Running Back
Authors: Allison Parr
Running Back
By Allison Parr
Natalie Sullivan is on the verge of a breakthrough most
archaeology grad students only dream of: discovering a lost city. Her research
points to a farm in Ireland, but to excavate she needs permission from the new
owner:
the
Michael O’Connor, popular NFL running
back.
On TV Mike seems so charming and good-natured that Natalie
figures getting his cooperation will be a breeze. So she’s not prepared to deal
with the arrogant—and adamantly opposed—man she meets in person. Or the way one
look from him sends shivers down her spine...
Determined to kick-start her career, Natalie travels across
the Atlantic and finds herself sharing an inn with Mike, who has come to Ireland
in search of his roots. She tells herself her interest is strictly professional,
but the more she gets to know him, the harder it is to deny her personal
attraction to the sexy sports star. And when Mike confides why he refuses to
allow the dig, Natalie must decide if she can follow her heart without losing
sight of her dreams.
81,000 words
Dear Reader,
It’s possible I say this every year, but I love October. To
me, this is the month that signals the start of a season of hot apple cider,
evenings by the fire, and curling up on the sofa with a good book, dressed
warmly in sweatpants and a comfy shirt and snuggled under my favorite fuzzy
blanket. We at Carina Press can’t provide most of those things, but we can
provide the good books, and this month we have more than a few good books!
In
Running Back
, the highly
anticipated sequel to Allison Parr’s new-adult contemporary romance
Rush Me
, Natalie Sullivan is on the verge of a
breakthrough most archaeology grad students only dream of: discovering a lost
city. Her research points to a farm in Ireland, but to excavate she needs
permission from the new owner:
the
Michael O’Connor,
popular NFL running back.
If you’re like me, there are certain tropes in romance that
you fall for every time. One of mine is the main theme of Christi Barth’s newest
book,
Friends to Lovers.
(Gee, can you guess what it
is?) Daphne struggles with revealing her longtime lust for Gib, sparking it all
off with a midnight kiss on New Year’s Eve—only Gib doesn’t know it’s Daphne
he’s kissed! Also in the contemporary romance category is
First and Again
by Jana Richards, which has a special place in my
heart because this emotional story takes place in my home state of North
Dakota.
For months, this Red Cross head nurse has been aiding Allied
soldiers caught behind enemy lines, helping them flee into the neutral
Netherlands. It’s only a matter of time until she’s caught in
Aiding the Enemy
, a historical romance by Julie Rowe.
If you’re a fan of
Downton Abbey
, be sure to check
out the rest of Julie’s historical romances.
We have two mysteries for readers to solve this month.
British crime author Shirley Wells returns to the sleepy northern town of
Dawson’s Clough with her popular Dylan Scott Mystery series in the next book,
Deadly Shadows.
And in Julie Anne Lindsey’s
Murder by the Seaside
, counseling is murder, but
it’s never been this much fun.
Erotic romance author Christine d’Abo brings us the story of
Alice’s obsession with a brooding lawyer at her firm, which takes Alice on a
journey of self-discovery through the rabbit hole and into the world of BDSM in
Club Wonderland.
Also this month, the
Love Letters
ladies, Ginny Glass, Christina Thacher,
Emily Cale and Maggie Wells, round up five sizzling-hot stories to finish off
their sexy stampede through the alphabet with
Love Letters
Volume 6:
Cowboy’s Command.
Edgar Mason is losing Agamemnon Frost despite everything
they’ve been through—the passion, the torture, the heat. Frost’s fiancée
Theodora is back, and Mason can feel his lover gravitating toward her. Every day
he sees them together, it tears at his heart. Don’t miss
Agamemnon Frost and the Crown of Towers
, the conclusion to Kim
Knox’s male/male historical science fiction trilogy.
Because October is the perfect month for the paranormal, we
have a wide selection of fantasy, urban fantasy and paranormal to share with
you. In Jeffe Kennedy’s fantasy romance,
Rogue’s
Possession
, neuroscientist Gwynn’s adventures in Faerie continue in
the long-awaited sequel to
Rogue’s Pawn.
And in the
sequel to
Soul Sucker
, a powerful magic user is
stealing people’s faces in San Francisco, and empath Ella Walsh and shifter
Vadim Morosov have been called in to investigate in
Death
Bringer
by Kate Pearce. Also returning with another book in her Blood
of the Pride series is Sheryl Nantus, with her paranormal romance
Battle Scars.
Combining futuristic fiction, fantasy and urban fantasy,
Trancehack
by Sonya Clark is a compelling
cross-genre romance. In a dystopian future where magic is out in the open and
witches are segregated, a high-profile murder case brings together a police
detective and a witch with unusual powers that combine magic and technology. But
dangerous secrets, a political cover-up, and the law itself stand between them.
Don’t miss this exciting new world of witchpunk!
Carina Press is pleased to introduce three debut authors this
October. Science fiction erotic romance author Renae Jones gives us a
Taste of Passion
when lust strikes hard for Fedni, an
empath who can taste emotion, but her off-worlder neighbor is horrified by the
caste system that the former courtesan holds dear.
Two urban fantasy authors debut with us this month. In
Kathleen Collins’s
Realm Walker
, a realm walker
hunts a demon intent on destroying both her and the mate who left her seven
years ago. Also debuting in urban fantasy is Joshua Roots with his book
Undead Chaos.
When warlock Marcus Shifter performs a
simple zombie beheading, he soon finds that the accidental framing of an
innocent necromancer, falling in lust, and burning down a bar are just the
beginning of his troubles.
Regardless of whether you’re discovering these books in
October or in the middle of summer, any time is the perfect time for reading,
and I hope you enjoy all these titles as much as we’ve enjoyed working on
them.
We love to hear from readers, and you can email us your
thoughts, comments and questions to
[email protected]
. You can also interact with Carina
Press staff and authors on our blog, Twitter stream and Facebook fan page.
Happy reading!
~Angela James
Executive Editor, Carina Press
www.carinapress.com
www.twitter.com/carinapress
www.facebook.com/carinapress
Contents
Chapter One
Three archaeology professors sat before me, frowns on their faces as they decided whether or not to give me the most important grant of my life. Hidden behind my back, my forefinger beat steadily against my hand.
The woman on the left looked up, eyes sharp behind wire-rimmed glasses. “Why Ireland? I see you’ve done your most recent fieldwork in Latin America.”
The male professor beat me to the punch. He leaned closer to his colleague, but not so close that I couldn’t overhear him. “She studied under Jeremy Anderson.”
All three professors eyed me with interest, and I struggled to keep my smile in place. Fake smiles usually came easily to me; I’d been doing them ever since my mother first toddled me out to charm her friends. But with the stakes so high, everything about me shook. I tried to minimize the damage as I spoke. “While I did study with Professor Anderson, this proposal is based off my own research about the most likely site for an Iron Age harbor.”
She nodded, and then looked at the others.
If they granted me this money, I would be the best behaved grad student in the world. I wouldn’t write snarky comments in my field diary and I would map units correctly and I would be a better daughter and I would, I don’t know, contribute to charity and recycle more.
The woman turned back to me. Her smile looked genuine, but she could be the kind of person who thought happy faces softened bad news. “We’ve decided to fund your proposal.”
The clenched fingers around my chest unfurled, releasing my heart so it could beat wildly. My lungs flailed with the increased oxygen. I took a startled gasp, and giddiness rushed through me, starting in my heart but quickly pumping through my arms and legs until every extremity tingled with relief and delight. It swirled in my stomach, brushed the back of my neck, and settled behind my eyes, bright and heavy and gleaming. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”
This time when I smiled, it was real.
* * *
Ireland.
I danced all the way down Broadway. New York in May was always beautiful, if heavily perfumed by sewers and smoke, but now the warm stone buildings near Columbia University were extra lovely, and my green-tinted vision turned it into the Emerald City. In Ireland, it would be past 10:00 p.m., so I shot off an email from my phone instead of calling Jeremy.
My best friend worked in a sports bar one long block away. I skipped past men hosing down the sidewalks and mothers picking up tiny children in navy uniforms. White flowers bloomed heavily on the trees that lined the street, and petals tumbled off in the light breeze. I dodged past the angry Laundromat woman and the same four men who sat on the stoop of 402 and harassed students every afternoon, and then I reached Amsterdam and Cam’s bar.
A heavy curtain draped over the entrance, keeping the air-conditioning trapped inside. I pushed past it and nodded at Charlie, the middle-aged doorman who nominally checked IDs. He took in my beaming face and grinned. “Take it it went well?”
I laughed.
Inside, two-thirds of the patrons turned. Behind the bar, Cam poured a shot of preparatory vodka and placed it beside a foil-wrapped bottle of champagne, apprehension clear on her face.
I sent a cheek-splitting grin clear across the room. “I’m going to Ireland!”
“Congratulations!” my friends cried in rapid succession. Hands thumped my back, arms encircled me. Someone slapped my butt and another kissed my cheek. The champagne popped and frothed.
It took twenty minutes of laughing and gesticulating as I regaled the other grad students with my tale, exaggerating the good bits, minimizing the paralyzing worry. I made my way over to Cam. She shook her head, the light from overhead lanterns sliding across her shiny black hair. Pride suffused her entire face. “Look at you. I knew you could do it.”
“Thanks.” I came around to the swinging entrance and hugged her. “Oh God, Cam, I’m so happy.”
“Me too.” She squeezed me tight. “You deserve it. You’re going to prove them all wrong. You’re going to find Ivernis.”
Two hours and a keg of celebratory Guinness later, my phone vibrated. When I saw the caller, I grinned widely and hitched myself up on the bar. “It’s Jeremy!”
Cam shook her head as she muddled together a mojito. “You are a hot mess. Don’t answer.”
I stuck out my tongue. “I have to answer.”
“That’s a bad life choice.”
Deliberately turning my back, I raised the cell to one ear and covered the other with my free hand. “Hey! Jeremy! How are you?” I maneuvered out of the bar, grinning and waving at my friends as I squeezed past and through the doors. Outside, a breeze cooled the air considerably. “Sorry, what was that? I didn’t catch it.” Almost bursting with pride, I prepared for more congratulations.
His steady tenor came clear from three thousand miles away. “I said, Patrick O’Connor is dead.”
When I was six years old, my father left on a two-week business trip, and I asked every night when he’d be home. And even though Mom kept giving me the same answer, I kept asking, because it didn’t make sense, and it didn’t stay in my head.
This didn’t make sense.
Patrick O’Connor
?
It had taken me three months to persuade the crotchety old Irish man to grant permission to dig on his land. Three months of pleading and proposals and gradually increasing the amount of money we’d give him. He couldn’t be dead. “How dead?”
“Natalie.”
On the other side of Amsterdam, people spilled out of bars. A young couple laughed. The girl leaned forward and sparked her cigarette off the guy’s lighter. The ember burned dully in the growing dark.
I should be panicking. Or hyperventilating, or at least feeling icy tendrils closing over my heart. Instead, I just watched the flirtation play out without a hitch. The girl twisted a lock of hair, the boy leaned closer and they both laughed again. “How’d he die?”
“Heart attack.”
“When?”
“Yesterday. I just got off the phone with his executor.”
I felt slow and stupid. “But—he signed the contract.”
During the long silence that followed, I was unable to form a single thought. “Natalie,” my old professor finally said, “it doesn’t matter. It’s invalid.”
My legs felt floppy, and I frowned at my knees and tried to lock them. Would it be weird to sit on the sidewalk? It was kind of gross, and darkened with gum stains—not to mention smears of dog poop. I leaned against a metal lamppost instead. “But I just got the grant. Everything’s set. We’re digging at Kilkarten.”
Jeremy sounded grim. “Not unless we get the new landowner to sign the contract.”
I swallowed. Inspected under my nails for the ever-present dirt. “Okay. Yeah. Of course.” The rights to the farmland hadn’t just disappeared into the nether with O’Connor’s death. His wife would surely agree to the same terms. Or maybe even agree to sell the land. “So I just get in touch with the widow?” I swallowed my groan. I didn’t want to interrupt Mrs. O’Connor’s mourning with business, but the excavation was set to begin in just over a month, and we couldn’t do anything without her signature.
Jeremy cleared his throat.
I’d studied with Jeremy long enough to recognize the sound of the other shoe falling. “What? He didn’t leave it to her?”
“She got the house and the money. The property went to his late brother’s son.”
Great, so now I’d have to track down some long lost heir. I dug into my purse for a pen. After I sandwiched my cell between my ear and shoulder, I positioned the pen above my hand. “What’s the nephew’s name? Does he live in the village—Dundoran?”
“It’s Michael O’Connor.”
Well, I didn’t need a pen to remember that name. “Like the running back?”
“Actually—it
is
the running back.”
My fingers loosened and the pen slipped down to clatter across the pavement. I’d fallen into some surreal world where clocks melted and famous football players inherited my lost city. “No.”
“Yeah.” Jeremy let out a hassled breath. “Think you can deal with this before your flight at the end of the month? I’m emailing you the forms that need his signature.”
I closed my eyes. Michael O’Connor. Running back for the New York Leopards. His image formed beneath my lids. O’Connor’s strong, Roman nose, his habitual grin and his curly, dark-red hair. His warm, brown eyes that squinted when he smiled. A mish-mash of dozens of screenshots and photos flashed though my mind. Of him in his uniform, the black and red of the Leopards. Of him on the bench, his auburn head in his hands, skin gleaming with sweat. Of him in a group hug after a win. Of that amazing touchdown last year. My throat worked but nothing came out for a good minute. “Okay. I’ll take care of it.”
Did this mean I would actually
meet
Michael O’Connor?
“Great. Oh, and good job on getting us the funding. We can retroactively use that for the past ninety days, so can you start that paperwork? See you soon.”
I lowered my phone. One did not just get in touch with a starting Leopard. Did he have a PR person? Or an agent? How was I supposed to talk to him without fangirling?
How could a contract I’d worked my ass off for be invalidated in a heartbeat?
In the lack of a heartbeat.
Oh, God, I was a terrible person. I’d better order some flowers for the widow.
I took one more deep breath. And then I started searching for O’Connor’s contacts.
* * *
When I entered middle school, I shot up several inches higher than any of my peers. My mother, who had abandoned her own modeling career before I was born, decided my height meant she should introduce me to some of her old fashion contacts. When the magazine spread of me in weird flowy dresses came out, it further cemented my classmates’ opinions of my freakiness.
Now, I thought those pictures were cute. At the time, they were the instrument of my unpopularity. I refused to ever stand in front of a camera again, and I still twitched uncomfortably when friends corral me into group photos.
During those middle school years, I found solace in an exquisitely illustrated book of Celtic myths in my dad’s home office. Someone had given it to him as a present, due to our last name being Sullivan, though we weren’t any more Irish than any other eighth generation American.
I loved that book. I especially loved the pictures of the Tuatha Dé Danann, depicted as tall, beautiful people with streaming hair that reminded me of my own. I fixated on them, and the myths, and by the time I reached high school I related almost every project I worked on back to ancient Ireland. At fourteen, I wrote a detailed analysis of
The Tain
, a Celtic epic set in the first century of the Common Era. I wanted to prove that one of the central figures, Queen Medb, was an actual ruler. I was obsessed with proving that the mythological Tuatha Dé Danann and Fir Bolg were actually based off real people.
In the last years of high school, that settled into a more academic interest in the original people of Ireland, who were mentioned in several of the classical Greek sources. The explorer Pytheas of Massalia visited in the fourth century BCE, and Ptolemy wrote a general geography in around 150 CE. Ptolemy called the island as a whole “Ivernia,” and noted that the name was the same as that of a people who lived in the extreme southwest, who may once have been the first inhabitants of the land. He located a city in their territory named Ivernis.
Which I decided to find.
It wasn’t that easy, of course. Archaeology didn’t happen as quickly as it looked in two-hour NOVA specials or made-for-TV movies. Archaeologists didn’t just show up on a plot of land armed with shovels and machetes and have at it. Instead, we had to broker deals with landowners and governments and partner universities.
And by “we,” I really mean grad students.
It had taken me three months to get Mr. Patrick O’Connor to give permission for me to excavate his property, Kilkarten Farm, which I had identified as the most likely place for Ivernis. A study had tested the earth there seven years ago and found it used to be saline water. Since I knew from old maps that Ivernis had been located on a bay, it seemed probable that the inlet had silted up, thus covering and hopefully preserving the harbor.
Patrick O’Connor had agreed to the dig after a fair amount of grumbling and haggling over price, but his nephew was being even more elusive. I spent late into the night and most of the next day trying to get in touch with O’Connor through various methods: fan email, the team itself, his agent.
But I didn’t get any answer until three days later when I was on the commuter rail up to Westchester for my weekly dinner with my parents. I’d refreshed my email on my cell for the millionth time, and I almost didn’t believe it when a response from O’Connor’s agent popped up. I came very close to yelping for joy on public transit, but managed to keep it to grinning wildly and swinging my foot. I’d be meeting with O’Connor tomorrow.
And thank God for that bit of good news, because I needed to get through dinner with my parents. I didn’t expect them to be happy that I’d received the grant for Ivernis, but I sort of expected them to be proud of me. That’s what parents did, right? Showed pride when their children achieved success.
I walked the several long blocks from the station to my parents’ house. They’d upgraded after I left for college, and while the new house was undoubtedly nicer, it seemed too large for only two people.
I cut across the immaculate lawn to the back door instead of using the imposing front entrance. I pushed open the unlocked door. “Hello!”
Unlike the house I’d grown up in, everything about this one was oversized—big kitchen, high ceilings, large leather couches across from a massive television. Several shots from my mom’s modeling days used to hang in the old house, but now only large, posed family portraits decorated the wall.
I hugged my parents and we unpacked the take-out Dad has just picked up. Things went downhill almost immediately.
Mom stirred her fork and took small, mincing bites. “This isn’t very good.”
My father stopped cutting into the fillet, his clenched hands stalled at ninety degrees. “We didn’t have to order it.”