Title: Racing Hearts
Series: Good Sports, Book Two
Author: Alex Winters
Publisher: NineStar Press
Release Date: 10/22/2024
Heat Level: 3 – Some Sex
Pairing: Female/Female
Length: 23500
Genre: Contemporary, contemporary, family-drama, lesbian, second chance, runner, realtor
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Description
Riley Hunter was the dependable one. The good girl, loyal to a fault and faithful to the end. She’d had big dreams, once upon a time, until her grandfather got sick and she had to give up going away to college to care for him. Now, a year after his passing, Riley is a townie through and through, doing social media for a local realtor and happy with her daily grind. Or, at least, content. Content, that is, until she literally runs into her old high school crush during her morning jog one random weekday in the middle of May. The morning jog they used to run together, before Piper left three years ago, that is. Left without looking back…
Piper McPhee couldn’t wait to leave tiny Jasper, North Carolina. To run away from her abusive mother. Her dysfunctional home life. Her cloying friends and, most of all, her confused feeling about girls. And how much she adored them. The only thing she regretted leaving behind was Riley, sweet, sexy Riley. Her first and only female crush. But after three years at State, and a recent avalanche of failed romances, she can’t wait to come back to town. More specifically, come back to Riley. As the two girls pick up their old habit of running together every morning, they struggle to reconnect and realize it’s because they’re no longer friends. Or, at least, just friends. And in the days to come they’ll connect in ever increasing ways, becoming lovers at long last and realizing just how much they’ve missed by denying their feelings for far too long. And, happily, making up for lost time one scintillating tryst at a time…
Racing Hearts
Alex Winters © 2024
All Rights Reserved
“When’s the last time I saw you, Piper?”
Piper didn’t have to struggle to remember the occasion. “Sophie Tucker’s graduation party.”
Riley frowned. “So…three years then?”
“Almost four,” Piper corrected her, offering the cheap cigarette she’d picked up at a gas station off the interstate less than two hours earlier. She watched as her old friend did the mental math, waiting for the inevitable callout.
“Hmm,” Riley observed knowingly, her smoky brown eyes searching out Piper’s as they lingered near the back of the truck. “It’s too late to be home for spring break, and a few months early for graduation, so…what gives?”
Piper sagged with the weight of her decision, the old truck shifting behind her. “Do you want the whole truth?” she asked, dropping the last of her cigarette to the driveway and tamping it out herself. “Or the sanitized version I’m going to give my mom when she wakes up and finds me sitting in the kitchen, having my eighth cup of coffee of the morning?”
“The whole truth, duh.” Riley’s face was dotted with concern, making Piper feel bad for disturbing her old friend’s morning run. She knew how much those meant to Riley growing up.
“So, I…actually didn’t go to school this semester.”
“What? Why not?”
“I don’t really know, Riley. I just…didn’t want to.”
Riley nodded as if she understood, even as she began her predictably thorough interrogation. “All of a sudden? But your scholarship—”
“Shit, honey, I screwed that up sophomore year. I’ve been paying for school myself ever since.”
Riley gave her the vaguely judgmental, quietly concerned look she’d been dreading ever since deciding to drive home in the middle of the night the day before. Her lease was up, her bags were packed, her roommates were tired of her sleeping on the couch, it was time. She just wished she’d left a little sooner to avoid a predawn reunion with the one girl that got away. “I…I had no idea, Piper.”
“Well, how could you? We kind of left on not the best of terms, so…”
Riley grew indignant. Piper grew defensive. It was too early for this kind of thing, too soon, too much, too fast, yet somehow not even close to enough. Their voices mingled in the rising sun, hushed as if to match the dulcet tones of a small-town Carolina morning in the stilted air of May.
“I mean—”
“Don’t get me wrong, it’s just—”
“No, I get it, still—”
“Sure, of course, but—”
Riley’s voice struggled to have the last word. “It’s just…friends fade away, don’t they? Eventually? After a while. I mean, I don’t keep in touch with most of the kids we graduated with, do you?”
Piper wanted another cigarette so badly she could taste the acrid burn deep down in her lungs but resisted the urge. She’d always been the bad girl to Riley’s goody two-shoes, responsible, stuck-up little self, and the last thing she wanted now, upon seeing her old friend for the first time in years, was to add chain-smoking, scholarship-losing, couch-surfing, college dropout to the list.
“I’m not blaming you, Riley. I…I got all caught up in college athletics that first year, and after that, it was hard to pick up the pieces and remember I even had a life back here, you know?”
Riley nodded, glancing slightly away at her own house, further on up Sycamore Street. Her voice was oddly sentimental as she muttered, just above a whisper, “I hope you didn’t forget all about your life back here, Piper.”
Their eyes met in the shimmering new dawn, Piper nodding gently as she struggled to contain the feelings bubbling straight to the surface. She’d hoped, with nearly four years’ distance, she could have put some of those old longings to bed. Instead, they came back, harder, faster, more powerful than ever.
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Alex Winters is the pseudonym of a busy restaurant manager whose curious young staff would love nothing more than to follow him around the dining room reading his steamiest, most romantic passages aloud! When not writing romantic holiday stories of various heat levels, he enjoys long walks with his wife, scary movies, and smooth jazz. Visit him social media to see what stories are brewing up next!
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