Contemporary Family Life

In the small town of Celeste, Texas, Mitzi Taylor has never quite fit inside the lines. Nearly six feet tall, flame-haired, and with a plus-size spirit to match every curve, she’s found her niche: a custom wedding-dress boutique catering to big brides-to-be with big dreams. Taking the plunge alongside her two best friends, she’s proud they’ve turned The Perfect Dress into a perfect success. Just when Mitzi has it all pulled together, Graham Harrison walks back into her life, looking for bridesmaid dresses for his twin daughters.

Pay It Forward, is the moving story of Trevor McKinney, a 12-year-old boy who accepts his social studies teacher’s challenge to come up with a plan to change the world. Trevor’s idea is simple: Do a good deed for three people and ask them to "pay it forward" to three others who need help. He envisions a vast movement of kindness and goodwill spreading beyond his small California town and across the world.

Melissa had clung to the thin thread of hope given by the adoption agency that someday her newborn son might want to connect with her. When his eighteenth birthday arrived, she called the agency to simply update her contact information, not expecting a response.

Mortified after her semester abroad is cut short, Amelia Christiansen returns to Deep Haven, certain she isn't brave enough for the adventures she's dreamed of. The last thing she expects is for the man who broke her heart to cross the Atlantic and beg forgiveness. Heir to a European hotel dynasty, Roark St. John has trekked from one exotic locale to another, haunted by tragedy and the expectations that accompany his last name. Amelia is the first woman to give him a reason to stop running.

After his twin brother died on the night of their senior prom, Jason Parker disappeared from Pilgrim Cove. Nine years later he returns in order to make peace with his family - with Lila Sullivan, the woman he can't forget - and with himself. But nothing and no one is the same as he remembers. Certainly not his family. Not Lila, with her fiance and a child. Not even his old house. Can a wanderer ever find home again? Do second chances really exist?

Keith bears scars - both physical and emotional - from his childhood, but he's worked hard to overcome the past. After walking away from his mother and her controlling ways five years ago, he's built a new life in LA. He's also accumulated a fortune of his own. But as soon as he learns of his mother's death, he returns to Fairham. He feels he owes it to his grandfather to put the family empire together again, and he's determined to find his mother's killer.

Daydreamer Nora has inherited all of her grandmother's worldly belongings. Nora dreads seeing her beloved grandmother's possessions go, but she's determined that item by item, memory by memory, she will find the perfect new owners. When she opens The Memory Shop in the front of her grandmother's house, the community is gradually drawn inside, and Nora begins transforming the lives of those around her through the objects she pairs them with.

Since opening the Rose Harbor Inn, Jo Marie Rose has grown close to her handyman, Mark Taylor. Jo Marie and Mark are good friends - and are becoming something more - yet he still won't reveal anything about his past. When Mark tells her that he's moving out of town, Jo Marie is baffled. Just when she is starting to open herself up again to love, she feels once more that she is losing the man she cares about. And as she discovers the secret behind Mark's decision to leave, she welcomes two visitors also seeking their own answers.

For as long as she can remember, they were Cam and Lilly - happily married, totally in love with each other, parents of a beautiful family, and partners in life. Then, after decades of marriage, it ended as every great love story does...in loss. After Cam's death, Lilly takes a lone road trip to her and Cam's favorite spot on the remote coast of Maine.

The next three decades of Abby Herbert’s life are as carefully planned out as the last three were. Best career ever? Check. Great friends, one of whom she lives with in a stunning Tribeca apartment? Check. Perfect man to share her dream family? Surely just a matter of time. But then she gets devastating news from her doctor - if she wants to get pregnant, she needs to get started on that by...well, yesterday. On the bright side, she has the perfect person in mind to be the father.

Shelley Anderson is trying to provide fun for her two young children when she rents the first floor of Sea View House a year after a painful divorce. The kids haven't been adjusting well, and the house is perfect. Daniel Stone, the man who's renting the top floor of the house, is trying to find his balance after losing his wife. He definitely wants to be left alone. He's less than thrilled by the instant rapport between his beautiful golden retriever and her two active kids. And he's definitely shaken by the rapport that springs up between himself and Shelley.

Sex, love, and forgiveness - can they coexist, and can romance author Sarah write them into her life? Although best-selling author Sarah O’Malley is sure her next erotic-romance novel will be another hit, she finds it near to impossible to replicate the same results in her personal life. At 45 years old, Sarah now finds herself divorced and a single mother of two. Sarah journeys back to her childhood home to nurse her mother who is suffering from Alzheimer's, and she inevitably encounters the ghosts of her past.

Pregnant and still grieving the death of her fiancé, historian Megan Buchanan is forging ahead on a dream project: to restore to its original glory the landmark hunting lodge her own great-great-grandfather built on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. With the help of her fiancé’s caring best friend, it’s sure to draw much-needed tourist revenue to Cape Hudson, a town rich in southern history. However, it’s Spring House, the caretaker’s cottage on the grounds, that holds the most intriguing history for Megan.

On the anniversary of his beloved wife’s death, Dr. Michael Everett receives a letter Hannah had written him. In it she reminds him of her love and makes one final request. An impossible request. I want you to marry again. She tells him he shouldn’t spend the years he has left grieving her. And to that end she’s chosen three women she asks him to consider. During the months that follow, he spends time with Winter, Leanne, and Macy, learning more about each of them…and about himself.

Cora hasn’t spoken to her best friend, Quinn, in a year. Despite living next door to each other, they exist in separate worlds of grief. Cora is still grappling with the death of her beloved sister in a school shooting, and Quinn is carrying the guilt of what her brother did. On the day of Cora’s 12th birthday, Quinn leaves a box on her doorstep with a note. She has decided that the only way to fix things is to go back in time to the moment before her brother changed all their lives forever - and stop him.

When Toots Loudenberry relocated to Los Angeles to be near her daughter, Abby, she expected to bump into the occasional celebrity. She just never expected them to be dead. Meanwhile, Toots, Sophie, and Mavis are concerned that the prestigious Dr. Sameer’s budding romance with Ida may have something to do with his ailing bank balance. And Abby’s attempted makeover of the celebrity magazine The Informer into the most talked-about tabloid in town could end more than just her career.

Paige Watts is the ultimate stage mother. The daughter of Hollywood royalty, Paige channels her own acting dreams into making her daughter, Emma, a star. By the age of nine, Emma is playing a central role in a hit TV show. Then everything is shattered by unforeseeable tragedy. Once famous, outgoing, and charismatic, Emma is now a shadow of her former self - without speech, without memory, lost and terrified. But with her Aunt Whitney’s help, along with a team of caregivers and doctors, Emma begins to find her way, starting her young life all over again.

With a little determination and a lot of charm, Rosa Capoletti took a run-down pizza joint and turned it into an award-winning restaurant, voted the “best place to propose” three years in a row. For Rosa, though, there has been no real romance since her teenaged love affair with Alexander Montgomery ended without explanation a decade ago. But guess who’s just come back to town? Reunited at the beach house where they first fell in love, Rosa and Alexander discover that the secrets of the past are not what they seem.

Your best friend deserves the truth. But it will ruin her life. What would you do? It’s been over twenty years since four very different teenage girls sat on that beach at Goran Haven, and swore to be best friends forever. Their lives went different ways after Emily left. But each remembered that promise. And none truly found friendship like it again. Now, Emily’s back, with a secret she can’t face. She tries to hide away, take time to heal and make some difficult choices, but she runs into one of her old friends, and soon the four are reunited.

Elsie Lavender and Homer Hickam (the father of the author) were high school classmates in the West Virginia coalfields, graduating just as the Great Depression began. When Homer asked for her hand, Elsie instead headed to Orlando, where she sparked with a dancing actor named Buddy Ebsen (yes, that Buddy Ebsen). But when Buddy headed for New York, Elsie's dreams of a life with him were crushed, and eventually she found herself back in the coalfields, married to Homer.