A quintessential romance of the Old West, complete with rustlers, land grabbers, frustrated lovers, and a hard-riding cowboy hero.

An encounter with a certain man changes a girl who has been tossed by the winds of fate. Lauri, who studies at a ballet school, encounters an unexpected opportunity. She is discovered by Maxim, the general manager at a top ballet company in Venice, who is rumored to be ruthless. Trembling in joy at the opportunity, Lauri moves to Italy despite the scars that remain in her heart after losing her parents in a theater fire. Although her legs freeze up when she gets on stage, she makes every effort to meet Maxim's expectations. One day, she learns that she is a stand-in for another ballerina...

After a disaster destroyed nearly everything Maddie Brooks owned, Trey Walker offered the petite redhead shelter at 2 Hope Ranch. A veterinarian, Maddie was smart, sexy, and good with animals… Impossible to resist, yet Trey is convinced he is cursed when it comes to women. The temporary arrangement Maddie made with Trey was supposed to be strictly business. Easy since Maddie had tried and failed to catch the handsome cowboy’s eye for a year. She thought she was so over him...until he kissed her.

A vivid history of America's biggest, baddest prison system and how it came to lead the nation's punitive revolution In the prison business, all roads lead to Texas. The most locked-down state in the nation has led the way in criminal justice severity, from assembly-line executions to isolation supermaxes, from prison privatization to sentencing juveniles as adults. Texas Tough, a sweeping history of American imprisonment from the days of slavery to the present, shows how a plantation-based penal system once dismissed as barbaric became the national template. Drawing on convict accounts, official records, and interviews with prisoners, guards, and lawmakers, historian Robert Perkinson reveals the Southern roots of our present-day prison colossus. While conventional histories emphasize the North's rehabilitative approach, he shows how the retributive and profit-driven regime of the South ultimately triumphed. Most provocatively, he argues that just as convict leasing and segregation emerged in response to Reconstruction, so today's mass incarceration, with its vast racial disparities, must be seen as a backlash against civil rights. Illuminating for the first time the origins of America's prison juggernaut, Texas Tough points toward a more just and humane future.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST A lyrical and authentic book that recounts the story of a border-town family in Brownsville, Texas in the 1980's, as each member of the family desperately tries to assimilate and escape life on the border to become "real" Americans, even at the expense of their shared family history. This is really un-mined territory in the memoir genre that gives in-depth insight into a previously unexplored corner of America.