I loved a man and I thought he loved me. So, his cheating-ass ways were a big surprise to me. Even more shocking, was who he risked it all for... somebody I never had a reason to believe, was a whore. But I blame me... Because I'm usually better about who's in my space, knowing that those in relationships, sometimes wear more than a single face. They wanted to tap dance on someone's heart. They probably should've thought long and hard about that part. So now because of what was done... it's only fair that I have me some fun. I guess now they need to be shown the error of their ways. To the point that they're asking to see better days. Cue the deep sigh... Now, in the middle of my storm, something new fell in my path. Something beautiful, something amazing... he came with a taste of something I've never had. There's absolutely no rushing, to the beat of love, present in my view... But once my mission is complete, who knows what my heart will want to do? The only disclaimer I'll offer is this... "You'll either love me or hate me by the end of this tale, but I operated off of one goal, only ... that was to prevail." Signed, Nova Skai Levine ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ - ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ - ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ SMALL SAMPLE: "Was that your first kill? I'm intrigued. I haven't seen you so much as break a sweat with any of this shit-unless, you did it in private-which I doubt. How does that happen?" "You strike me as the type that already knows the answer to that. Besides, even if I could answer it, I'm sure it's different for everybody." "Right. But I'm not interested in everybody. I'm interested in-" I turned to him. "Mr. Davis, have you ever been hurt so badly that your heart feels like it's going to burst out your chest? Have you ever been so filled with anger that you feel a thick layer of heat eclipse your entire form-head to toe? Maybe you have. Maybe you haven't. In my case, when it happens, I become another person. That person shows up... she's different. Remorseless, vengeful. Just like the perpetrators come and disrupt my life with no remorse, I come to theirs with the exact same energy." "Hmm..." he said in a voice softer than the one he usually spoke with. "I guess it's a lot safer on the softer side of you." He shrugged and held his gaze on me. I thought I saw a little bit of empathy there. "At the end of the day," he continued, "their loss was my gain." He started to laugh and something in me swelled. Why was laughter even a part of that moment? I felt mocked, played. It showed me in living color that he felt like the powerful one. Him being in power was already a pre-existing issue for me. And yes, he did have the upper hand. But laughing about it wasn't something that sat right with me. "I'm glad you find all of this funny." "And you don't?" "Actually, I don't. I don't think it's funny at all." "You've got heart. And not just heart; you got the balls of a man." "Like every one of y'all have balls. Tuh. That's debatable." "Whoa. Ouch." He reached for the door, finally ready to fetch a carrier for the money. "And on that note. I'll be right-"

A history of America’s Stand Your Ground gun laws, from Reconstruction to Trayvon Martin After a young, white gunman killed twenty-six people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, conservative legislators lamented that the tragedy could have been avoided if the schoolteachers had been armed and the classrooms equipped with guns. Similar claims were repeated in the aftermath of other recent shootings—after nine were killed in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, and in the aftermath of the massacre in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Despite inevitable questions about gun control, there is a sharp increase in firearm sales in the wake of every mass shooting. Yet, this kind of DIY-security activism predates the contemporary gun rights movement—and even the stand-your-ground self-defense laws adopted in thirty-three states, or the thirteen million civilians currently licensed to carry concealed firearms. As scholar Caroline Light proves, support for “good guys with guns” relies on the entrenched belief that certain “bad guys with guns” threaten us all. Stand Your Ground explores the development of the American right to self-defense and reveals how the original “duty to retreat” from threat was transformed into a selective right to kill. In her rigorous genealogy, Light traces white America’s attachment to racialized, lethal self-defense by unearthing its complex legal and social histories—from the original “castle laws” of the 1600s, which gave white men the right to protect their homes, to the brutal lynching of “criminal” Black bodies during the Jim Crow era and the radicalization of the NRA as it transitioned from a sporting organization to one of our country’s most powerful lobbying forces. In this convincing treatise on the United States’ unprecedented ascension as the world’s foremost stand-your-ground nation, Light exposes a history hidden in plain sight, showing how violent self-defense has been legalized for the most privileged and used as a weapon against the most vulnerable.

New York fashion designer Jamie Nova has chosen the glitz of Las Vegas as the setting for celebrating her impending divorce. Joined by her two best friends, street-smart Madison Castelli, and Natalie de Barge, an ambitious TV reporter - Jamie plans to make the most of her hard-earned holiday and forget all about her controlling ex. When the threesome encounters Mark Blaine, the fun-loving playboy scion of a real estate billionaire, things start to heat up very quickly. Madison and Natalie receive a frantic midnight phone call telling them Mark is lying in Jamie's bed. And he's dead...

An unprecedented and terrifying bioterrorism plot threatens to kill millions in the midst of a divisive presidential election in this new thriller from the #1 New York Times bestselling Mitch Rapp series.

Love has never been more lethal. Elite operative Domino is no stranger to peril and impossible situations. Trained all her life to be just as comfortable fighting terrorists as mixing with the gala crowd, she is proficient at playing any role necessary to accomplish her objective and believes the cause sanctifies the means. But her latest assignment to investigate journalist Hayley Ward will test more than her skills, ingenuity, and courage, because this time she faces the ultimate dilemma: a choice between loyalty and love. First in the Elite Operatives romantic intrigue series.

Who wanted her dead? Having rescued Cassidy McKnight from kidnappers in South America, Gabe Sinclair thought his job was done. Not that the former Navy SEAL could ever forget the brave, beautiful single mother. But when the danger followed her home, Gabe promised to protect her. Why anyone would want to kill Cassidy was a mystery. Was the motive related to the orphaned toddler Cassidy was raising, a sweet little girl who brought out the father fi gure in maverick Gabe? Or did a newly revealed family secret have killer consequences?

By L A Westfall ISBN: 9781847471246 Published: 2007 Pages: 221 Key Themes: childhood abuse, sexual abuse, depression, recovery Description At the age of just five. Lindsay would plead to the man her parents called God to kill her while she slept. But like so many other prayers it was not her time to be answered. Lindsay suffered a further six more years of physical, mental and sexual abuse from her parents hands. Until at the age of eleven, she was rescued by social services and placed into care. But would Mother let go that easily Was this poor child free to find some happiness. Or was it the start of a different sort of abuse. This a harrowing and emotional story of abuse and mental illness, it is an essential read, essential for anyone who wishes to understand how people who are abused feel, how it affects them and how they learn to cope with their experiences. About the Author I was born in London in the year 1962. I grew up spending most of my life in Essex, first with abusive parents then in care homes, until I was seventeen. I found fantastic foster parents who loved me like their own. I learnt to love and too be loved. I met and married a wonderful man and sixteen years later he is not only my husband, but my very best friend. Together we have a son Richard, and a daughter Nikki. Family means everything to us. I suffered with mental illness from a very young age. But with the support of my family I always come through the other side. If by writing this book I can help just one child, then reliving it would have been worth while.

When Mieke Bal reread the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife as an adult, she was struck by differences between her childhood memories of a moral tale and what she read today. In Loving Yusuf ̧ Bal seeks to resolve this clash between memory and text, using the same story, in which Joseph spurns the advance of his master’s wife who then falsely accuses him of rape, as her point of departure. She juxtaposes the Genesis tale to the rather different version told in the Qur’an and the depictions of it by Rembrandt and explores how Thomas Mann’s great retelling in Joseph and His Brothers reworks these versions. Through this inquiry she develops concepts for the analysis of texts that are both strange and overly familiar—culturally remote yet constantly retold. As she puts personal memories in dialogue with scholarly exegesis, Bal asks how all of these different versions complicate her own and others’ experience of the story, and how the different truths of these texts in their respective traditions illuminate the process of canonization.

From the author of the bestselling Prozac Nation comes one of the most entertaining feminist manifestos ever written. In five brilliant extended essays, she links the lives of women as demanding and disparate as Amy Fisher, Hillary Clinton, Margaux Hemingway, and Nicole Brown Simpson. Wurtzel gives voice to those women whose lives have been misunderstood, who have been dismissed for their beauty, their madness, their youth. Bitch is a brilliant tract on the history of manipulative female behavior. By looking at women who derive their power from their sexuality, Wurtzel offers a trenchant cultural critique of contemporary gender relations. Beginning with Delilah, the first woman to supposedly bring a great man down (latter-day Delilahs include Yoko Ono, Pam Smart, Bess Myerson), Wurtzel finds many biblical counterparts to the men and women in today's headlines. She finds in the story of Amy Fisher the tragic plight of all Lolitas, our thirst for their brief and intense flame. She connects Hemingway's tragic suicide to those of Sylvia Plath, Edie Sedgwick, and Marilyn Monroe, women whose beauty was an end, ultimately, in itself. Wurtzel, writing about the wife/mistress dichotomy, explains how some women are anointed as wife material, while others are relegated to the role of mistress. She takes to task the double standard imposed on women, the cultural insistence on goodness and society's complete obsession with badness: what's a girl to do? Let's face it, if women were any real threat to male power, "Gennifer Flowers would be sitting behind the desk of the Oval Office," writes Wurtzel, "and Bill Clinton would be a lounge singer in the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock." Bitch tells a tale both celebratory and cautionary as Wurtzel catalogs some of the most infamous women in history, defending their outsize desires, describing their exquisite loneliness, championing their take-no-prisoners approach to life and to love. Whether writing about Courtney Love, Sally Hemings, Bathsheba, Kimba Wood, Sharon Stone, Princess Di--or waxing eloquent on the hideous success of The Rules, the evil that is The Bridges of Madison County, the twisted logic of You'll Never Make Love in This Town Again--Wurtzel is back with a bitchography that cuts to the core. In prose both blistering and brilliant, Bitch is a treatise on the nature of desperate sexual manipulation and a triumph of pussy power.