The secrets of the kingdom are finally unravelling, and now that Maisie knows the truth of why Kappur and Thalassar are at war, she will do everything she can to make it right. Starting with finding out where the missing royal is. To do that, she’ll need to retrace Princess Odele’s every move, and she knows she can’t do it alone. Not with the queen monitoring her every move. Not with the royal advisor’s cruelty following in her shadow. Not when courtiers are vying for her attention at every corner. She’ll need the help of shadows, dragons, power, and three mermen who despise each other. Of the Black Blade, Prince Kai, and Captain Saber. But will the mermen she’s come to love put aside their differences for the good of the kingdom? Or will their hatred for one another doom them all?

Return to a world of shapeshifters, underwater adventures, and thrilling mysteries in the second book of the Underwater Series! Feline shifter and Captain of the Capitol Guard Mirandha has a new assignment: find and dismantle a suspected trafficking ring. She enlists the help of Zane, the soldier and friend for whom she's always carried a flame. They've been dancing around the potential sparks for years, but when they discover the evil lurking beneath the surface of Cetean society, their burgeoning romance is strained. Mirandha is forced to confront her past, and jeopardize her safety as well as her heart.

The only life Maisie Fauna knows is one of poverty and tragedy. Years of war killed off her friends and neighbors one by one. So when the crown’s soldiers arrive to take their pick of able-bodied mer, it’s no surprise that the Captain of the Royal Guard takes an interest in her. Only, it’s not so she can fight. The Princess of Thalassar is missing and to save the kingdom, they’ll need a lookalike. They’ll need Maisie. And to help the poor, forgotten mer of Thalassar, she’ll do whatever it takes. She didn’t take into account that she’d be suffering the scrutiny of her guard, the attractions of a crown prince, the temptations of the kingdom’s most wanted criminal, or the various attempts on her life. The kingdom’s secrets are deadlier than she could have ever imagined and Maisie soon discovers that the reason the princess disappeared was because she knew too much… …and someone wanted her dead.

Given that touch and touching is so central to everyday embodied existence, why has it been largely ignored by social scientists for so long? What is the place of touch in our mixed spaces of sociality, work, domesticity, recreation, creativity or care? What conceptual resources and academic languages can we reach towards when approaching tactile activities and somatic experiences through the body? How is this tactile landscape gendered? How is touch becoming revisited and revalidated in late capitalism through animal encounters, tourism, massage, beauty treatments, professional medicine, everyday spiritualities or the aseptic touch-free spaces of automated toilets? How is touch placed and valued within scholarly fieldwork and research itself, integral as it is to the production of embodied epistemologies? How is touch involved in such aesthetic experiences as shaping objects in sand, or encountering fleshly bodies within a painting? The goal of this edited collection, Touching Space, Placing Touch is twofold: 1. To further advance theoretical and empirical understanding of touch in social science scholarship by focussing on the differential social and cultural meanings of touching and the places of touch. 2. To develop a multi-faceted and interdisciplinary explanations of touch in terms of individual and social life, personal experiences and tasks, and their related cultural contexts. The twelve essays in this volume provide a rich combination of theoretical resources, methodological approaches and empirical investigation. Each chapter takes a distinct aspect of touch within a particular spatial context, exploring this through a mixture of sustained empirical work, critical theories of embodiment, philosophical and psychoanalytic approaches to gendered touch and touching, or the relationship between visual and non-visual culture, to articulate something of the variety and variability of touching experiences. The contributors are a mixture of established and emerging researchers within a growing interdisciplinary field of scholarship, yet the volume has a strong thematic identity and therefore represents the formative collection concerning the multiple senses of touch within social science scholarship at this time.

Two-hundred-year-old Daegan Blackwell is one of the last remaining Empowered, an ancient magical race. Daegan's duty is to lead and protect his remaining Brethren in the coming war foretold by prophecy. The last thing he expects is to meet the one woman who will either save or destroy him—his destined mate. Fiercely independent Realtor Olivia Farrell believes darkly handsome Daegan is simply a prospective client. Until she's attacked by a man with a strange aura—and Daegan fights him off, taking away her pain with just his touch. At first, Olivia refuses to believe she's part of a magical race, yet mounting evidence and her powerful chemistry with Daegan are too strong to deny. But as Daegan's partner, Olivia becomes a target in the battle between good and evil that threatens her life, as well as the very existence of the Empowered. And the only one who can save her is the man claiming to be her destiny... 92,000 words

Wayne Lacombe is searching for love, recklessly, yet the relationships he pursues repeatedly end in calamity and disaster. The journey begins with a failed marriage, from which Wayne has learned little, and proceeds through a series of comic encounters with local women and a Japanese exchange student. In each episode this loveable rogue comes to understand, if only momentarily, his flaws and inadequacies. His major realization occurs in Egypt where he confronts the goddess Isis and returns to Canada to begin his healing. He meets Sarah who slowly brings him to an understanding of the female mystique and the power of human love. A tragic act of nature leaves him pondering his future on the Chilkoot pass.

People don’t believe in the unseen, anymore, Only in things they can see for sure. They say love and soulmates exist no more, Yet they breathe an unseen air to live for sure. Not every story begins in the here and now. Some transit through time never ending. If time were to cease, then some things would live forever… It began in the garden beneath which rivers flow, the place where the Sand and the Sea were born before creation ¬– the first soulmates, the two halves of one whole, the two parts of the eternity sign. A part Koli, East Indian Catholic, Hannah lives in Mumbai where the Sea always watches over her. Yet her dreams are haunted by a voice that calls to her through the breeze… True love walks beside her in another life, yet she is unable to find a way back in time. Riddled with disappointment and distressing heartbreak, she is hopelessly drawn to the path the Universe has laid before her feet. Drawn to Istanbul, she finds part of the puzzle in the Ezan of the Blue Mosque. Could the man from her dreams be real? What could an Indian woman and a Turkish Imam have in common? Will Hannah find what she searches for? Only those who believe will pass the test. Everyone has their own journey; some get on to the path and to some, the path comes calling. This is the tale of the Sand and the Sea, Hanging on the edge of wait, watch and let’s see.