda coerces Charles into helping them. Impressed by her confidence (and her pretty face doesn't hur...

Matilda Blakethorn is at the top of the list of people William Fletcher never wants to encounter again. She humiliated him at the age of nine, and scared him out of his wits for years after.So waking up after a night of heavy drinking to find her looming over him is a bit of an unpleasant surprise. Especially since he has no place to go, except for the poorhouse she supervises.Matty Blakethorn doesn't recognize the bedraggled stranger sleeping on the floor of St. Bartholomew'...

Christmas is an inconvenient holiday for Helen Wright. Her sister Lucia always invades the household with her husband and seven children. Her stepfather insists on carrying on ridiculous traditions and her brother, Geoffrey, constantly invents new ones. The result of all this chaos is that Helen has no place to conduct her experiments in peace and worst of all, no one of good sense with whom to discuss them. During most of the year, she looks forward to a weekly dinner discussion with Mr. ...

With the war over, Lieutenant Heyward Elliott needs work. The job hunt is made no easier by the meddling of Sophie, who is all smiles and helpfulness one minute and snobby and argumentative the next. Complicating matters is her constant companion Helen, a strange young lady with a propensity to drop eggs on people in the name of science.Sophie tries to do the right thing, but gets all the wrong results. Her attempts to find employment for Lieutenant Elliott produce one disaster aft...

Eleanor of Aquitaine is intelligent and beautiful, her immense wealth desired by kings. Her father’s dying wish places the young heiress under the guardianship of King Louis VI of France, who marries her to his monkish son. The pious French Court considers her education and intellect shameful. She is accused of emulating men, regarded as her betters. It is emphasised she is there to breed, look decorative, and keep her eloquent mouth shut. Eleanor longs to break free. The opportunity arise...

In beginning of 1774, Jack McCready and Mara Weingardt may have been the only two people in the colony of Maryland who couldn't care less about the British tax on tea.Mara, a widow with two boys to support, had enough difficulty simply keeping her small farm together so that she would not have to marry the abusive, lecherous neighbor who owned her property. And peddler Jack could only care about the tax if somehow he could profit by it, which he could not.That is, until the d...

Geni Bayles has made some pretty poor choices when it comes to men. So she finally agrees to meet the suitor her mother has chosen, a painfully shy baronet from the country. When she encounters Sir Richard Latimer, however, she finds him witty, considerate and charming—but only because he thinks she's a maid. She decides to continue the deception just long enough to learn his true personality.Richard knows he has a duty to marry a rich woman to restore the estates on which so many ...

Drug Law Reform in East and Southeast Asia is a multi-author look at drugs in East and Southeast Asia, on drug policy, patterns and trends, local problems, human rights abuses, treatment prospects, and potential reforms. From the history of drugs in Asia, the book examines recent trends in illicit drugs, especially the present enormous amphetamine problems. It addresses recent policy shifts, especially harm reduction responses to the devastating drug-associated HIV epidemics. It explores f...

From the New York Times bestselling author of Homecoming comes a novel that takes readers on an unforgettable journey through generations and across continents as two women try to uncover their family’s secret past.A tiny girl is abandoned on a ship headed for Australia in 1913. She arrives completely alone with nothing but a small suitcase containing a few clothes and a single book—a beautiful volume of fairy tales. She is taken in by the dockmas...

It's late summer 1793, and the streets of Philadelphia are abuzz with mosquitoes and rumors of fever. Down near the docks, many have taken ill, and the fatalities are mounting. Now they include Polly, the serving girl at the Cook Coffeehouse. But fourteen-year-old Mattie Cook doesn't get a moment to mourn the passing of her childhood playmate. New customers have overrun her family's coffee shop, located far from the mosquito-infested river, and Mattie's concerns of fever are all but oversh...

Holidays, relatives, pressure to marry—sometimes it is all too much. Is it any wonder a woman may need to escape? The heroines in this collection of stories aren't afraid to take matters into their own hands when they've had enough.The Ultimate Escape, by Susana Ellis - On the eve of her wedding, Julia needs to take a moment to consider what she is doing, and where better than 100 years in the past? Unfortunately, Oliver finds a way to chase her through ti...