Lynne

I was drunk-dialing my ex the night I met him. Six-three, sexy as sin, and so incredibly rude I could smack the asshole smirk right off his face. Long story short, we got off to a bad start. But when the tabloids interpret our sparring as Drew Maddox "groveling" with a "mystery brunette", his agent presents us both a proposal: shacking up as a couple this summer. It's an alleged "win-win". I need to prove to my ex that I'm fine. Drew needs to prove to his team that he's stable.

Sarah Calhoun is bound and determined to restore honor to the family name the only way she knows how - make her late father's newspaper, the Burr Chronicle, the most successful in the Wyoming Territory. Haunted by past scandal, she knows one misstep, one misunderstanding, could bring disgrace back down on her head. Yet that doesn't stop her from running an article about the insulting Jack Donovan. Jack finally has the house in the kind of town he's always dreamed about. Now all that's missing is a wife.

Olivia Bennett is on the tenure track at Cornell University, the resident expert on Southern women writers. After moving to upstate New York from Atlanta, she falls in love with and purchases an old, run-down farmhouse. The only catch: she knows nothing about renovating a house, taking care of land, or snow. Joss Bauer is a New York native who grew up in her family's construction business. She has a soft spot for old houses, but no patience for overpaid debutantes who want to play at country living.

Jill Fryman (Friday to her friends) is a line supervisor at a truck manufacturing plant in a small southern Indiana town. Life on the assembly line is almost as predictable as her love life. When it comes to matters of the heart, Friday always seems to be making the wrong choices. Things go from bad to worse when El, a sultry labor organizer from the UAW, sweeps into town to unionize the plant right after it's been bought out by a Japanese firm.

Andrea Blake's life has order. Everything is meticulously laid out and planned, from her house in its quiet neighborhood to her career path at Hagan's, the largest supermarket chain in the Northeast. Andrea knows what she wants. Enter Kendall Foster, the distractingly attractive woman in charge of sales for her family's local microbrewery and somebody who wants very much to get her beer onto Hagan's shelves.

Jenna McGovern has spent her whole life training for the stage. She's taken dance classes, voice lessons, and even earned her performance degree from one of the most prestigious musical theater programs in the nation. At graduation, she's stunned when a chance audition lands her a prime supporting role in the hottest Broadway touring production in the country. In more exciting news, Jenna discovers acclaimed television star Adrienne Kenyon is headlining the production.

When I left for college, I put 1,000 miles between my future and my past. I'd made a choice - I was going to cross back to the other side, to live with the living. I just didn't know how. And then I met Nate Preeter. An All-American baseball player, Nate wasn't supposed to notice a ghost-of-a-girl like me. But he did. He shouldn't want to know my name. But he did. And when he learned my secret and saw the scars it left behind, he was supposed to run. But he didn't.

Set in small town Mississippi in the late 1950s, Mother of Pearl is populated by wonderfully rich and original characters with themes of identity and the true meaning of family interwoven throughout. The story revolves around 28-year-old Even Grade, a black man who grew up an orphan, and Valuable Komer, a 15-year-old white girl who is the daughter of the town whore and an unknown father.

When recently widowed Maggie McElroy is called to China to settle a claim against her late husbands estate, she is blindsided by the discovery that he may have led a double life. Since work is all that will keep her sane, her magazine editor assigns her to profile Sam, a half-Chinese American who is the last in a line of gifted chefs tracing back to the imperial palace. As she watches Sam gear up for Chinas Olympic culinary competition by planning the banquet of a lifetime, she begins to see past the cuisines artistry to glimpse its coherent expression of Chinese civilization.