Down by Contact
Available from Boroughs Publishing Group
It's showtime.
After twelve years in the league, all Zach Murphy wants is a Super Bowl ring. He’s been about hard hits not smooth manners, about breaking quarterbacks not making small talk at cocktail parties. But now he’s shattered something else. After dumping a tray of drinks on the team owner’s snooty daughter and accidentally feeling up the Governor’s wife, his tenure with his team looks perilously short. And things are getting worse.
Life is looking up for Kelsie Carrington-Richmond. A onetime beauty pageant star and mean girl, she only recently stopped living out of her car. But both those times have passed. Her Finishing School for Real Men has a real shot, and the Seattle Lumberjacks have hired her to polish up their roughest player. Except…it’s Zach. Long ago she broke his heart. He’s just the beast she remembers—gruff, protective—but she’s nothing like the beauty from his past.
Yet, getting knocked down happens, and getting back up makes a contender. And they both have the hearts of champions.
Read the first chapter here:
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Book Trailer:
Excerpt:
Kelsie Carrington glided across the room
straight toward him. His Cactus Prairie High School crush here? In Seattle?
What the fuck? Wasn’t halfway across the country far enough to escape her and
those painful memories? He blinked several times, but there wasn’t a damn thing
wrong with his vision. His one-date disaster balanced on a pair of heels so
high the altitude should require an oxygen mask. Her blond hair shone as
brightly as the gold in a coveted Super Bowl ring. Each graceful step of those
long legs carried her closer to him.
He held his breath and prayed she didn’t
recognize him. Just like old times, Kelsie looked right through him, as if he
didn’t exist. Her patent beauty-queen smile was plastered across her perfectly
made-up face. Damn, seeing her transported him back to being an awkward teenage
boy who only fit in on the football field. Her fake smile reminded him how
stupid he’d been to fall for her particular brand of poison. Her perfect face dredged
up a shitload of painful emotions.
Oh, yeah, painful all right. Zach Murphy
had fallen in love once and been carried out of the game on a stretcher. He’d
stick with football. Football gave him life, while women sucked the life out of
him. Football made sense to him. Women didn’t.
Especially this woman.
He glanced to either side to see if any of
his teammates noticed the fucking bleeding heart dangling on his sleeve. They
were too busy staring at Kelsie—she’d always had that effect on men. Well, except
for the king of asshole quarterbacks, Tyler Harris. Zach gave Harris a few
grudging points for tossing out his womanizer ways and only having eyes for his
sassy girlfriend.
Yet something on Zach’s face must have
clued Harris in. Like a hungry hyena catching the scent of wounded prey,
Harris’s sharp gaze moved from Zach to Kelsie and back again. The quarterback
possessed this uncanny ability to dissect an enemy’s weakness—and despite being
teammates, they were enemies. One corner of the fuckhead’s mouth turned
up in a knowing smirk. He nodded briefly at Zach and returned to his
conversation with his hot little girlfriend, even though Zach knew damn well
the jerk kept one eye on him.
Ignoring Harris, Zach scratched his chin
and studied Kelsie. What the hell was the cause of his most humiliating moment
in a lifetime of humiliating moments doing here a thousand miles from Texas,
invading his territory?
He blinked a few times and looked again.
Really looked beyond the beauty-queen face and body. Something was very wrong
with this picture. A loaded tray of drinks teetered precariously on the palm of
Kelsie’s raised hand as she moved in and out of the crowd. Rich girl Kel had
never worked a real job in her life. Yet, he doubted she was serving drinks
just for the unique opportunity to slum with the common folk.
Damn, maybe his life wasn’t the only thing
that’d changed.
Kelsie scanned the room then did a double
take. Their eyes met and crashed with the intensity of a wrong-way collision on
I-5. The fake smile faltered. The gliding stopped. She looked around the room
as if planning an escape route. Then she straightened her shoulders and turned
on the charm, gracing him with her halogen smile—perfect white teeth and hot
red lips. Really hot. As if she were happy to see him.
Bullshit.
Zach scowled his best don’t-fuck-with-me
scowl.
Kelsie faltered. Her stride went from
graceful to jerky. The smile slipped off her face, replaced by what appeared to
be panic. She pivoted on her impossibly high heels and fired up the after-burners.
Oh, no, she wasn’t getting away this
easily. Zach jumped to his feet and gave chase, single-mindedly focused on
confronting her, something he’d been dying to do since his senior year of high
school. Yeah, stupid idea, but he’d never been one for thinking before
reacting, a trait which worked well in football, not so well in real life.
She glanced over her shoulder, her blue
eyes filled with what looked like fear, as if she expected him to do physical
damage to her or some stupid-assed thing like that.
Zach cornered her near the head table.
Kelsie changed directions and charged past him. He spun around to follow,
refusing to let her off that easily. He clipped her full tray drinks with his
elbow. She lurched with the tray, but it was too late. Helpless, Zach watched
the disaster happen in slow motion.
The tray teetered back and forth, as
Kelsie desperately fought to gain control. The tray won. Glasses of wine
sprayed red, white, and pink across the tablecloth, looking like a tie-dye
session gone mad. Goblets shattered. Women screamed as wine drenched expensive
evening gowns. The team owner leapt to his feet, his sputtering laced with
profanity as red wine coated his custom-tux and white shirt. His spoiled
daughter, Veronica, didn’t hold anything back either, loudly insulting the size
of Zach’s brain and his dick. Closest to the debacle, the governor’s wife leapt
to her feet, her low-cut sequined evening gown hung on her like a limp rag. Red
wine and mimosas dribbled down her neck and chest and disappeared in her
cleavage. Zach grabbed a napkin and desperately blotted at the wine. In his
panic, he swiped the napkin across the plump mounds of her breasts. She
screamed as if he’d purposely groped her. HughJack, the team’s head coach,
grabbed him and pulled him away.
“I’m sorry. Oh, fucking hell. I’m so
sorry.” Zach wanted to crawl under the nearest boulder.
“What did you think you were doing?” Coach
spoke in that deadly calm, quiet voice that struck fear in the meanest of
linemen. Zach preferred HughJack’s ranting and notorious clipboard throwing to that
voice.
“I—I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
Veronica, still sputtering and looking for
blood, turned on Kelsie. “You! How could you be so stupid?”
“I—I—” Kelsie shoved her fist in her
mouth, obviously horrified at the carnage she’d helped cause. She lifted her
gaze to Zach’s. Anger blazed in her stormy blue eyes.
Wait one fucking minute. She blamed him?
He hadn’t done one damn thing other than be where he was supposed to be—a
charity benefit for a charity whose name he couldn’t even remember. She was the
one who didn’t belong here.
Jerking her gaze away from his, Kelsie
dropped to the floor and started wiping up the mess with any napkin she could
confiscate from the nearby tables. Several other staff joined in the fray,
wiping tables, cleaning up the mess, and comforting wet, angry guests.
Zach debated on whether or not to fade into the background
or make her night that much worse. Once again, she’d made him look like a
backwards hick, her special talent.
A fat, sweating chef with chocolate stains
on his white apron waddled out of the kitchen and spoke in a harsh whisper to
Kelsie. “You idiot. Did you do this?”
Kelsie didn’t look up, just worked
frantically to clean up the mess. The chef bent down and pointed a pudgy finger
in her direction. “You’re fired. Get the hell out of here. I’ll be contacting
you for reimbursement for the damages.” He kept his voice low, but Zach heard
him.
Zach stepped forward, a knight not exactly
comfortable in his dinner-jacket armor. “Apologize to the lady. It was an
accident, and your behavior is abusive.”
The chef gritted his teeth and spoke loud
enough for only Zach to hear. “Who the hell are you? Some dumb jock? You
probably beat up your girlfriend on a regular basis. And you accuse me of
abuse?”
Zach exploded and charged. Just before he
made contact, two defensive linemen, big suckers, yanked him backward and
pinned his arms behind his back. Zach lunged at the fat chef again, dragging
the linemen with him. More teammates jumped into the fray and held him back.
Several others restrained the chef, who hurled accusations at Zach and Kelsie.
“Stop it, you dumb shit.” Harris smacked
Zach on the arm none too gently. Zach grunted and squinted into the harsh light
glaring in his eyes. Someone had a camera trained on him.
Harris stepped in front of Zach, blocked
the cameraman, and faced the furious cook. “Let’s calm down and be civilized.
It was an accident.” He spoke in an aside to his teammates. “Let them go.” The
men did as Harris ordered. The cook made a move toward Zach but Harris
countered it, placing his body between the two dueling men. He put his hand on
Zach’s chest and pushed. Zach staggered back a step, reining in his temper.
He’d done it again. Screwed up in a social situation
and dragged the whole team down with him. His new team. The ones who were
counting on him to be a leader on and off the field. He’d led them, all right,
almost into a brawl.
Interview
Is there a particular
player that you compared Zach to?
Choosing a Player
By Jami Davenport
(for Musings from an Addicted Reader)
I write a popular sports romance series
featuring the Seattle Lumberjacks, a fictional Seattle NFL team. The following
three books have been published so far:
Fourth and Goal, featuring wide
receiver Derek Ramsey
Forward Passes, featuring bad boy
quarterback Tyler Harris
Down by Contact, featuring linebacker
Zach Murphy
The next two Seattle Lumberjacks
Romances are under contract and under way. Stay tuned.
Down by Contact is my latest release and features a linebacker
named Zach Murphy. I've long admired linebackers and been fortunate to watch
several good ones of the years. Since I'm a Seahawk fan, Chad Brown immediately
springs to mind, but he wasn't the inspiration for Zach in my book. I pictured
Zach as a combination of Green Bay's Clay Matthews and Baltimore's Ray Lewis.
Both men are the epitome of a hard-hitting linebacker who runs the defense with
absolute respect from his teammates and loves the game. My linebacker was just
as dedicated and hard working as any linebacker. He was big, tough, a little
rough around the edges, and he lived and breathed football.
But writing about a linebacker was
particularly tough when it came to the football scenes. Writing an offensive
player is easier, especially a quarterback, because more is written about
offensive players, they're analyzed to the nth degree on sports shows, plus the
camera follows them on the field, replaying good and bad plays over and over
again.
I watched tons of games and tried to follow the linebackers'
moves, which was next to impossible. Often the camera view would include the
linebackers at the beginning and end of a play and not in between. Instead the
camera follows the ball. So that left a lot of gaps regarding a linebacker's
moves out of camera range. I wanted to observe a linebacker analyzing the
offensive scheme and calling a defensive audible and direct their guys to
change positions, among other things. Not easy to do via normal telecasts, and
I didn't have the time to attend a Seahawks game, even if I could get tickets.
I tried to catch the Ravens and Packers whenever they were televised in our
area because there was a better chance of the camera following Clay Mathews or
Ray Lewis, than just about any other linebacker.
Truthfully, I have a husband who played
linebacker in high school and a little bit in college; he gave me some insight,
enough to pass muster with him and the readers.
My intention was to give Zach's football
scenes realism. I hope I succeeded.
Review:
Quarterback Zach Murphy remembers Kelsie Carrington only too
well, it is a memory he would rather wipe out from his past. When Kelsie is hired to teach the burly and
tactless Zach etiquette, he feels like a fish caught into a tiny bowl, until he
realizes she needs him more than he needs her.
Zach sees a chance for sweet revenge, but every time he tries to revel
in it why does he feel twangs of guilt and his long locked away feelings for
her are pushing to come out.
Trust is a huge issue for Zach where Kelsie is concerned, he
wants to believe she has changed from the mean girl twelve years ago but he is
not sure if his heart will ever recover if she has not. Kelsie regrets her past, but she has not been
hell with her ex-husband for nothing, she wants to show Zach she is a different
person I she can break down the wall he has erected where she is
concerned. I loved that Zach was just himself, he was a
bit sloppy, rude, and completely endearing.
The third in the Lumberjack series, I thought this was another fantastic
addition.
Prize
Information:
Jami is giving away all three of the Seattle
Lumberjacks books to one winner from all the different tour stops. Winner will
be selected by Rafflecopter.
Rafflecopter Code (Grand Prize):
a Rafflecopter giveaway
Tour Schedule:
Illicit by Opal Carew
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