Showing results by narrator "Cris Dukehart" in All Categories

It's Atlanta's senior year of high school, and she is officially infamous. Not only has she saved herself from a predator, brought down an untouchable dogfighting ring, and battled a pack of high school bullies, but she's also proclaimed to the Internet her willingness to fight for anyone who needs help. And Atlanta can't believe what's coming out of the woodwork. From an old friend to a troop of troubled girls with connections to a local fracking company, there's definitely fire in the water.

Between her service in the U.S. Army and her new life living with supernaturals in Alaska, Melena Sanders has had her loyalty and duty tested in every possible way. Or so she thought. Tensions among supernatural factions in Fairbanks are growing after the city's recent attacks, and she must pick a side. Her nephilim lover Lucas needs her help to search for his missing brother - whose disappearance may not be all it seems.

While most 17-year-old American girls would refuse to let their parents marry them off to a stranger, Robyn Mason dreams of the mysterious McKale in Ireland, wondering how he'll look and imagining his Irish accent. Prearranged bindings are common for magical families like her own. However, when she travels to the whimsical Emerald Isle, she discovers that there's more to her betrothal and McKale's clan than she'd been led to believe. What starts as an obligatory pairing between Robyn and McKale morphs over time into something they both need.

A year ago, Aimee Spencer's world imploded, and she has been running ever since. She doesn't want to feel. She doesn't want to remember. To bury the ghosts that haunt her, she is living a life that has become unrecognizable. Cole Everly has grown accustomed to girls throwing themselves at his feet, but when Aimee trips and literally lands in his lap one afternoon, she's not at all what he expects - difficult, damaged, and closed-off. If Cole needed to make a list of qualities to avoid in a girl, Aimee would probably match up with every single one of them.

Alisanos, the deepwood, is more than just a forest...it is sentient, and predatory. Home to demons and worse, its mercurial boundaries can suddenly shift miles in any direction to encompass previously safe human lands - and those taken by the deepwood are forever changed. Audrun, a human woman trapped within the forest, is reunited with her four children, only to learn that each has been marked by the deepwood’s wild magic. And her newly born fifth child, captured by a winged demon, is still missing.

After nearly a year and a half of grieving the loss of her husband, 27-year-old Alexa Sullivan Tate is headed back to her hometown after a decade of being away. She has no idea her high school crush, Jace McAllister, the guy who stole her heart the same night that he broke it, is more than ready to pick up the pieces.

Christmas is a hot button for Kimberly Perez, and not in a good way. Having grown up in the foster system, she's as frugal as she is smart and can't abide the materialism of the holidays. In an effort to use precious funds to help children in need instead of wasting money on meaningless commercialism, she pitches a new city ordinance to Red River's town council that would cut all holiday decorations and festivities from the budget.

Raised by her older sister in the small town of Blueberry Springs, all Beth Wilkinson wants is to create a family so big she’ll never be alone. Things are going great until her fiancé, Oz, rethinks everything from his own career to their nuptial plans—forcing Beth to do the same. As Beth works to rediscover herself in hopes of reattracting Oz, she catches the eye of the charming new city doctor, Nash. Not only does he see her as she’d like to be seen, but he knows exactly what he wants from life—and that includes Beth.

It's in His Forever: Flight medic Langston Brooks has built a good life for himself in his hometown of Red River. His secret lover for the past decade isn't a forever kind of girl. Not with a tarnished reputation over something she didn't do, and it's still following her. It's in His Song: Hailey Hicks left Red River six years ago with a secret. When she comes face to face with her ex, Dylan McCoy, sparks fly. Can they mend the damage done because of how they parted ways? Or will her secret cause them both to get burned again?

Skye Sebring is a hospitality greeter inside the pearly gates of an unorthodox Heaven, where carefree and lusty angels get tipsy in the Live a Little Lounge, practice cloud art, and are guided by a brassy female deity who sounds and looks like Bette Midler. During the course of her duties, Skye meets lawyer Ryan Blaine, who has a brush with death due to a motorcycle accident. It's not Ryan's time to die yet, so he returns back to Earth, but Skye can't get him out of her mind. Why does Ryan seem so familiar to her, and why does she feel an unexplainable attraction to him?

A new world is emerging years after war destroyed society. In a Minnesota lake, the last surviving loons await the one who can help heal the earth. Each year a human sacrifice is brought to them to be endowed with special gifts, but they come at a terrible price. Even as the rest of the world rebuilds, Grace Kriske's life is shattered. Unable to walk, Grace's only solace is her lover, David Tvedt, a trader who wants to take her away with him - if she'd let him.

This Christmas tale set in colonial New England was originally published in the 1895 collection A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others. The short story takes place in a fictionalized version of Litchfield, Connecticut, the town where Stowe grew up, which is also the setting of her novel Poganuc People: Their Loves and Lives. This version of "Christmas in Poganuc" was recorded as part of Dreamscape's Classic Christmas Stories: A Collection of Timeless Holiday Tales.

Almost a year ago, Delia Caswell’s husband died suddenly. That same night, she gave birth to a baby girl. Grieving her husband and battling postpartum depression, her life unravels one day at a time. But fate is not done with her yet...Just as she pulls herself together and learns to be a good mom to her daughter, she walks into the nursery to find her baby gone, snatched from her crib in broad daylight. Her daughter's kidnapping sets in motion a chain of events that turn her world upside down all over again.

In Suzanne Palmieri's thrilling novel The Witch of Belladonna Bay, Bronwyn is forced to return home to Magnolia Creek, Alabama - a place she hasn't been since her mother, Naomi, died 14 years earlier - and the troubled family she left behind. With her brother Patrick behind bars for the murder of her childhood friend and her eccentric father, Jackson, at wit's end with her 11-year-old niece, Byrd, Bronwyn finds herself back at her childhood home, the Big House, and surrounded by ancient Magnolia trees dripping with Spanish moss.

Audrun, Davyn, and their four children have fled their war-scourged homeland, joining a karavan headed toward a haven of peace where diviners have said their fifth child - the one Audrun now carries - must be born. But now, desperate to reach safety before the child comes, they have chosen to break off from the karavan and take a dangerous route too near the sentient hell called Alisanos.

Cat in an Alien X-Ray takes the Las Vegas gang on a science-fictional roller-coaster ride, as Midnight Louie, feline PI, and company encounter UFO enthusiasts, conspiracy nuts who are too bizarre even for tin foil hat therapy. An Area 51 attraction on the Strip threatens to bring more than starry-eyed enthusiasts to town. Once again it is up to that furballed PI Midnight Louie to keep his crew in line and save them from the attack of the creatures from the beyond...or common criminals that prey on the innocent.

Aaron thinks genre fiction is an affront to the fiction-writing craft. He often quotes the essayist Arthur Krystal, who says literary fiction "melts the frozen sea inside of us". Ironically Aaron doesn't seem to realize that he's emotionally frozen. The vivacious Laurie, lover of flamingo-patterned attire and all things hot pink, is the one person who might be capable of melting him.

Daphne Mayfield sought a moment of quiet in a park - a break from city life, a tense relationship, and chronic overwork - but then an elderly woman makes a desperate plea. Daphne is reluctant to get involved when she's not sure what's happening, but she wants to help the stranger. Is the rambling old lady the victim of a crime or a victim of dementia?

In 11 beautifully wrought stories - ranging from occupied Czechoslovakia to California's Central Valley to the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest - Mark Slouka explores moments in life when our backs are to the wall. Alternately harrowing and redemptive, these are stories of ordinary men and women, doing everything possible to tighten their grip on life.

The interwoven tales of three women unfold in the voices of Sarah, Miriam, and Beth, whose unshakable friendship takes root in a Buffalo college dorm in the late 1960s. Fueled by the optimism and bravado of that era, they charge into adulthood with high expectations and lofty ideas. They were, as Beth would later observe, the first generation of women to feel entitled to interesting lives. At times, they find themselves living long distances from each other as each of them seeks new directions and new locales. Nonetheless, they remain deeply connected in the decades after college.