How Long Does It Take To Read Elbert Hubbard Speaks?

Natalie Hale spent five years loving a man who never learned to look at her. When Ethan Cole's first love returns and he asks for a divorce, Natalie doesn't beg. She doesn't break. She asks for one month, thirty days for him to fulfill every promise he made and never kept. A candlelit dinner, a drive-in movie, an amusement park in autumn, Small things. The things that were supposed to mean us. He agrees, then he cancels and then he lies. Then she waits alone, again and again, learning in real time what she already knew in her bones, she was never his priority. But something shifts during that month. He begins to see her: her beauty, her grace, the way a room moves when she enters it. Too late, too slow, and far too little. On the thirtieth day, Natalie signs the papers, leaves a cup of coffee on the counter made exactly to his taste, and walks out the door. Three years later, she walks back in not to him, but into the same room. Radiant, accomplished and accompanied by a man who has never once made her wait. And Ethan Cole finally understands the difference between losing someone and letting them go. He let her go. She lost nothing.

After Pierce Emery and I got back together, I started "renting him out." Every time his old flame, Daphne Roach, called him away, I stopped crying and causing scenes like before. I charged by the hour instead. Ten grand an hour during the day. Twenty at night. Triple on holidays. Three months later, my account was up almost two million dollars. Pierce had promised to help me pick a dress for a banquet, but Daphne called him crying, saying she'd sliced her hand while cooking. I didn't even look up. I just held out my phone with the payment screen open. One night, I came down with a brutal fever. While Pierce was driving me to the hospital, his phone rang again. Daphne. He stared at the screen for a long second before answering. Her voice came through shaky and tearful. "Pierce, the thunder's so loud. I can't sleep. Can you come stay with me?" I quietly pulled out an umbrella and told him to let me out at the next intersection. He looked at me like he wanted to explain something, but I just smiled. "Don't forget to transfer the money." The same thing happened again on the day our daughter went in for her routine checkup. Except this time, she was the one asking him for money.

“Sign the divorce papers, Nicholas,” Eleanor said quietly. “I’m done begging to be loved.” Eleanor spent fourteen days in the hospital with three broken ribs, a dislocated shoulder, and bruises covering her body. Yet not a single person came to see her—not the family she gave her all to fit into, and certainly not her billionaire husband of two years, Nicholas Beaumont. For the first time in her life, Eleanor chose herself. She cut ties with the family that had never wanted her and walked away from a loveless marriage she had spent years trying to save. Nicholas had never looked back when she was by his side. But the moment she was gone, he realized that losing Eleanor Beaumont might be the biggest mistake of his life.

Forced to return to the past and then venture back into the realms of the dark lord to save her friend, Esmerelda faces loss, love, and a new awakening in this final installment of the Esmerelda Sleuth Series. Filled with excitement, love, loss, time travel, family dynamics, dimension hopping, and a few vampires, this is the completion of a story that you won't want to miss.

Meet Esmerelda Sleuth. Sleuth is her name and investigating is her game. (Paranormal Investigating, that is.) Esmerelda makes a good living as an investigator in a rather progressive firm. She lives a stable and sensible life until she meets Lance; an old money "hottie" who works for a real estate firm next to her building. After accepting an invitation for a weekend getaway party, she quickly discovers that Lance has a secret. He is wealthy. That part is true. And, yes, he's procured a job as a realtor in the building next door. His secret is that he belongs to an underground society of humans who didn't abandon their connection to magic centuries ago when religion declared it evil and he has traveled through time specifically to find her and bring her back to his time to marry him. If that isn't enough of a far fetched tale to absorb, he informs her that she was born in his time to a family belonging to that same secret society and was promised in marriage to him as an infant. When enemies who didn't want to see the union of families take place made attempts on her life, her parents sent her into the future and erased her memories of them as a precaution. Possessing virtually no belief in magic, ghosts, psychics, time travel, etc., it takes some doing on Lance's part to convince her to believe his story and go back with him. When she does, the lies, deceit and attempts on her life start all over again. Will she escape emotionally and physically unscathed? "The Other Side Of the Mirror" is a steamy-paranormal-romance- mystery-thriller and book one of the Esmerelda Sleuth series.

I have a severe case of logorrhea. Only speaking makes me feel alive. My classmates all call me a freak, but Marvin Britt is the only one willing to listen to me. One day, I bring some homemade soup over to see him, only to catch him holding his junior's hand. "Lexie, your voice is so lovely, unlike my wife at home. She sounds like a squawking duck. It's exhausting." My hands shake so violently that I drop the thermal flask. The commotion angers a nearby madman, who forces a bottle of boiling water down my throat. With my mouth full of blood and blisters, I realize I need proof. I send Marvin—a lawyer—a frantic voice note to accompany me to the police station for evidence. Marvin shoots back a single word—"Noted". Of course. He doesn't even listen to it, as usual. He used to reply to everything I said with voice notes at least a minute long. But we hit the seven-year itch, and he's sick of my endless talking. Leaving the hospital, I stare at my diagnosis of permanent mutism and laugh bitterly. He must be thrilled. His world is finally quiet.