Wednesday 9 July 2014

Special Guest Liz Crowe - an EXCLUSIVE sneak peek AND a free novel!

Liz and I share a joint love of writing sexy soccer novels and we've been having a blast nattering about all things football during the FIFA World Cup 2014. Sooooo as a very special, and I mean seriously special treat, here is an EXCLUSIVE excerpt from Liz's next book in her Black Jack Gentlemen Series AND links to a freebie - boy are we lucky today…


A little about Liz…

Amazon best-selling author, beer blogger and beer marketing expert, mom of three, and soccer fan, Liz Crowe lives Ann Arbor. She has decades of experience in sales and fund raising, plus an eight-year stint as a three-continent, ex-pat trailing spouse.
Her early forays into the publishing world led to a groundbreaking fiction subgenre, “Romance for Real Life,” which has gained thousands of fans and followers interested less in the “HEA” and more in the “WHA” (“What Happens After?”). More recently she is garnering even more fans across genres with her latest novels, which are more character-driven fiction, while remaining very much “real life.”
With stories set in the not-so-common worlds of breweries, on the soccer pitch, in successful real estate offices and at times in exotic locales like Istanbul, Turkey, her books are unique 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, frustrate and linger in the imagination long after the book is finished.



The Black Jack Gentlemen

A SOCCER SERIES ON SALE DURING WORLD CUP 2014!

A city and a sport with something to prove—Meet the men who take that challenge.

The Black Jack Gentlemen—Detroit’s expansion soccer team.
They play hard. And live harder.

Book 1: Man On  
Book 2: Red Card  
Book 3: Shut Out 

And coming soon…
Book 4: Set Piece
Book 5: Hat Trick



MAN ON ….. .99 during the 2014 World Cup!

Bad boy of European football, Nicolas Garza is about to hit American shores with a vengeance. Signed by the Detroit Black Jack Gentlemen as lynch pin for their expansion club, Nicco only half believes he’s making the right move. But with a past full of ghosts and rotten behaviour chasing him from his homeland, he has no real choice.

Parker Rollings is a college soccer superstar, but his parents’ plans for their only son do not include professional athletics. When the Black Jacks approach him to finalise their roster, Parker leaps at the chance to keep playing, leaving behind medical school, stability and his first and only college sweetheart.

Nicco and Parker face off as bitter rivals for a coveted starting spot at midfield and are forced to channel their negative energy into something positive for the sake of the group—and themselves.
All eyes are on the fledgling team in its debut season. It’s crucial that the Black Jacks prove all the doubters wrong. They must make a good showing in the league and with new fans. But player drama, club dynamics, and misplaced priorities may tear it apart before it even begins.


RED CARD….. FREE during the 2014 World Cup!

Free will makes us human.
Choice makes us individuals.
Love makes us unique.

Metin Sevim has it all. At the pinnacle of international soccer playing success, he has managed to craft a perfect world for himself along the way.

When fate strips him of free will and the ability to choose his own path, he retreats from everyone and everything, destroying his hard-won career in the process.

Dragged back from the brink by his desperate family, Metin reluctantly agrees to coach the Black Jack Gentlemen Detroit soccer team but remains debilitated by memories and loss. When a surprising friendship emerges, it renews his passion for life, providing much needed solace… and extreme complications.

A saga of family dynamics and gender politics that cuts across cultures and circumstance, Red Card illustrates the human capacity for forgiveness through the life of one man as he attempts to rebuild his shattered existence.




SHUT OUT….. .99 during the 2014 World Cup!

A submissive once, a submissive forever?

A man on the run from the only life he’s ever known, Brody Vaughn is poised to accept the Black Jack Gentleman’s newly vacant goalkeeper’s position. It’s a desperate move, but one he must take to regain his emotional equilibrium. Reeling from his Mistress’s rejection and on the ragged edge of a total breakdown, he arrives in Detroit. Numb with thinly veiled grief, he walks into the club’s front office completely unaware that an encounter with true destiny awaits him.

Sophie Harrison has seen it all--as Domme, sub, and victim. Now that her complicated circumstances have landed her as legal counsel for the expansion Black Jacks team, she holds herself aloof in body and spirit. Nothing and no one gets past her fiercely guarded walls. Until the day she looks up to greet the new goalie standing in her doorway, his raw combination of vulnerability and strength making her breathless.

Two people, horribly scarred by the excesses of the BDSM lifestyle and hiding from their true selves, meet across a desk over a simple contract. All bets are off.


Black Jacks links
Amazon (to the series)



All Romance Ebooks






“Digging Deep”
A Black Jack Gentlemen sneak pick at Chapter One of the novel SET PIECE
Inspired by World Cup 2014 ~Exclusively for Lily Harlem and her blog readers
July 9, 2014
By Liz Crowe   

*All Rights Reserved


Coop stared down at his hands, attempting to focus on them, on the rubberized floor of the locker room, on the shooting pain in his shoulder, anything to ignore the deadly silence that permeated the normally raucous after-match space.  The quiet was beyond eerie, and did nothing to calm the pounding in his chest and the booming between his ears. 

His first year called up to play on the U.S. Men’s national soccer team as an utter rookie, a long shot, a cocky kid with no real international experience had ended with a bang and a simultaneous whimper. The fourteen years he’d spent of his almost twenty-one, falling in love with and finding his way at the highest level of the game had culminated today in a crushing, embarrassing defeat. 

No, “defeat” was too nice a word for what had just happened in front of over fifty-thousand screaming, rabid American soccer fans and the smug Europeans and South Americans dying to say “I told you so,” to a team who slid into the cup by the skin of its teeth and held on through group play by their collective fingernails.

He sighed and leaned back, taking a full, deep breath of the stink of failure. Camden “Coop” Copper did not fail—not at anything. But especially not at soccer. Wincing, he rolled his sore shoulder and stood, figuring he might as well shower and get the hell out of this loser-riddled room. 

“Nice try, kid,” the veteran goal keep slapped his back on his way past. “Seriously. We wouldn’t even be this far without you.”

Coop grunted and jerked his chin, knowing that wasn’t really the politest of responses but no longer caring. He wanted to go home, to get out of this god-forsaken jungle of a shit hole country and be back where the AC worked and he could breathe the air without coughing. And he needed to see his girlfriend. Not that he missed her per se, she’d been pretty annoying with all her jealous insinuations that he was scoring with all the hot Brazilian chicks. He had. But that was beside the point. 

He grinned and his body stirred in an entirely normal way for a twenty-year-old healthy, athletic man at the memory of smooth, brown skin, full breasts, plump lips and what they all did for him just the other night, all at once. He shook his head to clear it of the fantasy come true. Maybe he would miss this place. 

A couple of his teammates bumped his sore shoulder none to gently as they passed but Cam ignored the urge to curse at them. They all felt like shit and the anger over their apparent inability to keep possession of a simple soccer ball for the length of the scoreless overtime still made his jaw ache.  

By the time he emerged from his shower, the locker room had mostly emptied out. It stank, but no worse than any other locker room he’d occupied in his years through high school, some college and then his two years at a farm league team in the middle of nowheresville Iowa. Being called up to try out for the men’s team had been a dream come true. Making the roster was the equivalent of sheer fantasy. Being put in the game in the waning minutes of a do-or-die last match of group play was in the realm of “extreme wet dream with two girls on a beach.” And he had scored. He, Cam  Fucking Cooper had won that god damned game on his own. He knew it. The world knew it.

So when he’d been put in at the twenty-minute mark after their star forward had to be carried off the pitch writhing in pain from what was likely a career ending, red-card inducing knee injury, he’d felt pretty damn good about it. But he had, in a word, sucked. The jerks on the French team had been older, taller, faster, better and assholes. They’d toyed with the young American team like a cat with a mouse for the whole time, scoring two goals in quick succession at the eightieth moment leaving the Yanks gasping and glaring at each other, their visions of glory fading faster than a suntan in Alaska.

With the towel wrapped around his waist and the buzzing in his ears down to a dull hum, he emerged from the thick steam into the empty room. Making his way by memory over to his locker he stopped, feeling around for the latch in the gloom, already pondering how he could parlay his brief moment in the bright light of international soccer attention into a ticket out of the cornfields. 

“Hey,” a distinctly female voice cut through his mental haze. He frowned.

“What do you want? And how did you get in here…whoa…” He clutched at the towel that had somehow begun to slide down his thighs. He was not in the mood for this, not today. He whipped around and glared at his agent, the woman who’d stuck him in the shitty backwater club and had argued against trying out for the national team.  He narrowed his eyes as her tall, womanly, tempting figure emerged from the steam.

No, not now, not here. You don’t need to be messing with her anyway Cam, you lame, weak….

 “Cut it out,” he insisted as she kept yanking at his towel. 

“I have some good news,” she cooed as she moved closer and put her cool palm around his stiffening cock. Her rich aroma invaded his nose, circled around up in his clanging head. She trailed the fingertips of the hand not encouraging his erection across his damp shoulders, down his pecs, tweaking his nipples on the way down to join her other one. God damn she was hot and horny and something like twenty years older than he was. 

He groaned and gripped her face, smashing his lips onto hers, eager for her, for anything to drown out the drumbeat of failure that kept pounding in his chest. He yanked up her short skirt and pulled her panties down as she kept up that lovely hand movement that was making his hips thrust involuntarily.

“Really?” he grunted as he broke the kiss and turned them around, shoving her up against the lockers with a bang. “Tell me the good news Carrie, after I fuck you. That’s why you’re really here. I know you miss me.”

She smiled, and licked her lips, a slow, sexy thing she did that he had never see any other woman in his experience do quite the same way. It was maddening and made his whole body break out in goose bumps. “I’ve heard you have been a very bad boy down here Coop,” she whispered as she pulled him close and wrapped one, long leg around his waist. He sensed the heat of her sex against his, eager, too eager. He tried to step back.

“Yeah, so?” he said, attempting to get control over himself. But he could really smell her now—that sultry, spicy odor that always flipped his upper brain off and his lower one into overdrive. She flexed her thigh and kept him close, angling her hips and guiding him inside her even as she was talking. 

“Yeah, so. Very, very bad things from my very, very bad boy.” She sighed as he propped his hands on either side of her and stroked in deep, groaning again at the sweet velvet grip of her pussy around him. “Show me how bad you are, Coop.” She gripped his hair, tugging at it and eyeballing him in a way that pissed him off.  “Make me come.”

He nodded, breathless, desperately wanting the connection, but not at the same time. 

Lame. Jesus Christ, man, your hot agent lady lets you fuck her six ways to Sunday. Just go with it. Too much thinking is making you stupid.

He shoved her soccer men’s team emblazoned shirt up and gripped her breasts, pinching her nipples hard like she wanted it, moving his hips slowly, surely relishing every wet stroke.  She raised her leg higher and he gripped it, bending it against her so he could go ever deeper and harder. 

The room darkened around him as he leaned close to he could suck her other nipple into his mouth. Their hips moved in unison, their breathing filled his ears. He knew  the orgasm threatened, hovering on his horizon. He was tempted to hold it back, to please first before taking his own but something in him snapped then, releasing a different urge, one that made him release her breasts and prop his hands up again, go up on his tiptoes and pound into her so hard the entire row of lockers rattled.

She shrieked and clutched his ass, digging in deep and likely leaving familiar, Carrie-fingernail-shaped welts but he didn’t even feel it. He took a long breath and blew it out, buried his face in her sweaty neck and let it happen. He went blind and deaf for a split second, then roared with satisfaction when all his senses returned in a rush of raw, erotic pleasure.

Her pussy gripped him so hard he grunted but he kept pounding, loving the sound of the metallic banging, of her moans and cries, of his own grunts. And then, like that, it was over. He pulled out of her fast, not even caring that she almost fell over. His dick was still rock hard and slick from her. But he stood with his hands on his hips, trying to catch his breath, glaring at her, hating her and himself at that moment.

She sighed and tugged her skirt down, never taking her deep green gaze from him. When she reached for him, he flinched and backed away. 

“About that good news?” he asked, tossing her a towel without giving a rats’ ass if she caught it. 

“Detroit,” she said, as she passed the cloth between her legs before finding her panties on the floor. 

He blinked. “What did you say?” Anger was rushing in to fill the space left empty by his monster orgasm. “I hope it was not ‘Detroit.’”

“Yep, stud, it was.” She threw the towel down and crossed her arms over her reassembled tee-shirt covered chest. “It’s why I came all the way down here. Well, that and…” She reached for him too quickly for him to escape, covering his lips, shoving her tongue into his mouth. 

He jerked out of her grip. “I am not playing for those guys. I fucking hate Parker Rollings. I hated him in high school. They…they’re…”

“They are one of the hottest, up-and-coming teams in the new league. And they want you, bad. Besides, you won’t have to play with Parker, sweet cheeks.” She pulled her long hair up off her neck. Cam attempted not to stare at the way her breasts shifted under the tee shirt when she did that.  The buzzing was back and getting louder. He clenched his eyes shut and willed this moment away from him. “That’s right Coop. I got you the plumb spot, right up top, guaranteed starting position. And they had to sell their little sweetie midfielder to afford you, bless his poster-boy-for-gay-athletes heart. You can thank me more later, at the hotel.” She turned and sashayed away, leaving him breathless, and feeling more like a piece of meat than ever.

“I am not playing in Detroit.”

“Oh yes you are and for a shit ton of money too. Now hurry up. We can still catch the bus back to the hotel.” She turned and winked at him. “Oh and your girlfriend’s been calling me trying to reach you after that horrible excuse for a match.” She made a little tsk tsk sound and cocked her hip. “Such a bad boy. It’s what I love about you. Let’s go Coop. We have things to discuss, contracts to sign, etcetera.”

He glared at her retreating form, wondering just how far off the rails he’d suddenly gone.  While at the same time acknowledging how much he wanted to fuck her again and again and again, just to drive out this sick, sinking feeling in his gut. 

Was he truly that weak?

Cam glanced up and caught his own gaze in the mirror. His thick brown hair was wild where she’d clutched at him. His face flushed red from exertion and hormones. He shivered and looked away, unwilling to acknowledge anything other than how badly he just wanted to go home.

* * * *

Phew, hot stuff, and don't forget you read it here first! Thanks Liz for being such an awesome guest today.

Lily x



4 comments:

  1. thanks so much for hosting me and letting me reveal the new Black Jacks player on your blog today!

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  2. Oh I can't wait! Sounds like another great book! Thanks for sharing Liz!

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  3. oh wow! HOT! thanks Liz for that... can't wait to read more!

    Shelly Small

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  4. Fanning myself!! Whew that is some serious make your lady bits drool material!! You on fire Liz <3

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