Southern Girls Know Best: Author Guest Post

Today I am able to feature an author I have a lot in common with, I couldn't be happier to share her with you!  Liz Crowe is the author of the Realtor Series including Floor Time and Sweat Equity.  Welcome to Liz and thanks to Marissa over at Sizzling PR for allowing me to share her with you!

Now y'all get ready to learn a thing or two from us Southern girls!  

About the Novels:

Floor Time (Realtor's #1)

Jack Gordon is Ann Arbor's most delectable bachelor. At age thirty-five, he's made millions as a top-selling Ann Arbor real estate broker and has the right connections to close a deal by any means necessary. With his rugged good looks and compelling personality, he has a virtual black book most men would kill for and he uses it often, never settling for one woman for very long.
While his D/s past remains buried, exactly where he wants it, an undercurrent of boredom and dissatisfaction runs through his life now. A disastrous experience years earlier made him swear off the whole scene, but the more Jack suppresses his natural Dom, the more his frustration grows.

Sara Thornton, a rookie in the real estate game, has fast-tracked herself to the top of the Ann Arbor market. Her life reflects a disciplined and focused routine, exactly the way she wants it. However, as her career takes off, the fulfillment she seeks remains inexplicably out of reach. The one thing she knows for sure, she will not join the Jack Gordon groupies in her company, no matter how tempting that might seem.

A chance encounter, then a difficult transaction, throw Jack and Sara together and the sparks fly high and hot and often. Forced to confront the compulsions that gain momentum with each sizzling encounter, their relationship seems to spiral out of control until Jack finally admits what he needs, and shows Sara what she's been missing.

Sweat Equity (Realtor's #2)

Jack Gordon thought he’d finally made it. He had a wildly successful career, money in the bank and had returned to his life as Dom, putting an end to a string of unfulfilling sexual encounters. Now that he’s made the ultimate commitment to Sara Thornton, he believes all is right in the world. But a series of misunderstandings and a dose of self-fulfilling prophesy bring his perfectly crafted house of cards tumbling down around him, forcing him to confront lingering misgivings about marriage and trust. Could those be the only two things he can never achieve?

Sara struggles with her intense need for Jack and her desire for less volatility in her busy life, which appear to be mutually exclusive goals. Although willing to put in the time and emotional effort to make their relationship work, she finds it futile and frustrating, littered with clashes thanks to near-identical personalities and temperaments. Given Sara’s history, easing back into the comfortable status quo becomes easier than fighting a war with the one person who should be her safe haven. But will the easier choice satisfy her the way only Jack can? Is her “war” one that comes from without or within?

Buffeted by circumstance, temptation and distraction, Jack and Sara’s tenuous relationship crumbles, sparking a continuous quest for the ever-elusive: trust, love and acceptance. By the time they rebuild a foundation for renewal, fate has other plans. Which leaves them both reeling, once again questioning their destiny.

Author Guest Post: 

Southern Girls Know Best

Greetings and THANKS to Lindsay for hosting me as I make the rounds of the blogosphere for my new series, The Realtors, and more specifically, Floor Time, the first of the original trilogy.

I gotta jump in with both feet here and give my bona fides for my lovely host. I was born in Nashville, Tennessee. Lived in Mobile, Alabama for several years, and Tallahassee, Florida before my family settled in Southern Kentucky (Williamsburg, to be precise, about equi-distant between Knoxville, TN and Lexington, KY).  My parents are Southerners (Kentucky and Tennessee) and I married a fine boy born and raised in Louisville whom I met at college (the University of Louisville) where I received my degree in English and served as social chairman for 2 years for my sorority, Chi Omega.

I love bourbon (and craft beer, of course), horse racing, basketball (of the Louisville Cardinal variety mind you NOT the Wildcat kind), grits, collard greens with vinegar and consider The First Saturday in May a sacred holiday (look it up).

So let’s just all settle in for a chat about how we Southern Girls Know Best, shall we?

Some of my favorite writers are southerners, or write about some of my favorite locales, like South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee. I myself am contemplating my first mainstream fiction WIP about a small town in Eastern Kentucky and the internal and external politics of it’s two main industries: coal mining and small college life. But I digress.

What I’ve always said about being a Southern Girl (and a PK to top it all off) is that we know how to be polite in ways I have never encountered in all the other places I’ve lived.  Now “polite” can also be deemed “hypocritical” if you watch movies like ‘The Help” (which has gotten me in more arguments than I care to cop to with my mid western friends for whom ‘having help’ is the most foreign arrangement they can imagine—we aren’t all mean, racist bitches. Just saying.) You might think that our sugary sweet ability to make small talk out of thin air, and grace you with a compliment about the most mundane thing is all fakery. 

It is most certainly not.

We (or at least I) were/was raised on the pure, burning principal of “say something nice” or keep your trap shut. Of course, we Southerners are a talkative bunch so that means lots of “nice” will come flowing out of us when we first meet you just to fill dead air. We mean it all. I was raised to write thank you notes for the smallest provocation, allow gentlemen to hold open doors for me and not get all bent out of shape over it and open doors myself, and to NEVER (and I mean never EVER) attend a party without bringing a “hostess gift.”

You can rest assured though if you prove yourself unworthy of our positive attention, we can cut you to ribbons with words so sweet and seemingly gentle you won’t know how injured you are until you get home and the water you drink starts leaking out all the little holes we poked in you.
That whole “Steel Magnolia” thing? Yeah. It’s real.

It takes a special kind of man to handle us. In my new release, Floor Time, The Realtors: Book One there is such a man. Craig Robinson is a soft-spoken, tall blonde Kentuckian who enters my heroine’s life at a crucial point—when she is attempting to process just how crazy things could get for her if she gives in to what seems to be an obvious fit. Her relationship with Jack Gordon starts hot and gets hotter. But when emotion creeps in for them both, it gets messy.

Enter Craig—the “new kid” in her high-powered, downtown real estate sales office. He’s charming, polite, with a sexy Southern lilt and falls head over heels for our Sara.  And he provides the perfect foil for the intense Mr. Gordon. The question is: What will Sara do about it?