Love and Romance BOOK!

[Devostator]

Perfect Pitch: A Hot Baseball Romance (Diamond Brides Book 1)

Reigning beauty queen Samantha Winger is launching her pet project, a music program for kids. All she has to do is follow the pageant's rules—no smoking, drinking, or "cavorting" in public.

That's fine, until D.J. Thomas—God's gift to baseball—throws her a wild pitch. He slams her in an interview, and the video goes viral. Sam's no shrinking violet. She parlays D.J.'s apology into a national T.V. appearance—and a very unexpected, very public kiss.

Soon, paparazzi catch the couple in a steamy make-out session, and Sam's music program is on the block. The blazing hot relationship is threatened even more when D.J.'s son begs to trade in Little League for music class.

[anya_may21]

The Notebook - Nicholas Sparks

A man with a faded, well-worn notebook open in his lap. A woman experiencing a morning ritual she doesn’t understand. Until he begins to read to her. The Notebook is an achingly tender story about the enduring power of love, a story of miracles that will stay with you forever. Set amid the austere beauty of coastal North Carolina in 1946, The Notebook begins with the story of Noah Calhoun, a rural Southerner returned home from World War II. Noah, thirty-one, is restoring a plantation home to its former glory, and he is haunted by images of the beautiful girl he met fourteen years earlier, a girl he loved like no other. Unable to find her, yet unwilling to forget the summer they spent together, Noah is content to live with only memories. . . until she unexpectedly returns to his town to see him once again. Allie Nelson, twenty-nine, is now engaged to another man, but realizes that the original passion she felt for Noah has not dimmed with the passage of time. Still, the obstacles that once ended their previous relationship remain, and the gulf between their worlds is too vast to ignore. With her impending marriage only weeks away, Allie is forced to confront her hopes and dreams for the future, a future that only she can shape. Like a puzzle within a puzzle, the story of Noah and Allie is just beginning. As it unfolds, their tale miraculously becomes something different, with much higher stakes. The result is a deeply moving portrait of love itself, the tender moments, and fundamental changes that affect us all. Shining with a beauty that is rarely found in current literature, The Notebook establishes Nicholas Sparks as a classic storyteller with a unique insight into the only emotion that really matters.

[YoungCosmo]

I've checked one out today that is actually a oook written during our lifetime! It's called "Possession" by A.S. Byatt.

"...is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and a triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets. As they uncover their letters, journals and poems and track their movements from London to Yorkshire-from spiritualist seances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany-what emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passions and ideas."

Sounds hot.

[anya_may21]

The Thorn Birds - Colleen McCullough

The Thorn Birds is a sweeping love story set on Drogheda, a sheep station in the Australian Outback. At its heart is the ill-fated romance of beautiful Meggie Cleary and the handsome Roman Catholic priest, Father Ralph de Bricassart. Forced to choose between the woman he loves, and the Church he is sworn to, Father Ralph's ambitions win, and he stays with the Church, eventually becoming a Cardinal in Rome. De Bricassart never realizes that Meggie's bright, compliant young son, Dane, is his child, even when the boy comes to Rome to study for the priesthood. After Dane's tragic death, Meggie must choose between her own comfort, and the independence of her beautiful, willful daughter Justine, a talented actress. McCullough's tome, almost 700 pages in length, details the private lives of three generations of the Cleary clan over 55 years, and paints a convincing portrait of the trials and rewards of life in the Australian desert, and one woman's doomed love for an unavailable man.

Meggie Cleary is a beautiful, but lonely little girl of nine with red-gold hair, when the family moves to Drogheda. Meggie's brothers are all busy with the ranch, and she is soon forced to quit school to care of the younger children. Ralph de Bricassart, a handsome young Roman Catholic priest, befriends the child. As Meggie grows into a beautiful young woman, the two fall in love, culminating in a kiss after a ball, when Meggie is 16 years old. Mary Carson, the clan matriarch, is jealous and ends the romance by bequeathing the enormous sheep ranch to the Roman Catholic Church, ensuring that De Bricassart will be elevated to bishop, far from Drogheda.

Heartbroken, Meggie marries Luke O'Neill, a man who looks like De Bricassart, and moves to Queensland. Meggie's husband has no interest in living with her, and travels around the countryside cutting sugar cane, forcing Meggie to work as a servant for a Queensland couple, Anne and Ludwig Mueller. During one of Luke O'Neill's rare conjugal visits, they conceive their daughter, Justine. Exhausted, and realizing her marriage is not viable, Meggie retreats to the honeymoon resort of Matlock alone, to sort out her future. Anne Mueller sends de Bricassart to join her, and the two conceive a son during a weeklong idyll. Meggie immediately realizes she is pregnant, and contrives to have sex with her husband, so the child will not be nameless. De Bricassart is transferred to Rome, and does not learn that he has fathered a son, until the boy is grown.

Meggie returns to Drogheda, where Justine grows into a fey, willful young woman, and her brother Dane becomes a sunny child. When Dane decides to become a priest, he travels to Rome to study under De Bricassart's tutelage. Meggie refuses to attend young Dane's ordination in Rome, feeling the Church has taken back the little happiness she stole from it. Just weeks later, Dane dies in Greece, while rescuing a drowning woman. Heartbroken, Justine decides to leave her acting career and lover in London and return to Drogheda. In an act of unselfish love, Meggie insists Justine must continue her own life in Europe, rather than submerging herself in Drogheda, as generations of Cleary women before her have done. The title of the novel is drawn from the legend of a bird that sings just once in its life, more sweetly than any other, but only at the cost of great pain. The title symbolizes the tenderness of the brief, forbidden love affair between Meggie and Father Ralph, resulting in pain and tragedy.

[anya_may21]

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

Many people, generally those who have never read the book, consider Wuthering Heights to be a straightforward, if intense, love story — Romeo and Juliet on the Yorkshire Moors. But this is a mistake. Really the story is one of revenge. It follows the life of Heathcliff, a mysterious gypsy-like person, from childhood (about seven years old) to his death in his late thirties. Heathcliff rises in his adopted family and then is reduced to the status of a servant, running away when the young woman he loves decides to marry another. He returns later, rich and educated, and sets about gaining his revenge on the two families that he believed ruined his life.