Soggy soccer games and steamy summer fiction!

This has been a busy week here in the Baker household. The Barnacle's preschool let out last week so it was the start of her summer vacation, and the Bub's last day of kindergarten was Tuesday. It's been stormy and gross here, which means I've been stuck inside with grumpy kiddos who had gleefully been awaiting the arrival of summer for weeks (there were charts and a video count-down diary involved...the Bub is very thorough).

All kindergartners read apocalyptic classics, right?

Luckily, the Bub is a bookworm like me, so he's been amusing himself by getting a start on his summer reading. I bought him the abridged version of War of the Worlds thinking it would get him through the summer as a reading project. It's 150 pages (and he's 6 with the attention span of a gnat) so I'd planned to spend the next two months cajoling him into sitting long enough to read a page or two at a time. He plowed through it in two days. He even snuck it into bed with him so he could finish, as I found out when he started yelling "It was the germs!" at 11:30 p.m., hours after I thought he was asleep. Hubs and I had to promise him we'd have a book club discussion about the end of the book over breakfast the next morning just to get him to shut up.

It was still pouring this morning when I dutifully marched over to the soccer fields to watch the Barnacle and the Bub play and Hubs coach. Seriously, they play in the rain. It's not like they're in a feeder system for the Premier League...this is U6 rec soccer! Let's be honest: They're primarily in it for the snacks afterward.

Maybe the smile was just on the inside...

Anyway, despite being soggy and frozen, I had a smile on my face because Diving In released today! It's part of the Dreamspinner Press Make a Play Anthology, which is filled with a lot of steamy sports action to start your summer on the right foot.

I loved writing this piece, and not just because it meant I got to watch YouTube videos of water polo matches. (Hubs wandered in during one session, looked at the laptop, shook his head, and walked back out of the room. What? It was research!)

Diving In has Speedos, hot sex, and a hint of angst and pining--everything you could ask for in a pool or beach read. (Or the in a I-wish-I-was-at-the-pool-or-beach read for those of us who are land-locked and/or stuck in the eternal misery that is a Midwestern spring.)

If you pick it up, I'd love to know what you thought of Diving In. You can find me here, on Twitter, or on Goodreads. *g*

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Diving In

Being the pool boy makes it easy for Max Jansen to ogle his long-time crush, water polo player Everett Caldwell. Never mind the fact that Max owns the company and is extremely overqualified for the task of monitoring chlorine and cleaning skimmers. He's just happy to watch his unattainable dream play—until one day Everett invites him over and suddenly Max is his platonic plus-one for everything from movie nights to racy industry parties. Then Max learns the one-time Olympian isn't as straight as everyone assumes, and he isn't sure how long he can hold out before his crush grows much deeper.