He just wants her booty, but she'll end up stealing his heart. ***** After pirates kidnap seventeen-year-old Ana in a case of mistaken identity, the orphaned housemaid prepares for the worst. Instead, between a shipwreck, mutiny, and her growing feelings for her captor -- the dashing Pirate King of the Caribbean, Alestair Kincade -- Ana soon realizes the secret she keeps is far from the most dangerous part of her new life. But playing the wholesome daughter of a Spanish admiral among rag-tag buccaneers isn't easy either, and to avoid both discovery and the gallows she'll have to learn to rely on more than just her wits and her charm. But is Alestair Kincade really on her side? Or will his protection and his love both disappear the moment he learns the truth? Book Two of The Pirate King Series is called SCUTTLE (formerly The Reluctant Pirate Queen) [Now an audiobook from Hachette, Powered by Wattpad] [word count: 90,000-100,000 words] PLUNDER (Book One in The Pirate King Series) © 2014 by R.S. Kovach. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced without the author's written permission. Cover designed by Ren T

this is the very beginning of The Silk Code, winner of the Locus Award for Best First Science Fiction Novel of 1999 ... more from The Silk Code (free) at http://paullevinson.blogspot.com/2012/11/free-thursday-taste-of-silk-code.html

In the year 2042, Sierra Waters, a young graduate student in Classics, is shown a new dialog of Socrates, recently discovered, in which a time traveler tries to argue that Socrates might escape death by travel to the future! Thomas, the elderly scholar who has shown her the document, disappears, and Sierra immediately begins to track down the provenance of the manuscript with the help of her classical scholar boyfriend, Max. The trail leads her to time machines in gentlemen's clubs in London and in New York, and into the past--and to a time traveler from the future, posing as Heron of Alexandria in 150 AD. Complications, mysteries, travels, and time loops proliferate as Sierra tries to discern who is planning to save the greatest philosopher in human history. Historical characters from Alcibiades to William Henry Appleton, the great nineteenth-century American publisher, to Hypatia, Plato, and Socrates himself appear. This is the very beginning of her story ...

"It doesn't take a real man to die for a cause. Any idiot can do that. What takes a real man is living for one." - Solomon Short Something dark and sinister has taken root underneath the streets of New York City, preying on the innocent folk who reside therein, but really, what else is new? As Christopher Pierce struggles with the dilemmas of simply existing, these malevolent forces might just be exactly what he needs to get his life back on track. ---------- A prequel to the Knight Casefiles series, Genesis deals with life before Chris decided to take on the Knight's mantle, or at least before he decided to take it seriously.