I’m excited to welcome two sister Roses (published by The Wild Rose Press), Desiree Holt and Liz Crowe! We’re spotlighting their new release, Numbers Game, and Liz is here to talk about the co-writing conundrum. Take it away, Liz!

Desiree has always been one of my writing heroes. She’s the sort of established, successful author who never begrudges a newbie question or need for advice. I’ve known her since we both were writing for Decadent Publishing and got to meet her when she visited Ann Arbor for a football game.

We also share a love of sports, and have been known to go off on a tangent or two talking about college football and basketball. When I helped raise money for my kids’ high school athletic fund by inviting the Harbaugh brothers to speak at a dinner, I made sure to get a signed commemorative football and send it to her.

When I got the wild idea that we should write a sports-themed romance together, I wasn’t sure that she’d want to do it, but luckily for me she jumped at the opportunity. Given that we are both busy, it took us about a year to get our thoughts coalesced around the novel that is now NUMBERS GAME, available from Wild Rose Press. We wrote in a literal back and forth—she wrote our heroine’s perspective and I wrote the hero’s. We ran into a few issues, mainly with names which took a bit to sort out but once we did, we managed to write it between us over the course of about six months.

I learned so much writing with her, which is always my goal as an author—to learn, grow, and get better with every book and every editor and every publisher I work with. I hope you enjoy reading our second chance romance NUMBERS GAME as much as we enjoyed writing it!

A little more about 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 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.

A peek between the pages:

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?

Buy the book!

More about 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.

Where to find her:

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More about 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.

Where to find her:

Facebook | Twitter | Amazon | BookBub | Goodreads | Instagram | Website

Sign up for her newsletter and get a free book!

Liz, Desiree, thanks so much for joining me today. All the best to you both, and may you have great success with Numbers Game!