There’s something truly magical about Christmas. Filled with remarkable true stories of the kindness of strangers and the blessings of answered prayers, the small miracles in this collection truly capture the spirit of the season. These stories of hope, faith and joy are a moving tribute to the true meaning of Christmas and remind us all that the greatest gifts in life can’t be gift-wrapped.

Perfect for fans of Maeve Binchy' - Candis Two women are ready to fall in love this Christmas season… Rookie reporter Emma Collins finally has her first big break: to interview three finalists in a fruitcake contest. There is just one problem, Emma hates Christmas…but falling in love with gorgeous pilot Oliver Hamilton might just help change Emma’s opinion of this holiday season. When rival reporter Nolan Adams criticised Maryanne Simpson’s lifestyle, she decides to leave her debutante past behind and start over. As the snow begins to fall, Maryanne finds herself a new life and falling head over heels for the man who got her into this mess… Make time for friends. Make time for Debbie Macomber.

A Lonesome Cowboy Finds His Destiny Former Navy SEAL Sloan Callahan lives by his own rules, free and alone. But now urgent family business brings Sloan and his brothers and sister to New Mexico—and the cousins he’d never met. That isn’t all he finds on Rancho Diablo, where a petite blonde is about to completely upend Sloan’s world. As the liaison between the two branches of the Callahan clan, Kendall Phillips’ job de*ion doesn’t include being bossed around by one ex-military cowboy. It’s hard enough to concentrate with the sparks she and Sloan are creating together. Now the sexy rebel has two more lives to safeguard: the baby boys Kendall’s carrying. No way is Sloan allowing danger to touch Kendall and the twins. His new mission: To protect his loved ones as he gets ready to change the course of Callahan destiny forever!

Is He SEAL Enough For The Job? The moment off-duty Navy SEAL Tristan Bartoni meets feisty yet vulnerable Brynn Langtoine, he's a goner. He sure didn't have plans to be attracted to a recently widowed pregnant woman who is already mother to a troubled, grieving young son. Nope, the struggling SEAL came home to Ruin Bayou, Louisiana, to finally deal with his haunting past decisions—not to start a new relationship. Brynn has enough problems without her hormones going crazy whenever Tristan is near. Her son, Cayden, constantly lashes out at her. Her baby will be fatherless. So…what does Tristan think he’s doing, making her life even more topsy-turvy than it already is? But when it comes to putting her heart on the line who could be more trustworthy than a Navy SEAL?

LOCAL BOY MAKES GOOD After ten years, Garret Beck is back with something to prove—to himself, to Hartley Creek, and especially to Larissa Weir’s family. Her father was once convinced Garret would never be successful enough. Now he’s investing in the local inn and working side-by-side with Larissa. Only problem is, she views the inn as her legacy. But seeing Hartley Creek through Larissa’s eyes soon awakens Garret to what he really wants. A new start—by her side—in the place that never stopped feeling like home. Home to Hartley Creek: A family legend brings cousins home.

In the dark days of war, a mother makes the ultimate sacrifice Lucy Takeda is just fourteen years old, living in Los Angeles, when the bombs rain down on Pearl Harbor. Within weeks, she and her mother, Miyako, are ripped from their home, rounded up—along with thousands of other innocent Japanese-Americans—and taken to the Manzanar prison camp. Buffeted by blistering heat and choking dust, Lucy and Miyako must endure the harsh living conditions of the camp. Corruption and abuse creep into every corner of Manzanar, eventually ensnaring beautiful, vulnerable Miyako. Ruined and unwilling to surrender her daughter to the same fate, Miyako soon breaks. Her final act of desperation will stay with Lucy forever…and spur her to sins of her own. Bestselling author Sophie Littlefield weaves a powerful tale of stolen innocence and survival that echoes through generations, reverberating between mothers and daughters. It is a moving chronicle of injustice, triumph and the unspeakable acts we commit in the name of love. "Littlefield has a gift for pacing…page-turning action and evocative, sensual, harrowing de*ions." —Publishers Weekly

HE NEVER STOPPED LOVING HER This handsome football coach cannot be little Jonny Turner, Neely Andrews’s best friend’s kid brother. Back in high school, Jonny was nothing but a pest. But when family troubles bring Neely back to her hometown, Jon is there to offer friendship and support…and maybe something more. Turns out that Jon has adored her from afar all these years. Neely has to admit he’s become the kind of man who’d make any woman proud. But will a terrible secret from her past scare him off? Or will Jon make her feel free enough to share everything with him?

This book will help you take your first steps in the WordPress theme development process, with 5 different projects centered around creating unique and responsive WordPress themes About This Book ? Learn the basics of WordPress theme development in a step by step manner ? Make your themes more dynamic by integrating components of Bootstrap and JQuery ? 5 carefully-selected projects to help you get beyond the theory and create highly marketable WordPress themes from scratch Who This Book Is For If you are a blogger or a WordPress user who wants to learn how to create attractive, eye-catching WordPress themes, this book is for you. A basic understanding of HTML5, CSS, PHP, and some creativity is all you need to get started with this book. What You Will Learn ? Simple and advanced themes – covers basic syntax and files along with archives and search pages ? Photo Gallery – add simple animation and use the W3.CSS framework to design a photo gallery theme ? Wordstrap – incorporate Twitter Bootstrap into the theme and use the WP_NavWalker class ? E-commerce theme – build an e-commerce theme using the Foundation framework In Detail WordPress has emerged as a powerful, easy-to-use tool to design attractive, engaging websites. Themes play a big role in making WordPress as popular as it is today, and having an eye-catching, fully-functional theme could separate your website from the rest! This book will help you take your first steps in the WordPress theme development process, with 5 different projects centered around creating unique and responsive WordPress themes. Start with creating a simple WordPress theme using HTML5, CSS, and PHP. Then, you will move on to incorporate different APIs, widgets, and tools such as Bootstrap and jQuery to create more dynamic and highly-functional themes. Whether you want to create a photo gallery theme, a highly customizable e-commerce theme, or a theme designed to suit a particular business, this book will teach you everything you need to know. By the end of this highly interactive book, you will have the required mastery to develop WordPress themes from scratch. Style and approach This book takes a projects-based approach, where every project incrementally builds on your programming skills required to create different kinds of WordPress themes. With the difficulty of the projects ranging from basic to complex, this book will help you get beyond the theory and put your understanding of WordPress theme development to practical use.

Expert techniques for building fast servers and scalable, real-time network applications with minimal effort; rewritten for Node.js 8 and Node.js 9 About This Book ? Packed with practical examples and explanations, Mastering Node.js contains everything you need to take your applications to the next level. ? Unleash the full potential of Node.js 9 to build real-time and scalable applications. ? Gain in-depth knowledge of asynchronous programming, event loops, and parallel data processing. ? Explore Node's innovative event-non-blocking design, and build professional applications with the help of detailed examples. Who This Book Is For This book is targeted at JavaScript developers who want to take an in-depth look at the latest Node.js framework to create faster, scalable, real-time backend applications. Basic JavaScript programming knowledge—and also some previous Node.js development experience—are mandatory to get the best out of this book What You Will Learn ? Build an Electron desktop app using Node that manages a filesystem ? Explore Streams and understand how they apply to building networked services ? Develop and deploy an SMS-driven customer service application ? Use WebSockets for rapid bi-directional communication ? Construct serverless applications with Amazon Lambda ? Test and debug with headless browsers, CPU profiling, Mocha, Sinon, and more ? Scale applications vertically and horizontally across multiple cores and web services In Detail Node.js, a modern development environment that enables developers to write server- and client-side code with JavaScript, thus becoming a popular choice among developers. This book covers the features of Node that are especially helpful to developers creating highly concurrent real-time applications. It takes you on a tour of Node's innovative event non-blocking design, showing you how to build professional applications. This edition has been updated to cover the latest features of Node 9 and ES6. All code examples and demo applications have been completely rewritten using the latest techniques, introducing Promises, functional programming, async/await, and other cutting-edge patterns for writing JavaScript code. Learn how to use microservices to simplify the design and composition of distributed systems. From building serverless cloud functions to native C++ plugins, from chatbots to massively scalable SMS-driven applications, you'll be prepared for building the next generation of distributed software. By the end of this book, you'll be building better Node applications more quickly, with less code and more power, and know how to run them at scale in production environments. Style and approach Mastering Node.js contains all of the examples and explanations you'll need to build applications in a short amount of time and at a low cost, running rapidly and at scale.

Design and build land, air, and sea drones using Ardupilot with Pixhawk 2.1 About This Book ? Explore the best practices used by the top industry professionals that will not only help you build drones in time, but also build effective solutions to cater to. ? Navigate through the complexities of Ardupilot to put together a complete functional UAV and assemble your drone ? Learn through practical examples that help you build robust UAV flight and ground control components Who This Book Is For The primary audience for this book is anyone (enthusiasts and hobbyists) who dream of building their own drones. It will also help those who are trying to build UAVs for commercial purposes. Some prior experience with microcontrollers and electronics would be useful. What You Will Learn ? Kitbash "dumb" objects into smart ones ? Program Pixhawk for your drones ? Fabricate your own parts out of different materials ? Integrate Pixhawk into different types of drones ? Build and understand the significant difference between land, sea, and air drones ? Adapt old Pixhawk sensors to the new Pixhawk 2.1 plugs ? Become familiar with procedures for testing your new drones In Detail The Ardupilot platform is an application ecosystem that encompasses various OS projects for drone programming, flight control, and advanced functionalities.The Ardupilot platform supports many Comms and APIs, such as DroneKit, ROS, and MAVLink. It unites OS drone projects to provide a common codebase. With the help of this book, you will have the satisfaction of building a drone from scratch and exploring its many recreational uses (aerial photography, playing, aerial surveillance, and so on). This book helps individuals and communities build powerful UAVs for both personal and commercial purposes. You will learn to unleash the Ardupilot technology for building, monitoring, and controlling your drones.This is a step-by-step guide covering practical examples and instructions for assembling a drone, building ground control unit using microcontrollers, QgroundControl, and MissionPlanner. You can further build robotic applications on your drone utilizing critical software libraries and tools from the ROS framework. With the help of DroneKit and MAVLink (for reliable communication), you can customize applications via cloud and mobile to interact with your UAV. Style and approach Step-by-step instructions to help assemble your first drone with the Ardupilot platform.

Learn how to leverage the features of the new Entity Framework Core APIs and use them to build pure .NET Core applications. About This Book ? Learn how to effectively manage your database to make it more productive and maintainable. ? Write simplified queries using LINQ to acquire the desired data easily ? Raise the abstraction level from data to objects so teams can function independently, resulting in easily maintainable code Who This Book Is For This book is for .NET Core developers who would like to integrate EF Core in their application. Prior knowledge of .NET Core and C# is assumed. What You Will Learn ? Create databases and perform CRUD operations on them ? Understand and build relationships (related to entities, keys, and properties) ? Understand in-built, custom, and remote validation (both client and server side) ? You will learn to handle concurrency to build responsive applications ? You will handle transactions and multi-tenancy while also improving performance In Detail Being able to create and maintain data-oriented applications has become crucial in modern programming. This is why Microsoft came up with Entity Framework so architects can optimize storage requirements while also writing efficient and maintainable application code. This book is a comprehensive guide that will show how to utilize the power of the Entity Framework to build efficient .NET Core applications. It not only teaches all the fundamentals of Entity Framework Core but also demonstrates how to use it practically so you can implement it in your software development. The book is divided into three modules. The first module focuses on building entities and relationships. Here you will also learn about different mapping techniques, which will help you choose the one best suited to your application design. Once you have understood the fundamentals of the Entity Framework, you will move on to learn about validation and querying in the second module. It will also teach you how to execute raw SQL queries and extend the Entity Framework to leverage Query Objects using the Query Object Pattern. The final module of the book focuses on performance optimization and managing the security of your application. You will learn to implement failsafe mechanisms using concurrency tokens. The book also explores row-level security and multitenant databases in detail. By the end of the book, you will be proficient in implementing Entity Framework on your .NET Core applications. Style and approach This book is filled with various examples that will help you use Entity Framework Core 2.0 to write efficient software.

Sheriff Braddock's Proposal Seemed Too Good To Be True A new life dawned for Anna Bauer and her daughter under the wide Montana sky. The past was finally behind them, and the future meant a home and the welcoming arms of a loving father in search of a bride. Or so Anna thought… . Cooper Braddock had too many females in his life already. He hadn't arranged this marriage - his two determined little girls had. And though half the town thought that he and Anna would make the perfect couple, Cooper wasn't convinced. How convenient would it be to be married to the most beautiful woman in town!

A FAMILY TO CALL HIS OWN When Cassie Morrison arrived on Zach Hart's doorstep, claiming her swaddled bundle was a Hart, he knew she was another gold digger out to lasso the Wind Song Ranch fortune - and destroy his family. Yet somehow this sultry spitfire's fierce protectiveness stirred his emotions-and his passions… . Fighting her undeniable and searing attraction to the virile cowboy was the most difficult act of Cassie's life - but she'd do anything to ensure that baby Billy received the love he deserved. She longed to yield to tantalizing temptation and throw caution to the Wyoming wind, but too much was at stake. Namely, her heart…

Sylvie's Wish Life would be perfect for Sylvie Venner if she had a baby. Not marriage, not a husband - just a baby. Of course, she would need a teensy favor from a willing male acquaintance - someone who had no desire for a family. Fortunately, she had the perfect candidate… . Chase's Child Confirmed bachelor Chase Buchanan would do almost anything for a friend. But what Sylvie wanted went above and beyond the call of duty! How could he agree to father her child, and still stay "just friends" when he wanted so much more?

A Sunday Times Bestseller ‘O’Brien cleverly intertwines the personal and political in this enjoyable, gripping tale.’ -The Times Her path to the throne is paved with treason… 1330. Philippa of Hainault may be married to King Edward III but she’s penniless and powerless. England quivers in the clutches of the Dowager Queen Isabella and her darkly ambitious lover Lord Mortimer while her husband rots in jail, a prisoner at Mortimer’s hand. It will take a courageous young man to emerge from the shadows and rise up against this formidable pair. Philippa won’t sit back and see Edward puppeteered. She is determined to see justice done. It’s her words whispered into the young King Edward’s ear that will see the battle for England’s throne commence. Praise for Anne O’Brien ‘O’Brien cleverly intertwines the personal and political in this enjoyable, gripping tale.’ - The Times ‘A gem of a subject … O’Brien is a terrific storyteller’ - Daily Telegraph ‘Joanna of Navarre is the feisty heroine in Anne O’Brien’s fast-paced historical novel The Queen’s Choice.’ -Good Housekeeping ‘A gripping story of love, heartache and political intrigue.’ -Woman & Home ‘Packed with drama, danger, romance and history.’ -Pam Norfolk, for the Press Association ‘Better than Philippa Gregory’ – The Bookseller ‘Anne O’Brien has joined the exclusive club of excellent historical novelists.’ – Sunday Express ‘A gripping historical drama.’ -Bella ‘This book has everything – royalty, scandal, fascinating historical politics and ultimately, the shaping of the woman who founded the Tudors.’ – Cosmopolitan www.anneobrien.co.uk @anne_obrien

Inspiring and enriching romances about faith, hope and the healing power of love. WARMING HIS HEART Former Alaskan sled dog musher Ben Grayson is still grieving the tragic loss of his dog team. So much that he put the reins—and his dreams—away. Now a photographer, Ben’s covering the Gold Rush Trail sled dog race. He’s surprised his heart isn’t more guarded around lovely journalist Clementine Phillips—until he learns that Clementine plans to handle a sled dog team herself. Ben can’t bear the thought of Clementine in danger. So he comes up with a compromise—one to keep her close . . . forever.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING TITLE THE ORPHAN'S TALE OUT NOW Paris, 1919 The nation’s leaders have gathered to rebuild the world from the ashes of The Great War. But for one woman, the City of Light harbours dark secrets and dangerous liaisons Brought to the peace conference by her German Diplomat father, Margot resents being trapped in Paris where she is still looked upon as the enemy. Yet returning to Berlin means a life with the wounded fiancé she barely knows. Torn between duty and the desire to be free, Margot strikes up unlikely alliances: with Krysia, a musician who protects a secret; and with Georg, the handsome, damaged naval officer who makes Margot question where her true loyalties should lie. Against the backdrop of one of the most significant events of the century, a delicate web of lies obscures the line between the casualties of war and of the heart, making trust a luxury that no one can afford. THE STUNNING PREQUEL TO THE BESTSELLING NOVEL, KOMMANDANT’S GIRL, HERALDED A ‘BREATHTAKING DEBUT’ BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ‘Wonderfully written and utterly compelling, this is a must-read’ – The Sun Praise for Pam Jenoff: ‘[A] heartbreakingly romantic story of forbidden love during WW2’ – Heat ‘Must read’ – Daily Express

Ink is in their blood On the heels of a family tragedy, Katie Greene must move halfway across the world. Stuck with her aunt in Shizuoka, Japan, Katie feels lost. Alone. She doesn’t know the language, she can barely hold a pair of chopsticks, and she can’t seem to get the hang of taking her shoes off whenever she enters a building. When Katie meets aloof but gorgeous Tomohiro, the star of the school’s kendo team, she is intrigued by him… and a little scared. His tough attitude seems meant to keep her at a distance, and when they’re near each other, strange things happen. Pens explode. Ink drips from nowhere. And unless Katie is seeing things, drawings come to life. Somehow Tomo is connected to the kami, powerful ancient beings who once ruled Japan—and as feelings develop between Katie and Tomo, things begin to spiral out of control. The wrong people are starting to ask questions, and if they discover the truth, no one will be safe.

When it came to reinventing a client's image, Maddie Sinclair knew just what to do. But when it came to her own remake, she didn't have a clue. Until photographer Dan Willis took one look at her and knew the most photogenic models in the world couldn't compare to what he saw in Maddie. She was a rare and true beauty, from rher flashing eyes and easy smile to her genuine kindness. Now, no one could be more willing than Dan to play fairy godfather, but was he ready for other men to learn what he already knew: Maddie was gorgeous…inside and out!

‘KISS ME,’ Isaiah whispers. My heart beats frantically Isaiah is hot and scary and hot. Why would a guy like him want to be anywhere near A GIRL LIKE ME? People expect Rachel Young to be the good girl who always gets straight As. But Rachel’s keeping her real life secret. Her wealthy family have no idea that she loves racing strangers in her mustang. Or about dangerous, intense Isaiah Walker Isaiah has secrets, too. And the last thing he needs is to get tangled up with a rich girl slumming it. But when their shared love of speed puts their lives in jeopardy, Isaiah and Rachel have six weeks to come up with a way out – and to discover just how far they’ll go to save each other. Praise for Katie McGarry 'The love story of the year' - Teen Now on Pushing the Limits 'A real page-turner' - Mizz onPushing the Limits. 'A romance with a difference' – Bliss onPushing the Limits The Pushing the Limits Series 1. Pushing the Limits 2. Dare You To 3. Crash Into You 4. Take Me On

Sometimes the most unlikely of friendships are the ones that save us. From the loyal dog who risks his own life to rescue a drowning boy to the lost kitten who comforts a grieving woman to an abandoned horse and foster child who come to rescue each other, these inspiring true stories highlight the hope, healing, happiness and – most of all – unconditional love animals bring to our lives. Whether you love sloppy dog kisses or melt at every meow, this heartwarming collection is one to treasure.