NUMBERS GAME by Authors Liz Crowe & Desiree Holt

Today, we welcome the writing due of Liz Crowe and Desiree Holt to Notes From a Romantic’s Heart. They’re going to share their new release Numbers Game from The Wild Rose Press. They’re also answering some really fun questions!

 

Inquiring Minds Want to Know

Is your book based on real-life experience or a figment of your imagination?

Desiree: Oh, definitely a figment of my imagination, but my years both attending and working at universities played into this.

If you could trade places with one of the characters from your book, who would it be and why?

Desiree: Olivia, of course. I want her second chance romance with a sexy, sexy coach.  I also wanted to be a sports reporter and actually was for a while so a little mixing of real life and fantasy here.

Is the setting for your book real? If so, have you been there? If it’s fictitious, is there somewhere real that you’ve used as a model?

Liz: The setting for Numbers Game is fictional but based on what I’d call an amalgam of locations in the Midwest (the Big Ten Conference specifically). It has an Ann Arbor feel to it as it’s about a Michigan college town located close to a bigger city, but it’s also on a nice lake, sort of like Madison, Wisconsin. And I also think, at least for me, that it has a bit of a small-town/big-city feel to it, a little like State College, Pennsylvania, or even Evanston, Illinois. I lived in Ann Arbor for over 20 years and Desiree attended the U of M so we definitely wanted to give the (fictional) town of Avon, Michigan, home to Lakeview University a real-feel and I think we accomplished it. It helps that I’ve visited pretty much every Big Ten campus, thanks to my daughter who played soccer for Michigan State.

If you could trade lives with any other writer, living or dead, who would it be and why?

Desiree: Dell Shannon, because suspense and police procedurals are my first love and she created the world of procedurals. She enjoyed such success in her writing but also great admiration from all sources. She had such a skill with words that I envy to this day.

What has been the most unusual experience you’ve had that you have written into a book?

Liz: I wouldn’t call this unusual necessarily but it was fun. My three kids went to Pioneer High School, which is literally across the street, diagonally from Michigan’s football stadium, a.k.a. The Big House. When my youngest was a senior, her prom was held in one of the big alumni event spaces there, and they got to take photos down on the field, which is super cool since that stadium is a “bowl” set into the ground. You don’t realize how huge it is from the street level. You have to go inside it to get a feel for the 100k + seats. While I am not a Michigan fan per se, I do respect the athletes and coaches who work hard to bring success to that program and so standing on the big “Block M” in the middle of the field gave me a fair bit of inspiration for Coach Hatcher, whose POV I wrote in Numbers Game.

 

I also got to meet both John and Jim Harbaugh (Michigan’s head coach and his older brother who is a Pioneer High graduate) when we had a Hall of Fame Dinner and fundraiser for them at the school. I snagged a football signed by them both to give to Desiree who is a huge Michigan fan—kind of by way of bribing her into writing a football romance with me. I’m glad it worked!

Do you like to read in the genre in which you write? Or, are you adventurous?

Desiree: I think I’m stuck in the genre I write but I still feel adventurous. I’ve tried several other genres but suspense is really my addiction. But I do like it in all subjects. I love sports mysteries and sports romantic suspense. And when I create my heroes, no matter what their current profession, I always imagine the sports heroes that I’ve followed for years. Probably my ideal hero (grin!) is: a former college football player, maybe a quarterback, who was also a Navy SEAL and is my own version of Superman!

 

About the Book

Former NFL 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 can 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.

Get Numbers Game On Your Favorite Platform

Find Numbers Game on BookBub

 

Read an 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?

 

Meet the Authors 

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.

Liz's Website ~ Facebook ~ Twitter ~ Instagram ~ Newsletter Sign Up 

Amazon Author Page ~ BookBub ~ Goodreads

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.

Desiree's Website ~ Blog ~ Facebook ~ Twitter ~ Instagram ~ Newsletter Sign Up

Amazon Author Page ~ BookBub ~ Goodreads

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Thanks to both Liz and Desiree for stopping by today. We've got one more guest this week, so please come back tomorrow. Until then, stay happy, stay healthy, stay well read.

Nancy