Showing results by narrator "Erik Bloomquist" in All Categories

One night with a Bratva king sealed my fate. Now I'm carrying his baby . . . and I'm the target of a bloody war. I had my life mapped out—Graduate school. Teach physics. Live quietly. No mafia. No danger. No drama. But everything changed the moment I found a birth certificate I was never meant to see. When I agreed to be a surrogate, I thought I was helping friends. Instead, I stepped into a trap. Now I'm caught between two warring Bratva empires—And chained to the most dangerous man in Vegas.

After a chance meeting aboard the ocean liner Paris in 1924, Harvard University scholar and activist F. O. Matthiessen and artist Russell Cheney fell in love and remained inseparable until Cheney's death in 1945. During the intervening years, the men traveled throughout Europe and the United States, achieving great professional success while contending with serious personal challenges, including addiction, chronic disease, and severe depression.

Thirteen-year-old Benjamin is pulled from his old life and forced to attend a special boarding school in the middle of nowhere. That's confusing enough. Then, he's fed instructions through an earbud and thrown into etiquette classes alongside an angry, spike-covered creature. Despite wearing purple dresses and having the unassuming name of Eve, the creature is horrifying and, as Eve quickly demonstrates, dangerous. With the help of his new friends Lorena and Persephone, Ben must overcome his own anxieties and uncover the truth about Eve's origin.

Get ready for a collection of thirteen short stories that will chill your bones, tingle your spine, and scare your pants off. Debut author Josh Allen masterfully concocts horror in the most innocent places, like R. L. Stine meets a modern Edgar Allan Poe. A stray kitten turns into a threatening follower. The street sign down the block starts taunting you. Even your own shadow is out to get you! Spooky things love hiding in plain sight. The everyday world is full of sinister secrets, and these stories show that there's darkness even where you least expect it.

In 2010—long before the release of Lemonade—Professor Kevin Allred created the university course "Politicizing Beyonce" to both wide acclaim and controversy. He outlines his pedagogical philosophy in Ain't I a Diva?, exploring the process of teaching Beyonce and what it means to use a superstar to blow up the canon. Allred brings his syllabus to life by pairing music videos and songs with historical and academic texts, and combines analysis with classroom anecdotes.

In The Great Lockdown: Lessons Learned During the Pandemic from Organizations Around the Globe, expert strategists Shivaji Das, Aroop Zutshi, and Janesh Janardhanan deliver an insightful exploration of this once-in-a-lifetime event to unearth invaluable learnings for the future. Told through the experiences of CXOs at billion-dollar companies, star start-ups, and nonprofits from around the world, the book chronicles the ups and downs of sophisticated organizations as they navigated the COVID-19 crisis through initiatives impacting people, processes, and technology.

Drawing on years of investigative reporting, Wyatt Williams offers a powerful look at why we kill and eat animals. In order to understand why we eat meat, the restaurant critic and journalist investigated factory farms, learned to hunt game, worked on a slaughterhouse kill floor, and partook in Indigenous traditions of whale eating in Alaska. In Springer Mountain, he tells about his experiences while charting the history of meat eating and vegetarianism.

This book is the definitive guide for leaders of high-growth organizations seeking to understand and execute the people-management principles that are essential to continued success. Andrew Bartlow and T. Brad Harris offer a practical toolkit that founders, functional leaders, and managers of people can use to rethink their practices to meet their organizations' needs.

Casey doesn't have much luck in the dating department, so when her girlfriends ditch their girls only weekend for a couple's retreat, she's forced to take desperate measures. Refusing to be the only single one, she does what any quick-thinking girl would do: She lies. It was almost too easy hiring a stranger to pretend to be her hot, rich, successful boyfriend. What she didn't plan on was him being hot, successful, and way too much trouble for her liking.

Marius Winter doesn't walk the road of the shaman-warrior alone. He has powerful allies in the Other Realms and in ordinary reality. His spirit guides are a Lakota war-chief and medicine man, First in Front; Tigre, a powerful feminine spirit who appears as a white tiger; and Burt, a spirit raven who channels an old Jewish bookie from the Bronx. Now, Marius is targeted by a powerful sorcerer. In the battle for the souls of his friends and lover, he must storm the gates of the underworld and fight through the Seven Demi-Demons of Hell to the deepest dungeons to confront Belial himself.

Time is the ultimate scarce resource and thus quintessentially a topic for economics, which studies scarcity. Starting with the observation that time is increasingly valuable given competing demands as we have more things we can buy and do, Spending Time provides engaging insights into how people use their time and what determines their decisions about spending their time.

Mind Tools for Managers helps new and experienced leaders develop the skills they need to be more effective in everything they do. It brings together the 100 most important leadership skills - as voted for by 15,000 managers and professionals worldwide - into a single volume, providing an easy-access solutions manual for people wanting to be the best manager they can be. Each chapter details a related group of skills, plus the tools you need to put ideas into practice.

It started as a stupid, desperate plan. Fake the baby bump. Claim my sister's secret love child as mine. Lie to everyone, including the most dangerous man in Vegas. Then my sister disappeared. Her forbidden lover and his wife got blown to bits in a car bomb. And I bankrupted myself trying to find her. That's when he found me.

I expected to wake up tangled in my husband's arms. His wicked hands dragging me back into bliss. Instead, I'm barefoot on a freezing cot and I'm dressed like a trauma surgeon who lost her shoes. This sucks and I'm scared. The cotton sheets and silk robes are gone, replaced by chains, shadows, and a cast-iron door. At first, I thought it was Radomir. That two-timing bastard must have found out I was going to leave him. But the truth is far worse. I've been kidnapped. Not by just anyone—but by the monster from my nightmares. He wants what's locked inside my mind.

At twenty-one, I had been prepared to give up my dream of touring with a rock band to become a father after getting my ex-girlfriend pregnant. But when she told me she'd gotten an abortion, I was devastated. Now five years later, I bump into her little sister, who I haven't seen since high school, while she's grocery shopping with four-year-old Logan. Sparks flare between Callie and me that didn't exist before. But soon I grow suspicious when I realize her deaf "son" is the same age as my own child would have been.

When my best friend, who's away on a mission, asks me to find out why his sister isn't answering her phone, there's no way I can say no. He once saved my life from an attempted suicide. Turns out, Nicole had been too busy with work to replace her phone after it broke. With my band, Pushing Limits, taking a few days off from their biggest tour yet, my helping Nicole around the house seems like the perfect way to spend the break. What I didn't expect was for the chemistry between us to be explosive.

Chef Charlee has spent a lifetime trying to outrun her difficult past. A head chef job in a small town might be the start of something new—but she never expected the boss to be more sizzling hot than anything she's ever cooked! But keeping her mind on the job is the only choice. If only she would stop imagining the kitchen counter as a great place for a steamy rendezvous . . . (No! You prepare food on that! Stop thinking that way! But he's so handsome . . . !)

Devon Atwood presents Book 3 in the Kiss-Met series.