na

I have no life there if you're not in it. You're part of everything good I've ever done, Ryen. Please.

I bite my bottom lip, trying not to cry. I never cry in front of them.

I'm going to hell. I'm pretty sure she's going to drag me there herself.

Sometimes it's easy to get caught up in life and take things for granted.

It's easy to forget that life is the greatest gift of all

My lover is dead.And they think I killed him.I'm running rogue. Hell bent on both revenge and redemption. Whatever it takes, I'm going to finish a job that began nine months ago. An unauthorized assignment that turned horribly, devastatingly wrong. My miscalculation. My fault. My heart left shattered into incomplete pieces which will never wholly fit back together again.But first I have to outsmart my former organization and the hired killer they've sent after me; a ghost from my past who knows my every move, who__ been inside my head, my heart, my dreams and memories: Jaxson.I'm the traitor, Kylie. The rogue mercenary, Jaxon's newest assignment. And this is our love story.

You can__ get the blood out.

I'm not sure I'll ever know the meaning of life or what comes for us after death, but I know it's more than the hysteria people make it out to be. It's about freeing your soul when no one else can; turning thirty and still feeling like you're seventeen. It's about taking chances on a whim, embracing the rain during the storm, and smiling so damn much that you start to cry. It's never regretting, never forgetting, and always being.It's kissing underwater and touching in the dark. Loving even when you think it's emotionally impossible and surviving someway and somehow. It's about living life with a full heart and an overflowing glass.I live life on the edge. I dream, I care, and I belong.I know there's a here and now.I know that I want it.

Leo leaned forward and met her soft lips. Their first underwater kiss created bubbles that floated lazily to the surface. Audrey ran her fingers through his coarse hair, and they lingered until his lungs were bursting.

I'm going to be honest with you. I don't want to sit here all night making small talk when all I want to do is kiss you.

Like most people who decide to get sober, I was brought to Alcoholics Anonymous. While AA certainly works for others, its core propositions felt irreconcilable with my own experiences. I couldn't, for example, rectify the assertion that "alcoholism is a disease" with the facts of my own life.The idea that by simply attending an AA meeting, without any consultation, one is expected to take on a blanket diagnosis of "diseased addict" was to me, at best, patronizing. At worst, irresponsible. Irresponsible because it doesn't encourage people to turn toward and heal the actual underlying causes of their abuse of substances.I drank for thirteen years for REALLY good reasons. Among them were unprocessed grief, parental abandonment, isolation, violent trauma, anxiety and panic, social oppression, a general lack of safety, deep existential discord, and a tremendous diet and lifestyle imbalance. None of which constitute a disease, and all of which manifest as profound internal, mental, emotional and physical discomfort, which I sought to escape by taking external substances.It is only through one's own efforts to turn toward life on its own terms and to develop a wiser relationship to what's there through mindfulness and compassion that make freedom from addictive patterns possible. My sobriety has been sustained by facing life, processing grief, healing family relationships, accepting radically the fact of social oppression, working with my abandonment conditioning, coming into community, renegotiating trauma, making drastic diet and lifestyle changes, forgiving, and practicing mindfulness, to name just a few. Through these things, I began to relieve the very real pressure that compulsive behaviors are an attempt to resolve.

My god, they're everywhere.

You are sitting in my chair, my lord." She said the words very civilly, she thought. Although he quirked a brow and lowered his chin as if giving her one of those looks. Like really? In a way that wasn't a question. She was telling a fae king, a hawk fae king, and a guest of the dark fae, that he should be sitting in her seat? But she didn't stop there. "You may sit there if it pleases you." She pointed to Micala's seat since he was not at the meal. Her mother's mouth gaped and for once she didn't have an immediate rebuke ready for Ritasia. The king gave Ritasia such a sinister smile, she was afraid she might have gone a little too far with her first encounter with him. She quickly remembered her manners, curtseyed, though, because she wasn't wearing a gown, she thought she looked a little ridiculous, then looked back up at him.

I'm not that good of an actor to fake something like that.

King Tiernan scowled at the mess his father had gotten him into...all because the heartless man had to die. Hawk fae kings were to immediately marry as soon as they were seated on the throne and a suitable bride could be found...Legend had it that the queen always met an early death - ordered by the king himself, although it was said that a secret order of assassins was given the task. Why? Because two sons or a son and a daughter could fight over ruling the kingdom. Civil war could ensue. So best to ensure the queen only had one offspring. And then, she no longer was needed.

She is beautiful, soft hair nearly midnight in color, large eyes nearly as dark, and ivory skin like the petals of the lily, and she wore a fragrance of jasmine. But 'tis her willfulness that I enjoyed the most. And her resourcefulness.

Two Dutch, two Americans, one German and one Australian. And yet, as the rocket began to quake beneath us, my mind focused on a man in Antarctica. I thought about Sam "Snowbow" Archambeau waiting for the September sunrise to reach the South Pole. I smiled recalling him getting a haircut in a lawn chair next to the frozen barbershop pole." -- Nikki in the upcoming novel, "Nikki White: Polar Extremes" (Nikki, #3)

Be happy. Be free. You have a universe inside you.