Playing For Keeps (31 page)

She frowned. “All right, if that’s what you
want. Except that I don’t sleep with guys I just met, and I was
really hoping...”

He chuckled and pulled her close, his hand
anchoring her to his body. “You got a point, darlin’. Maybe we’ll
just pick up where we left off.”

“I’d like that, Coach.”

“So would I, Dr. Ross.”

So he took her in his arms.

-o0o-

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When I got the idea for PLAYING FOR KEEPS in
2004, I told my husband I wanted to write a football book. After
choking on his coffee, he said, “Honey, you don’t know anything
about football.” Now that wasn’t quite true. I was a cheerleader in
high school and college and though I didn’t know what a first down
was in my teens, just yelled the words following the captain, I’d
learned a lot watching games with my own personal hero. But I
certainly didn’t know
enough
to write a book. So I did
what I always do. I researched the sport. I figured out what
position would be best to use for Mike as a former player and
coach. I learned football terminology, though I’d picked some of
that up as a viewer. And, as I was teaching full time, I enlisted
the help of the football coaches in my school. They had a blast
teaching me things and encouraging me to study the playbook they
gave me. The result was a pretty decent knowledge of the game. As I
reread it to publish the second edition, I thought, “Wow, I learned
a lot.”

I also went to the training camp of the
Buffalo Bills, housed for the summer at the same college my husband
attended (and I cheered for, being from the girls’ school down the
road). The campus
was
a circus, and I was shocked at how
the training camp disrupted everything. I also met with the newly
implemented Sports Studies chair and he walked me through
everything I needed to know about the program to write this book.
Thank you to St. John Fisher College.

What I didn’t need to research was the
relationship between Mike and Jacelyn. My husband and I are very
different people, so I understand the concept of “opposites
attract.” And my son was leaving for college right when I started
to the book, so all of Jacelyn’s reactions to Kyle growing up were
my own. And do we ever forget the time when our kids were seven
years old?

I like how the relationship between Jacelyn
and Mike developed. Their conflict is very real, and though they
behave poorly at times and do lash out, they truly care about each
other. (It was fun having them try to stay apart and failing.) And
I might not have liked how Jacelyn gave into Neil, I did understand
her insecurities.

Though with the sports theme, this is a
different kind of Kathryn Shay book, it has all the elements of my
brand—no easy answers, lots of emotion and a hero and heroine who
have to compromise. I hope you enjoyed it.

o0o

Visit or Contact Kathryn
at
www.kathrynshay.com
 
www.facebook.com/kathrynshay
 
www.twitter.com/KShayAuthor
 
http://pinterest.com/kathrynshay/

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To browse Kathryn’s impressive list
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A NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author, Kathryn
Shay has been a lifelong writer and teacher. She has written dozens
of self-published original romance titles, print books with the
Berkley Publishing Group and Harlequin Enterprises and mainstream
women’s fiction with Bold Strokes Books. She has won five RT Book
Reviews awards, four Golden Quills, four Holt Medallions, the
Bookseller’s Best Award, Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year and
several “Starred Reviews.” Her novels have been serialized in
COSMOPOLITAN magazine and featured in USA TODAY, THE WALL STREET
JOURNAL and PEOPLE magazine. There are over five million copies of
her books in print, along with hundreds of thousands downloaded
online. Reviewers have call her work “emotional and
heart-wrenching.”

For notification of Kathryn’s new work
and information about her books, be sure to sign up for her
newsletter at
http://on.fb.me/1bLS0bN
.

If you liked this book, you might
want to post a review of it at 
Smashwords
.