Welcome to Amelia C. Gormley visiting Love Bytes on her Riptide blog tour for her new release Player vs Player
She offers an excerpt to her story and there is a giveaway to participate in
Welcome Amelia !

An Excerpt from Player vs Player: The Tim-Wyatt-Go-Round

 

Hi, and welcome to the Player vs. Player blog tour! Today I’ll be sharing a scene with you between Niles River and his twin brother, Jordan, where Niles discusses his chance encounter with his ex-flame, Detective Tim Wyatt.

*****

“How did things go with the police?” He frowned. Niles looked exhausted. Of course, they had all been up late last night, and he and Niles had gone to breakfast early that morning, but every one of his senses was pinging an alert that something was eating his brother.

“Pssh. Don’t ask.”

“Okay and now I have to ask. How did things go with the police?”

“Fine. Fine.” Niles flapped one hand, the other still covering his eyes. “They’re not going to open an investigation now, but the . . . detective I spoke to is going to keep the letter on file so if there are any more incidences, I can bring them to his attention. If there’s a next time, we’re not to get our fingerprints on it.”

Interesting hesitation there before “detective.”

“Right. Okay. Sounds good . . . So what’s with the reaction?”

“Nothing. It’s nothing. I’m just tired. And distracted. And I need to get this fucking scene done, and apparently the universe doesn’t want to let me do that.”

Jordan grinned. “I’ll be out of your hair after the pizza arrives.”

Niles made a dismayed sound. “No, it’s not you. It’s just too much going on all at once.”

“Is Anthony still calling you a lot?”

“Yeah, but nothing I can’t handle.”

“Are you letting those assholes get to you?” Jordan gestured at Niles’s closed computer with an open hand. “I mean, you’ve been talking a good game about not giving it any attention, but—”

“No. No.” Niles groaned and let his hand fall away from his face. “Timothy Wyatt.”

“What?” It took him a moment to place the name, the hunky country boy from college who had been Niles’s lab partner and first love on pretty much every level. Mostly what Jordan remembered was how long it had taken his bruised hand to heal when he’d belted the guy for blatantly using Niles’s infatuation with him to check out the action on the other side of the tracks. “What about him?”

“He’s here. In Portland. He’s the detective I spoke to.” Niles scoffed and covered his face again. “I let him take me to lunch. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I should have turned him down.”

“He asked you to lunch? Mr. I’m-Not-a-Fag-I-Just-Fuck-Guys-for-Science?” Jordan snorted, scratching at his jaw. “Let me guess, he wanted to keep you out of the police station so you wouldn’t say anything that might out him?”

“Oh no. He’s divorced now. And apparently out and proud. He has a whole new life, or so he says.” Niles peeked between his fingers. “He wants me to go on a date with him.”

“Wow. That takes some balls after what he pulled. Jesus.” He scrutinized his brother as Niles dropped his hands. “What did you tell him?”

“What do you think I should have told him?”

“Pfft. Uh-uh. Not going there. When it involves sex or relationships, you’re on your own unless someone needs their ass kicked.”

“I turned him down.”

Jordan nodded slowly. “Not necessarily a bad idea. Having second thoughts?”

“No. Yes. Damn it, I don’t know.” Niles’s chair squeaked as he squirmed in his seat, rubbing his fingertip up and down the armrest of his chair. “He turns my head around. He always has.”

“He turns your head off, and he always has. At least the one that holds up your hair.”

“That too. Jesus. I’m so pitiful.” Niles made a dismayed sound, closing his eyes. “If you had asked me ten years ago, I would have said this was everything I ever wanted handed to me on a silver platter. Tim. Out. Apologizing to me. Wanting to be with me. Hell, pursuing me. Hard to let that go even if it’s not a good idea. My inner twenty-two-year-old is practically squeeing.”

Jordan smiled, remembering a time when Niles had squeed like a preteen girl with a celebrity crush over Tim Wyatt. “And your inner thirty-two-year-old?”

“Thinks there’s too much history there. Too much hurt. It’s too good to be true. I can’t trust it.”

“Well, who can blame you after what he did?”

“I know, right?” Niles sighed. “Past is past for a reason. We don’t get do-overs.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far.” Jordan smiled wryly, brushing a speck of lint off his slacks. “I’m not saying you should consider it, nor am I saying you shouldn’t, but people do sometimes manage to redeem themselves on second chances. Whatever you do, just w—” He almost said watch yourself before he remembered the note delivered to Niles’s house and flinched. “—be careful.”

“What, you don’t want me to get hurt again?” Niles mirrored his smile.

“I don’t want to break my fist on that fucker’s face again.”

“Your protectiveness is touching, truly.” He tipped his head back, staring up at the ceiling panels. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll just sit on it for a while. Wait until the trolls and the protesters crawl back where they came from and I’m not under so much pressure.”

A wistful look crossed Niles’s face and with the perfect clarity of understanding they often shared, Jordan could nearly hear the thought as if it were his own: fucking Tim would sure relieve some pressure.

Ducking his head to hide another smile, Jordan started resigning himself to the prospect of his brother taking another trip on the Tim-Wyatt-Go-Round.

The night security guard called to tell them their pizza had arrived, and Jordan excused himself to retrieve it. When he returned to Niles’s office with the grease-stained box in-hand, steam seeping out around the edges, Rosie was there, her grin far too toothy.

“Oh shit, what is it?”

“I am about to make your year,” she practically sang, hitching herself up to sit on the edge of Niles’s desk. Niles still reclined in his chair, watching with an amused smile.

“Well, don’t keep me in suspense.” Jordan set the pizza on a filing cabinet and started laying out napkins.

“We’re going to be picketed again later this week.”

His eyebrows crept up, and he turned to face her. That cat-in-cream, gloating look was pretty fucking disconcerting. “This is a good thing?”

“It is when it’s the Guiding Light Fellowship doing the picketing.”

“What?” His own face split into a wide grin. “Those douche bags out of Nebraska with the ‘Fags Will Burn’ signs who even conservatives hate?”

Rosie bit her lip and nodded, her eyes dancing.

“Holy shit.” He laughed, a giddy, incredulous hoot, and visions of counterprotests and letters of support campaigns blossomed in his head. “Thank you, Coalition for Responsible Media or whoever the fuck you are. This is excellent. They just put exactly the right spotlight on us to undo the results of their own negative PR. I’ll see you guys later.” He snagged a few steaming slices of pizza onto a napkin and headed for the door. “I’ve got work to do.”

 

*****

Pushing for change can be dangerous when change starts pushing back.

Video game writer Niles River loves the work he does at Third Wave Studios: creating games with mass appeal that feature women, people of color, and LGBTQ characters. To make his job even better, his best friend is his boss, and his twin brother works beside him. And they mostly agree that being on the forefront of social change is worth dealing with trollish vitriol—Niles is more worried about his clingy ex and their closeted intern’s crush on his brother than he is about internet harassment.

But now the bodies on the ground are no longer virtual, and someone’s started hand-delivering threats to Niles’s door. The vendetta against Third Wave has escalated, and to make matters worse, the investigating detective is an old flame who left Niles heartbroken for a life in the closet.

No change happens without pain, but can Niles justify continuing on with Third Wave when the cost is the blood of others? If he does, the last scene he writes may be his own death.

*****

Amelia C. Gormley may seem like anyone else. But the truth is she sings in the shower, dances doing laundry, and writes blisteringly hot m/m erotic romance while her son is at school. When she’s not writing in her Pacific Northwest home, Amelia single-handedly juggles her husband, her son, their home, and the obstacles of life by turning into an everyday superhero. And that, she supposes, is just like anyone else.

Her self-published novel-in-three-parts, Impulse (Inertia, Book One; Acceleration, Book Two; and Velocity, Book Three) can be found at most major online book retailers, and be sure to check Riptide for her latest releases, including her Highland historical, The Laird’s Forbidden Lover, the The Professor’s Rule series of erotic novelettes (co-written with Heidi Belleau), the post-apocalyptic romance, Strain, her New Adult contemporary, Saugatuck Summer, and of course, Player vs. Player, available now. She is presently at work on two more novels set in the Strain universe, Juggernaut and Bane, coming summer/fall of 2015.

You can contact Amelia on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, BookLikes, Tumblr, or contact her by email using the form at http://ameliacgormley.com/

Every comment on this blog tour enters you in a drawing for a choice of one a book from my backlist (excluding Player vs Player.) Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on December 13th. Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. entries.