Set in horse country near Lexington, Kentucky, The Love Brothers Series is a saga of family devotion that runs as wide and deep as the Ohio River - except on Sundays when brothers Antony, Kieran, Dominic, and Aiden work out their frustrations on the basketball court, Love brother style.
The Love Brothers: A family saga with humor, heat and heart - not to mention beer, bourbon, and basketball.
Description:
Every family has one—the black sheep, the problem child, the prodigal. But Dominic Sean Love could teach all of those guys a lesson or two. Stuck in the middle of a boisterous group of siblings, he’s given “acting out” a new meaning from the day he drew his first breath.
While he’s the one son who follows his strict father’s footsteps into the Love family business, he’s also the one who butts heads with him the hardest. Their epic clashes are the stuff of family legend. But they have made peace and work side by side to take Love Brewing to the next level of success.
Until Dominic does the one thing his father can never forgive.
Diana Brantley has been Dominic’s friend, girlfriend and ex-girlfriend so many times she’s lost count. When he shows up at the farm she’s slowly transforming into a wildly popular farm-to-table resource for restaurants all over the U.S. her first impulse is to shoot first and ask questions later. But she doesn’t. And their lives entwine once more, for good, bad and ugly.
Antony Ian Love has a lot on his ample shoulders. He owns and runs a small business, is estranged from his teenaged daughter AliceLynn, his beloved mother is dying of cancer, and he's come face to face with his youngest brother Aiden's sudden reappearance into the Love family circle. Years of sublimating his true self in deep mourning for his long dead wife have hardened the surly, emotional shell he's nurtured, but one woman seems to have broken through. Rosalee Norris is the young widow of Antony's best friend Paul and their mutual sorrow and close friendship has slowly morphed into something more.
Family therapist and recent divorcee Margot Hamilton is dropped into the close-knit Love family by necessity but fate has a real design twist in mind. With her heart and mind closed to anything resembling an emotional connection, Margot is shocked to discover something about Antony the very first time they meet--something she tries, and fails, to resist.
SAFE LOVE, The Love Brothers novella is a tale of love's realistic complications within the saga of family devotion that runs as wide and deep as the Ohio River--except on Sundays when brothers Antony, Kieran, Dominic and Aiden work out their frustrations on the basketball court, Love brother style
EXCERPT
Exclusive Sneak Peak from Chapter 1
Diana patted Pepper’s
flank as she released him into the paddock then leaned against the barn door,
relishing the soreness in her muscles. The sun burned a white hole in the
light-blue late summer sky. Smells of her childhood filled her nose, smoothing
her edges.
A
bit of coolness in the air, heralding the coming seasonal transition sent a
shiver of anticipation down her spine. Masie, the pregnant cow, uttered a low
moo, snapping Diana out of daydreaming about her favorite season—the hunting
kind. It brought her long to-do list flashing across her brain, reminding her
she still had to finish mucking out the rest of the barn. The garden was in
desperate need of weeding, too. The last of her tomatoes were due in and her
sister had already sent three texts that morning about the chicken salad Diana
still had to make and get over to the shop.
With a heavy sigh,
she let the light wind cool her skin. Her arms burned and her thighs shook in a
wholly welcome, familiar way, post long ride. She dropped onto the overturned
bucket from the horse’s cool-and-wash.
“Go on, get out
there, ya big baby.”
She smiled when the
huge animal nuzzled her shoulder before he trotted away obediently, sticking
his nose into the water trough, tail flicking lazily, indicating satisfaction with
the morning’s proceedings. Bees buzzed, the cow made another lowing sound, late
season locusts hummed, and the sun heated her skin. Drifting, her mind calm and
free of Jen’s endless demands and catering menus she let the sweet sounds and
distinct odors of her family’s farm soothe her.
When the horse
whinnied and snorted, Diana ignored it and stretched her legs out. One of the
dogs let out a loud bark then the other two joined in. They sounded delighted,
so Diana figured that her sister must have arrived in the catering van to pick
up the chicken salad—the one Diana hadn’t even started yet.
Deciding to pretend
she was alone a minute longer and enjoy the peace and quiet she always found in
the barn, Diana closed her eyes.
“Hey.” A
distressingly familiar male voice hit her ears. “Um...Diana?”
She blew out a
breath, unwilling to acknowledge how much she would have given at one point in
her life to hear that voice say her name again.
“What do you want?”
“Just a place to
crash. Hide a bit, I don’t know.”
“Why now? I thought
you and your folks were gettin’ on like a house afire.” She tried to keep the
anger out of her words, but it was nearly impossible.
“Diana. Please.”
She opened her eyes
and observed the man she’d loved as long as she could recall. Dominic Love
stood in front of her dressed in, of all things, a pair of dress pants and
crumpled, long-sleeved shirt. A red tie hung loose around his neck. He had his
blond hair scraped back and tied at his nape so she could see he’d added more
body art. He stood still, hands tucked in his trouser pockets, his expression
scarily blank.
She rose and smacked
the dust off her ass then stood, arms crossed, willing him not to be there, not
to tempt her, because God help her still loved the man, despite how badly he’d
treated her.
“I am not letting you
back in my bed, Dom.”
When the corner of
his full lips lifted in a smirk, she imagined how satisfying it would feel to
smack it off his face—with a blunt instrument.
“Not asking for
that…yet.”
“Go to hell.” She
brushed by him, forcing him out of her brain. He snagged her arm and held on
tight.
“I’m already there,
babe, trust me. I swear I just need a friend right now and someplace to lay
low. I’ll help around the place, you know that.”
As if on cue, the
horse bumped Dom’s shoulder, shoving the man forward. The grip on her arm
tightened and Dom leaned in close. She yanked away from him, keeping her gaze
on the far horizon and her mind on the fact that if she went with her gut right
then, she’d pull him back into her life, no questions asked.
“You can sleep out
here.”
He let go. “Thanks,
babe.”
She clenched her jaw.
“Stop calling me babe, you shit-heel,
motherfucking, selfish, cheating asshole.”
“Okay,” he muttered,
but his eyes were bright in a way she knew well.
She walked away,
letting the memory of their last, and she believed final, fight fill her mind,
fueling her fury as she put one boot in front of the other, placing as much
distance as she could between them.
The dogs circled her
legs, escorting her en masse to the door.
It slammed, cutting off their nervous whines and snuffling, leaving her
standing in the middle of her outdated, overworked kitchen. Usually being in
this room helped her forget all the crap going on in the real world while she
transformed the various vegetables from her large garden and the meats she’d
either hunted or raised herself into meals fit for a five-star restaurant.
She shook her head.
There were no five-star-restaurants
in her universe and there never had been. Even thinking those three words in
that order caused heat to rise up her neck and into her face at the memory of
her ex-husband—the man who’d swooped in right after Dominic’s last rejection of
her and convinced her that he would open the restaurant of her dreams, using
the inheritance money she’d saved.
Yeah, that had worked
out not-so-well.
Men.
Stupid, lying, cheating men.
Stupid me and my stupid need to have one nearby all the
stupid time.
Her hand landed on
something substantial and her fingers curled around it. She picked up the cast
iron pan slowly, contemplating it for a split second, recalling she’d left it
out to use for frying bacon. With a noise between a grunt and a yell, she put
every bit of long-forgotten frustration into the effort to fling the pan at the
door. At the last second she worried she might hit one of the dogs.
But there was no
canine yip of pain. They’d vacated her immediate area, likely sensing the
temper eruption on her horizon before she did. It did bust a satisfying hole
through the screen at the top of the door and hit the back porch railing with a
musical clang that echoed back to her
still burning ears.
She blew her hair out
of her eyes, ready to tackle the next thing on her long to-do list—this time
free of any memory of her last disaster of a relationship. That loser—now
officially her ex-husband—had been floating through, setting up some chain
restaurant over in Lexington. Memories of his handsome face and lying mouth
rolled through her head even as she tried to halt them.
A real five-star restaurant, Di, he’d liked to say, usually
when they were naked. That and, You
should try it, and, I could use
thirty thousand of your dollars to make it work, plus, let’s get married!
And they were naked a
lot.
Diana groaned and
leaned over the sink for a few seconds then straightened. She had too much to
do. There was no time for that kind of useless reminiscing. Damn Dominic Love
to hell and back for showing up and sending her into this tailspin.
She grabbed her
mother’s soup pot, slammed it into the sink and starting filling it from the
leaky tap. A breeze lifted the lace curtains at the window, stirring the hair
around her face. She smelled the rain a few seconds before it let loose,
pounding onto the grass between the kitchen window and the barn. Squinting through
the sheeting water she spotted Dominic standing in the middle of the paddock,
seemingly impervious to the deluge.
Pepper trotted over
to see what could possibly make the tall, yellow-haired male human stand in the
rain like an idiot. When Dom didn’t respond to nudging, the animal gave every
appearance of shrugging and glancing in her direction with a whattaya gonna do look before getting under cover in the barn.
Within a very few
minutes, Dom’s drenched dress shirt clung to him. She watched, gape-jawed and
shivering as he yanked his hair from its tie and shook it free, turning his
face to take the full force of the increasing downpour, arms outstretched as if
preparing for crucifixion. Then he seemed to disappear in the space of a blink.
She turned off the tap, which was overflowing the pot by then anyway, and ran
out the door.
Heart pounding, ears
ringing with well-remembered panic over what she might find, she took the
expanse of grass between house and paddock in a few long strides. In her fury
at how casually he’d sauntered back into her life that morning, she hadn’t
thought to study his eyes very closely. Diana had memorized long ago how
Dominic’s deep-brown gaze took a particular edge, a kind of sharp, distinctive
sparkle, when he hovered on the verge of a breakdown.
The rain soaked all
the way to her skin by the time she rounded the post at the paddock. At a burst
of lightening, she flinched and started counting, only getting to three seconds
before the ear-splitting thunderclap. She squinted, seeking a prone, muddy
Dominic. But the paddock was empty.
Cursing,
she glanced back at the house. It was pretty well futile to run back now that
she’d gotten drenched. She mirrored Dom’s earlier stance, letting the rain
pound against her cheeks, forehead, and lips. Lightning flashed. Thunder
followed. Laughter bubbled up from her throat, only getting louder as she
realized what an utter whack job she must be, out there, cackling and drinking
rain.
About the author:
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.
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