Brett Rocha retired from pro-hockey while still at the top of his game. Co-owner of a chain of restaurants and an inherited ice skating academy, he seems to have it all. Despite his fame, wealth, and good fortune, though, Brett suddenly finds himself painfully alone. Ex-Olympic figure skating star Rylan Hennessy transitioned to professional ice dancing with Celia, Brett’s sister and Rylan’s lifelong partner on the ice. Then tragedy strikes, and Rylan’s world is turned upside down, too. With the unexpected death of Celia, Brett and Rylan are drawn together through their mutual grief. Their bond strengthens when Brett introduces Rylan to BDSM, a lifestyle Rylan has never experienced before. While the mystery of Celia’s murder still needs to be solved, a second tragedy threatens to tear them apart. Will their relationship survive, or will love be enough to see them through this life altering, harrowing change?

Once a winter pastime for socializing and courtship, skating evolved into the wildly popular competitive sport of figure skating, one of the few athletic arenas where female athletes hold a public profile--and earning power--equal to that of men. Renowned sports historian James R. Hines chronicles figure skating's rise from its earliest days through its head-turning debut at the 1908 Olympics and its breakthrough as entertainment in the 1930s. Hines credits figure skating's explosive expansion to an ever-increasing number of women who had become proficient skaters and wanted to compete, not just in singles but with partners as well. Matters reached a turning point when British skater Madge Syers entered the otherwise-male 1902 World Championship held in London and finished second. Called skating's first feminist, Syers led a wave of women who made significant contributions to figure skating and helped turn it into today's star-making showcase at every Winter Olympics. Packed with stories and hard-to-find details, Figure Skating in the Formative Years tells the early history of a sport loved and followed by fans around the world.

This book presents a new front of research in conformal geometry, on sign-changing Yamabe-type problems and contact form geometry in particular. New ground is broken with the establishment of a Morse lemma at infinity for sign-changing Yamabe-type problems. This family of problems, thought to be out of reach a few years ago, becomes a family of problems which can be studied: the book lays the foundation for a program of research in this direction. In contact form geometry, a cousin of symplectic geometry, the authors prove a fundamental result of compactness in a variational problem on Legrendrian curves, which allows one to define a homology associated to a contact structure and a vector field of its kernel on a three-dimensional manifold. The homology is invariant under deformation of the contact form, and can be read on a sub-Morse complex of the Morse complex of the variational problem built with the periodic orbits of the Reeb vector-field. This book introduces, therefore, a practical tool in the field, and this homology becomes computable.

Dynamic Behavior of Materials, Volume 1: Proceedings of the 2012 Annual Conference on Experimental and Applied Mechanics represents one of seven volumes of technical papers presented at the Society for Experimental Mechanics SEM 12th International Congress & Exposition on Experimental and Applied Mechanics, held at Costa Mesa, California, June 11-14, 2012. The full set of proceedings also includes volumes on Challenges in Mechanics of Time -Dependent Materials and Processes in Conventional and Multifunctional Materials, Imaging Methods for Novel Materials and Challenging Applications, Experimental and Applied Mechanics, 2nd International Symposium on the Mechanics of Biological Systems and Materials 13th International Symposium on MEMS and Nanotechnology and, Composite Materials and the 1st International Symposium on Joining Technologies for Composites.

Of the many books that get published around the world, this is the first that was ever written by a female author on a deadly yet sophisticated sport ‘TAEKWONDO’. ‘TAEKWONDO’ is beyond a sport in itself and more of representation of way of life. Kicks and Punches resemble a great form of ‘Art’ than a mere combat techniques; they are as subtle as a piece of paint work that requires enormous amount of dedication and effort to get it right. This book provides an illustration of some of the amazing techniques from ‘TAEKWONDO’ that are focused on providing self-defense guidance for young girls/women or to anyone who are keen on this subject. ‘Taekwondo – An Olympic Sport’ is dedicated to all those unsung heroes in the sport of ‘TAEKWONDO’ who practiced this ‘Art’ with passion and have been religiously practicing and training young ‘TAEKWONDO’ athletes. It’s also dedicated to those who believe in fitness as a whole.