When a closeted cop reconnects with his sexy foster brother, they pursue a hateful criminal—and their forbidden attraction—in this suspenseful romance. As a police officer, Dante Green’s career has kept him far away from the one temptation he won’t let himself pursue: his younger foster brother. But when he bumps into the now-out-and-proud firefighter at Smoke & Bullets, he finds himself wrestling with fantasies and desires he thought were long behind him. Luke Parsons fell in lust with Dante when he was thirteen years old, but he’s not a kid anymore. He’s a New York City firefighter, and he’s done chasing after things he can’t have. But after witnessing a hate crime, it quickly becomes clear that Dante isn’t as straight as Luke always thought. With Luke to introduce him to the local gay scene, Dante dives into an unsanctioned investigation as the attraction between them grows. Unfortunately, Luke is totally off-limits. Dating him would be a betrayal of their foster father’s trust. But Luke isn’t about to let anything get in the way of their happily-ever-after—even Dante’s fear of commitment.

"It used to be," soon-to-be secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright said in 1996, "that the only way a woman could truly make her foreign policy views felt was by marrying a diplomat and then pouring tea on an offending ambassador's lap." This world of US diplomacy excluded women for a variety of misguided reasons: they would let their emotions interfere with the task of diplomacy, they were not up to the deadly risks that could arise overseas, and they would be unable to cultivate the social contacts vital to success in the field. The men of the State Department objected but had to admit women, including the first female ambassadors: Ruth Bryan Owen, Florence "Daisy" Harriman, Perle Mesta, Eugenie Anderson, Clare Boothe Luce, and Frances Willis. These were among the most influential women in US foreign relations in their era. Using newly available archival sources, Philip Nash examines the history of the "Big Six" and how they carved out their rightful place in history. After a chapter capturing the male world of American diplomacy in the early twentieth century, the book devotes one chapter to each of the female ambassadors and delves into a number of topics, including their backgrounds and appointments, the issues they faced while on the job, how they were received by host countries, the complications of protocol, and the press coverage they received, which was paradoxically favorable yet deeply sexist. In an epilogue that also provides an overview of the role of women in modern US diplomacy, Nash reveals how these trailblazers helped pave the way for more gender parity in US foreign relations.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 24th International Symposium on Distributed Computing, DISC 2010, held in Cambridge, CT, USA, in September 2010. The 32 revised full papers, selected from 135 submissions, are presented together with 14 brief announcements of ongoing works; all of them were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers address all aspects of distributed computing, and were organized in topical sections on, transactions, shared memory services and concurrency, wireless networks, best student paper, consensus and leader election, mobile agents, computing in wireless and mobile networks, modeling issues and adversity, and self-stabilizing and graph algorithms.

The dissertation presents an in-depth study of mobile routing protocols, particularly mobile collection protocols through a literature study, a theoretical model, and thorough experimental studies both in simulation and testbeds. A mobile collection service provides data delivery from stationary source nodes to a mobile user (or a sink) over multihop networks. One of the main contributions of this dissertation research is the Whirlpool Adhoc Routing Protocol (WARP), which efficiently routes data to a mobile destination within a static network. The key insight in WARP's design is that, when a destination moves, data traffic can use the existing topology to efficiently probe, repair, and communicate changes with the few control packets. Using simulation, controlled testbeds, and real mobility experiments, we find that using the data plane, rather than control plane, is highly effective due to the incremental nature of mobility updates. WARP leverages the fact that converging flows at the destination makes it the region of highest traffic. The dissertation also provides a theoretical basis for WARPs behavior, defining an update area where the topology must adjust when a destination moves. As long as packets arrive at a destination before it moves outside of the update area, WARP can repair the topology with the data plane.

An ex-magician returns to Vegas to confront his sordid past in one final, decadent showdown—but he may not make it out of Sin City alive . . . When a mysterious box containing a greeting card, a sheet of textbook paper, three human teeth, and an adult index finger severed just above the knuckle arrives unannounced on Rusty “The Raven” Diamond’s doorstep, he realizes he can no longer hide on the beaches of Maryland. Someone wants Rusty to pay for what he did years before, and if Rusty is going to survive, he’ll need to take the fight to Vegas. Rusty was once the hottest act on the strip, an illusionist who commanded sellout crowds for his death-defying act. But with bigger risks come bigger enemies, and it seems Rusty has made one of the most sizable enemies the Nevada desert has to offer. A mobster-turned-politician with every resource available aims not only to close the curtain on Rusty, but to make sure he pays dearly beforehand. Rusty’s final reckoning with his past will draw him into a trap that, even at his most Houdini-esque, he may not be able to escape, in this gripping crime thriller by the author of The Platinum Loop, praised by Publishers Weekly as “pulp fun at its best.”

“Awakening” is Part 1 of the saga of Kelem Rogeston, a young Martian psychic genius who is the first member of the 6th Root Race, the next step in the evolution of mankind. Kelem learns to harness his amazing abilities and invents the n’time generator, a device that will carry mankind to the stars. Kelem struggles against The Phalanx, an evil organization from Earth that wants to steal the technology and conquer Mars. He designs an n’time ship and travels to Plantanimus, an alien planet where the Dreamers, a sentient form of plant life help him expand his abilities and teach him the true nature of consciousness.

Geeky tech girls aren’t supposed to have this much fun with their super spy co-workers. Ruby typically supports a team of do-gooder assassins from the safety of her supercomputer in their command center. She’s dragged into danger when hackers attack her, empty millions from her crypto wallet, and threaten the global economy by tampering with blockchain technology. Worse, her attraction to two of the agents she works with—Ace and Liam—is a distraction none of them can afford, especially when she winds up sharing a bed with them for her own safety. They’ve got issues of their own. Ace barely returned to active duty after a grievous injury that wrecked his arm and nearly ended his career. His wounds fractured more than bones, shaking Liam’s confidence and willingness to deepen their partnership both on and off duty because they risk their lives daily to protect others. And that’s before they admit that they’re falling for the same nerdy-yet-adorable woman, who should also be strictly off-limits. Can Ruby fix what’s broken between the three of them before the hackers end her career and her life? From New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Jayne Rylon comes a steamy new multi-partner standalone series set in the Powertools universe. The Shields security team accepts missions in the grey area of both law and morality that no one else wants or can handle. They’re a ragtag bunch of special ops soldiers, ex-government agents, and hackers wrangled by a former construction worker who aspired to be a superhero’s sidekick when he grew up. What could go wrong?