Showing results by narrator "Dan Calley" in All Categories

It should've been a dream. A new life on the coast, running a beautiful country hotel with my husband. It should have been everything I'd ever wanted. Worth every scrap of investment. A hotel business we'd sunken every single penny we owned into, only to find out there was a big chain rival opening just a stone's throw away. Slowly, day by day, the dream became a nightmare. Bills. So many bills. Sleepless nights, tossing and turning. No way out in sight. Until there was him. The man at the bar. The man with a proposition we should never have considered in a thousand years.

Edgar Award winner Otto Penzler returns with a new anthology of exhilarating mysteries, assembling Victorian society's lords and ladies and most miserable miscreants. Behind the velvet curtains of horse-drawn carriages and amid the soft glow of the gaslights are the detectives and bobbies sniffing out the safecrackers and petty purloiners who plague everything from the soot-covered side streets of London to the opulent manors of the countryside. Brush off your dinner jackets and straighten out your ball gowns for these exciting, glitzy mysteries.

Ripped from a forgotten homeland as a child, Tisaanah learned how to survive with nothing but a sharp wit and a touch of magic. But the night she tries to buy her freedom, she barely escapes with her life. Desperate to save the best friend she left behind, Tisaanah journeys to the Orders, the most powerful organizations of magic Wielders in the world. But to join their ranks, she must complete an apprenticeship with Maxantarius Farlione, a handsome and reclusive fire wielder who despises the Orders.

If a no-strings hookup is required, then I'm the perfect guy. When I meet Danny, I can't believe my luck. A sexy wolf shifter who's also a fireman? Who runs from relationships just as fast as I do? Sign me up. The night that follows is one for the history books and the best part? Neither of us is looking for a repeat. That doesn't mean we won't see each other again. Without even realizing it, we become friends. Friends who do everything together. Everything with Danny is perfect, but when I start to yearn for more from my hookups, I know something needs to change.

A man’s body washes up on a beach on the North Yorkshire coast with a single gunshot wound to the chest. The only clue to the victim’s identity is a ring engraved with two names. DCI Tom Raven is back in his hometown of Scarborough for the first time in over 30 years. When offered the chance to lead the murder investigation, he takes it. Raven quickly discovers that the prime suspect is his once-teenage friend, now a wealthy but shady businessman. He finds an ally in Detective Sergeant Becca Shawcross, but not everyone in the team is on his side.

I've never been good at doing the right thing. A series of bad choices have left my life in tatters. Everyone is telling me to move on, but how can I? What I did was unforgivable, even if some believe otherwise. My whole world imploded the night I left a human dying on a classroom floor. I don't deserve anything good in my life, I know that. But I'm desperate for peace. Just a few moments where I can escape from everything I've done. When Toby offers me a solution that promises just that, I jump at it. I never imagined having a Dom but with Toby in that role?

When your eyes land on a complete stranger on the train, and the world around you stops. When the stranger says hello, and your heart stops, too. When the universe answers your prayers and he's there, next day, on the train. A man so powerful—brooding with darkness and secrets. I knew there was going to be more. I wanted more. When the stranger is reading one of your favorite novels, and you're reading one of his. When you think the universe can't be any kinder, but it truly delivers the jackpot of all jackpots and two opposite worlds collide, as though it was meant to be.

Life doesn’t always pan out as you expect. When it explodes in my face, literally, an old friend offers me a place to heal and a job renovating the kitchen of Burlington’s coolest wine bar. V&V is a chill fest. Living above it should be a blast. But I’m not built to be a social butterfly. Not anymore. I’m a damaged man. And I’m not its target clientele. At least, I think I’m not until I come face-to-face with the most beautiful human I’ve ever seen.

In the wake of a crushing defeat, Tisaanah and Maxatarius have been ripped apart. Tisaanah is desperate to rescue Max from his imprisonment, even as her people's fight for freedom grows more treacherous. But within the walls of Ilyzath, Max's mind is a shadow of what it once was . . . leaving his past a mystery and his future at the mercy of Ara's new, ruthless queen. Meanwhile, in the Fey lands, Aefe has been dragged back into this world by a king who vows to destroy civilizations in her name. But even as her past returns to claim her, her former self is a stranger.

Dumped by his boyfriend in favor of his best friend, Jack's been busy bragging about a hot new man in his life. A hot new man who doesn't exist. With an important function to attend where he'll come face-to-face with his ex, Jack knows he'll be a laughing stock when his boasts are exposed as nothing more than wishful thinking. He's desperate but time, like his options, is running out. Rory is scared he won't last another night sleeping rough on London's frozen, snowbound streets. With all the homeless shelters full, Rory seeks refuge in the first empty doorway he stumbles across.

Tisaanah bargained away her own freedom to save those she left behind in slavery. Now, bound by her blood pact, she must fight the Orders' war—and Max is determined to protect her at all costs. But when a betrayal tears apart Ara, Max and Tisaanah are pushed into an even bloodier conflict. Tisaanah must gamble with Reshaye's power to claim an impossible victory. And Max, forced into leadership, must confront everything he hoped to forget: his past, and his own mysterious magic. All the while, darker forces loom—far darker, even, than the Orders' secrets.

John Taylor works in the Nightside - the gaudy, neon noir, secret heart of London, where it's always three in the morning, where gods and monsters make deals and seek pleasures they won't find anywhere else. He has a gift for finding things. And sometimes what he's hired to locate can be very, very dangerous indeed.

After leaving the SAS, going into personal security seemed like the next logical step. Having been briefed on my client, the drummer for the rock band Caffeine Daydreams, I believed I'd be guarding some spoiled kid with more money than sense. But as I get to know Arlo, I realize nothing could be further from the truth.

It's three in the morning, and we're in her bed. My body throbs from his mouth on me, my blood still whooshing in my ears. I want to make him feel like this, so I can drown in it. So I can drown in him. Goddamn, I want to suffocate in every fiber of Locke Halliwell with the woman I love at my side. He has me fragile already. She has me in pieces at her feet. And man alive, I wish that was all I had to worry about. But this life. It's vicious. It's deadly. And if I can't protect every soul I've ever loved from the past, the future is already in ashes at my feet.

One February afternoon, Detective Ray Flowers' life is blown apart by a petrol bomb attack. No one can tell him who did it. Or why. Anchorless and alone, he moves to his aunt's country cottage. What he needs is perspective. Instead, he is tormented by visions of Kitty Hallam, a troubled young woman accused of witchcraft. Back in 1643. Is she a figment of Flowers' imagination or something more? Whatever the truth, Flowers can't help but be drawn into Kitty's world, sensing their stories are intertwined somehow.

Karly Winters has waited 10 long years to have the man of her dreams, the handsome but duplicitous Jacob Cruthers. From her home in Glasgow, she pines for the Londoner who casually keeps her dangling, never with a thought of giving her what she wants and never with any intention of leaving his wife. For her part, Karly has no intentions of being second best any longer and she hatches an artful plan of devious intent that she is certain will work in her favor.

In 1760, Guillaume le Gentil, real-life astronomer to King Louis XV, sets out for the oceans of India to document the transit of Venus. The weather is turbulent, the seas are rough and his quest may be more complicated than initially thought. 250 years later, estate agent Xavier Lemercier chances upon Guillaume's telescope in a property he's sold. As he looks out across the rooftops of Paris, he discovers an intriguing woman with a zebra in her apartment. Then the woman walks through the doors of his office, and his life changes forever.

A French musket ball to the leg takes Captain Hugh Fanshawe from the battlefield and leaves him enduring long, quiet days compiling paperwork at Horse Guards headquarters. He knows his lameness makes him the object of pity and distaste at the stifling social engagements he dutifully escorts his mother and sister to, but everything in his orderly life changes when Colonel Theo Lindsay arrives.

Taylor is the name, John Taylor. My card says I'm a detective, but what I really am is an expert on finding lost things. It's part of the gift I was born with as a child of the Nightside. I left there a long time ago, with my skin and sanity barely intact. Now I make my living in the sunlit streets of London. But business has been slow lately, so when Joanna Barrett showed up at my door, reeking of wealth, asking me to find her runaway teenage daughter, I didn't say no.

Lady Iolanthe of Rockmourn Keep expects to be a spinster all her days. She is very tall. She is very poor. And she is thirty. What lord could possibly want her? But then her father returns with news that he has found a bridegroom for her—one that is impressively tall. One that is strong, and bold, and wealthy. And best of all? He wants Iolanthe. It seems too good to be true. And when Iolanthe gets her first look at her husband-to-be, she realizes why. No one mentioned the 'orc' part of things . . .