A guarded king will be unraveled in this royal romance by USA TODAY bestselling author Caitlin Crews! His Majesty requires an untouched bride… But can duty ever become love? Virginal Helene Archibald knows she’s destined for an arranged marriage. So, when her father declares she’ll be given to a king in a loveless union, she accepts it as fate. But Helene is unprepared for King Gianluca San Felice, and the wildfire that awakens at the sight of him! She is undone by the craving that consumes them on their wedding night. But outside the royal bedchamber, Gianluca remains ice-cold—dare Helene believe their chemistry is enough to bring this powerful ruler to his knees? From Harlequin Presents: Escape to exotic locations where passion knows no bounds.

A Christy Award-winning novel chronicling the forbidden romance between Martin Luther and his wife, Katharina von Bora, set against the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. She was a nun of noble birth. He was a heretic, a reformer, and an outlaw of the Holy Roman Empire. In the 16th century, nun Katharina von Bora’s fate fell no further than the Abbey. Until she read the writings of Martin Luther. His sweeping Catholic church reformation—condemning a cloistered life and promoting the goodness of marriage—awakened her desire for everything she’d been forbidden. Including Martin Luther himself. Despite the fact that the attraction and tension between them is undeniable, Luther holds fast to his convictions and remains isolated, refusing to risk anyone’s life but his own. And Katharina longs for love, but is strong-willed. She clings proudly to her class distinction, pining for nobility over the heart of a reformer. They couldn’t be more different. But as the world comes tumbling down around them, and with Luther’s threatened life a constant strain, these unlikely allies forge an unexpected bond of understanding, support and love. Together, they will alter the religious landscape forever. - Christy Award: Historical Romance Fiction Winner

The Welsh Marches, 1460 In the eerie depths of Llanwardine Priory, Elizabeth de Lacy is about to take the veil when she is told she must wed her family's sworn enemy! Lord Richard Malinder must produce an heir, and a union with the de Lacy family could prove advantageous—if only to keep his enemies close…. The heat of anticipation rises as they make their way to the bridal chamber….

This enlightening narrative takes a look at the wedding night—its origins, history, customs, cultural expressions, and fictional representations through the ages. Though just outside of public view, the wedding night is loaded with expectation and consequence. The Wedding Night: A Popular History is an entertaining, accessible, touching, and humorous volume that looks at the previously unexplored topic of wedding history "between the sheets." Covering a kaleidoscopic array of cultural expressions, this unique study zooms in on what's quintessential and shares insights into the history of intimacy through the ages. The book traces the formalization of the wedding night in the ancient Near East and classical world, provides many examples of historically significant unions in European and American history, and describes the lively variety of traditions leading up to the present. Spicing their narrative with many piquant quotes from contemporary sources, the authors explore the rich cultural context for the wedding night—processions, royal rituals, apparel, food-related traditions, and pranks—throughout Europe and America in the 19th and 20th centuries. Separate chapters examine sex guides, jokes, and the bed as a special conjugal space.

Many cultures have myths about self-imitation, stories about people who pretend to be someone else pretending to be them, in effect masquerading as themselves. This great theme, in literature and in life, tells us that people put on masks to discover who they really are under the masks they usually wear, so that the mask reveals rather than conceals the self beneath the self. In this book, noted scholar of Hinduism and mythology Wendy Doniger offers a cross-cultural exploration of the theme of self-impersonation, whose widespread occurrence argues for both its literary power and its human value. The stories she considers range from ancient Indian literature through medieval European courtly literature and Shakespeare to Hollywood and Bollywood. They illuminate a basic human way of negotiating reality, illusion, identity, and authenticity, not to mention memory, amnesia, and the process of aging. Many of them involve marriage and adultery, for tales of sexual betrayal cut to the heart of the crisis of identity. These stories are extreme examples of what we common folk do, unconsciously, every day. Few of us actually put on masks that replicate our faces, but it is not uncommon for us to become travesties of ourselves, particularly as we age and change. We often slip carelessly across the permeable boundary between the un-self-conscious self-indulgence of our most idiosyncratic mannerisms and the conscious attempt to give the people who know us, personally or publicly, the version of ourselves that they expect. Myths of self-imitation open up for us the possibility of multiple selves and the infinite regress of self-discovery. Drawing on a dizzying array of tales-some fact, some fiction-The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was is a fascinating and learned trip through centuries of culture, guided by a scholar of incomparable wit and erudition.

Revenge has never been so sweet as in this Kings of California novel by USA TODAY bestselling author Maureen Child... She married him. Used him. Then left him. Rico King has waited five years for revenge. Now he's got Teresa Coretti where he wants her. To save her family, she'll return to Rico's island...and his bed...for one month. That will cure the hunger that's afflicted him since she left.... But Rico can't know what it cost Teresa to leave him. Nor the exquisite torture of being with him again. Because soon, her divided loyalties could once again cost her the love of her life.