sports

Today, please welcome authors Liz Crowe and Desiree Holt! These two romance authors have teamed up for a joint project that is hot off the press. Take a peek at Numbers Game!

Former pro football player and coach Duncan “Hatch” Hatcher fumbled his career and marriage. Now divorced and ready to tackle his future, he has an opportunity to redeem himself as coach of his college alma mater’s football team. But how can he turn the team’s losing streak around and keep the secret of his downfall buried when the school agrees to a documentary that will allow a lovely journalist to dig her way into his past…and into his heart?

Olivia Grant’s ex-husband almost wrecked her journalism career while he definitely did a number on her self-esteem. The documentary on Duncan Hatcher is the perfect way to rebuild both. As a freshman in college, she’d had a crush on the senior football hero, but he hadn’t known she existed. She never expects the sparks that fly between them as they work on the project nor the struggles they must face if they both want to win.

The book, a contemporary romance with a sports theme, is available in a number of retail outlets. Pick up your copy here: UNIVERSAL BUY LINK

Excerpt:

Excerpt:

Hatch winced at the memory of how goofy he must have sounded to the lovely woman he was going to be having a fair bit of contact with this season. Olivia Grant was, without a doubt, beautiful, not to mention sexy as hell. She was a natural reporter, putting him at ease, even in the face of his high-school-ish reaction to her at first. But dear Lord, the crap he’d said? That shit about her being “better than she thought” at the race? And “looking for a foot in the door”? He’d sounded about as slick as the grandpas he’d been named for.

He groaned and pressed his forehead to the leather blotter on his new desk. After his divorce, he’d made a point not to notice women, something that was a bit of a self-imposed penalty. But there was no not noticing Olivia. Her soft, dark blonde hair that kept dropping over one of her deep green eyes as she’d look down at her notes, then back up at him. That smile, and those full, barely lip-sticked lips. And there was no denying she had a body that would be hard to shake out of his brain. Scott had told him she used to play soccer here, a few years behind him as an undergrad. How he’d not known her… Granted, he hadn’t been a big partier then, kept mostly to himself and his close group of friends and, as always, focused on the game.

But damn. He’d missed out on something then, without a doubt. He felt his face flush red and his entire body begin to react in ways that didn’t really serve him well as a fully grown man, with plenty of experience under his belt, so to speak.

Thankfully, she’d left before he could embarrass himself any more.

Home. Shower. Beer. Stare at a string of old movies on the giant television screen. Anything to get the lovely Olivia Grant and all her many attributes out of his head. She was, after all, the media. And everyone knew how he felt about the media.

It was get-a-grip time—on all parts of himself.

This was his chance at redemption. The opportunity was a godsend, considering the sorry state he’d left his life in on the west coast, and he didn’t intend to do anything to screw it up. He couldn’t afford to get distracted by a single thing. But how the hell was he going to do that when Olivia Grant might prove to be the biggest distraction of all?

Introducing Desiree:

USA Today best-selling and award-winning author Desiree Holt writes everything from romantic suspense and contemporary on a variety of heat levels up to erotic, a genre in which she is the oldest living author. She has been referred to by USA Today as the Nora Roberts of erotic romance, and is a winner of the EPIC E-Book Award, the Holt Medallion and a Romantic Times Reviewers Choice nominee. She has been featured on CBS Sunday Morning and in The Village Voice, The Daily Beast, USA Today, The (London) Daily Mail, The New Delhi Times and numerous other national and international publications.

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Introducing Liz:

Liz Crowe is a Kentucky native and graduate of the University of Louisville living in Central Illinois. She’s spent her time as a three-continent expat trailing spouse, mom of three, real estate agent, brewery owner and bar manager, and is currently a social media consultant and humane society development director, in addition to being an award-winning author. With stories set in the not-so-common worlds of breweries, on the soccer pitch, inside fictional television stations and successful real estate offices, and even in exotic locales like Istanbul, Turkey, her books are compelling and told with a fresh voice. The Liz Crowe backlist has something for any reader seeking complex storylines with humor and complete casts of characters that will delight, at times frustrate, and always linger in the imagination long after the book is finished.

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Happy book birthday to Liz, Desiree and Numbers Game, and happy reading to all of you!

Darlene

I am not athletic. I’ll just put that out there up front. But it’s probably no surprise, right? Bookish at a young age equals nerdy equals non-athletic. I do, indeed, fit that stereotype. I’m the girl who feared/loathed P.E. class.

I remember the embarrassment of being chosen last for a team, any team (or not chosen at all, and simply assigned as the leftover). I mean, really, who wants a scrawny girl who’s afraid of the ball on their team? I get it.

Endurance is a big word in the sports world, right? It’s important to build up your endurance. To go the distance. Yeah, well, for me, P.E. was all about endurance – enduring the class.

dodgeball-meme I ran across this dodge ball meme, and wondered if it was true. Do today’s kids miss out on the opportunity to be hit repeatedly by a red rubber ball? Oh, the memories this meme dredges up. Dodge ball and Red Rover were among the most humiliating games. I was such an easy target. Remember the chant? “Red Rover, Red Rover, send Darlene right over.” Not sure how that was fun for my opposing teams, but I certainly got my exercise in Red Rover. I could never break through the line, so I spent a lot of time running from one side to the other. Actually, volleyball may have been the worst. At least with dodge ball there was a chance the ball would hit me in the backside, or the leg. But with volleyball, what are the chances of it not hitting my face?! I’m looking up. The ball is coming down over the net. The physics of that trajectory put the ball squarely in my face. Volleyball was pegged as a girl sport. But I hated volleyball, even if it was a girlie game.

Sophomore year of high school we still had a P.E. requirement. For the love of God, would this never end? But, wait! There was a new course offering – drill team. And it could be counted as a P.E. credit. Hallelujah! It meant I could escape the swim semester of P.E. Unfortunately, my euphoria was short-lived. The class was run by a battle-axe of a drill sergeant. And it turned out that her vision of a drill team and mine were quite different. The group ended up being on the hokey side, in my 16-year-old opinion, complete with short white cowboy boots, cowboy hats and vests. If I had hoped to also gain a point or two in the popularity standings by being part of this new half-time entertainment show, it soon became apparent that would not happen. But the opposite was a definite possibility. I could not be on this team. So, it was a P.E. quandary. Go back and suffer through regular P.E. class or endure the humiliation of drill team? In a stroke of good fortune, a friend and I cut a deal with the battle-axe. We were allowed to drop off the team, but stay in the class as long as we showed up and learned the routines. Whew! It was a sweet compromise, but the longest semester of my life.

Okay, lest you think I am completely inept and uncoordinated, let me say I was better with ropes than balls. I was able to climb the long ropes dangling from the gym ceiling, and I did have one somewhat athletic claim to fame. In third grade, I was crowned the jump rope queen. Champion of the entire grade’s jump rope marathon. I jumped the hell out of that rope for what seemed like hours, almost giddy, watching my classmates drop one by one until only one boy and I were left. At that point, my arms ached, and my legs were starting to shake. But I. Was. Determined. I did not stop jumping that rope until I saw him go down. And then . . . well, with my usual athleticism, I basically collapsed. Let go of that rope and sank onto the floor – right down onto my ankle. So, wearing my crown of glory, I was wheeled out of the gym in a little red wagon. Not even kidding.

Ahhh, glory days.

And what are your athletic accomplishments?