"When lifeguard Ondine Wilde rescues Jack Walcott from drowning, she almost regrets it. The billionaire is as rude and entitled as he is gorgeous, so Ondine doesn't expect any thanks. She's certainly not expecting his spontaneous marriage proposal...Jack explains he needs a convenient wife to secure his position as CEO. And while Ondine hates to admit it, she needs financial security for her family. His only rule? No feelings. Which, after a lifetime...

A small-town lawyer with a big-time reputation, Stafford Lee Penney, Mississippi's #1 lawyer who has never lost a case, when his wife is scandalously killed, spirals into a legal and personal legal streak, ruining his career, and making him the nation's #1 suspect.

"Amy Prescott couldn't help but notice the sexy, wet-suited Navy SEAL who washed up on the beach. Nor could she overlook the burst of gunfire that followed his hasty introduction. Thankfully, Riley Hammond expertly shielded her from harm. Unfortunately, he landed her in the middle of his deadly covert op. Riley never expected the seemingly innocent beach girl to be connected to the bad guys he'd been sent to track down. But between the body splayed...

"I noticed the smell coming from the slowly emptying pool. Putrid water now and the putrefaction of all the years; all the years since the baths were built. Do you understand, the old lifeguard said to me, all still here, nothing washes off that easily? The People's Baths, he laughed. Do you know what happened here? Look how innocently the water lies here. Some innocence, he laughed. In the side passage there wasn't room to shoot people. There are...

At Hound Town Lake, Emma meets the newest lifeguard, a Newfoundland, and leans how the dog's webbed feet and rudder-like tail are used to save struggling swimmers.

Accompanying the Pike family during a two-week vacation to the Jersey Shore, baby-sitter Stacey falls head over heels for a handsome lifeguard despite Mary Anne's warning that he is too old for her.

A sun-baked, beautifully observed debut- a mother and daughter come of age in Las Vegas.

At the beginning of Eudora Welty's "June Recital" in The Golden Apples, the child Loch peers through his telescope and observes a woman inside the house next door: "Here came an old lady. No, she was an old woman, round and unsteady-looking...She went inside, and he saw her through the beady curtain, which made her outline quiver for a moment". We later learn that the "she" is Miss Eckhart -- a strict, unmarried, German piano teacher in the town of...