Free Book, Contest & Excerpt!

Irish Heat is FREE today on Amazon! Pick it up here! Also, Dirtying It UP, my sexy Valentine's Day story is free, too! Get it here! Both are Top 5 Amazon bestsellers!!

Also, if you're a Books We Love blog fan or you made your way over here after reading my feature on Irish Heat at The Romance Studio, I'm giving away a $25 Amazon gift card! Just leave a comment on this post and your email addy (so I can contact you about your prize) and you're entered to win! So easy!

Finally, I have an excerpt for you! Irish Heat is a #3 Amazon Hot New Release and YES, it's FREE at Amazon!

Irish Heat by Calista Fox

Narrowly escaping with his life after infiltrating a powerful Irish mob family in Chicago, undercover detective Rourke O’Reilly finds himself in a different kind of danger when he returns to his birthplace in Ireland to return a gold coin he’d been bullied into stealing when he was just ten years old. Curses, spells and murder mar the mysterious and mystical land of Talamh an Óir, but a beautiful, russet-haired woman awaits him, ready to help Rourke reclaim everything he’s lost over the years...

If she doesn’t accidentally kill him with an Irish death curse first.


Excerpt:

Chapter One

Rourke. Your name is Rourke O’Reilly.

He didn’t dare say the words out loud. Given his current circumstances, he never knew who was listening in on his conversations. Whether his crapbox of an apartment on Chicago’s south side was bugged, along with the payphone in the lobby he used once or twice every six months to tell family members he was still among the land of the living. Rourke had no idea who he could trust and who he couldn’t these days, aside from a couple of cousins and his police commander.

What he did know was that if he didn’t repeat his name in his head every morning when he woke up, he just might lose his identity altogether. He just might start believing he really was Royce O’Neal, a two-bit criminal who’d worked his way far enough up the food chain with the Shaughnessy family to get a birds-eye view of what the Irish mob boss was up to—and collect enough evidence to bust his lying, cheating, murdering ass.

With a low groan over the toil of late, Rourke rolled onto his back and stared up at the cracks in the ceiling for a few minutes. The rumpled sheets on the unmade bed were scratchy against his bare back and feet. Jeans covered his legs, opened at the waist, though he couldn’t remember why. Quite possibly, he’d been too lazy to button all the way up after using the john. Or he’d considered stripping down to his shorts in his drunken stupor, but had then abandoned the idea. A wise decision. He often slept with his clothes on, never knowing when he might have to dive out the window and onto the fire escape to keep from getting his head blown off.

Last night could have been one of those times. For his own safety and for the good of the case he was working on, he really shouldn’t have gotten plowed. That could’ve turned out to be a deadly mistake. But, Jesus... He’d gotten an eyeful at the warehouse on the docks—a horrific scene he’d needed to block out with an alcohol-induced haze. He’d had a panoramic view of a nightmare he prayed he’d never bear witness to again in his life. No matter how long or short it turned out to be.

Sitting up, he swung his legs over the side of the bed and reached for a pack of cigarettes. He wasn’t a fan of cancer sticks, but Royce was, so he shook one out of the box and lit it. Leaving behind a life he’d lived for over three years would be difficult, no matter how shitty the conditions. The cockroach-invested apartment, the double bed with the thin mattress that provided absolutely no barrier against the springs poking through, the lukewarm shower water, the noise from shouting neighbors... No human being should be stuck with this lot in life, but there were plenty of impoverished families occupying the sardonically named Serendipitous Villas.

Villas, my Irish ass.

And he’d yet to find anything serendipitous about the low-rent cesspool in which he lived.

He’d be thrilled to get the hell out of here, if only he knew where to go. He’d been deep undercover for so long, he had no idea what to do with himself now that he was about to blow this case wide open. Shaking all of Royce’s bad habits would be even more challenging.

As he blew out a long stream of smoke, he spared a glance at the alarm clock. It was nearly two o’clock. He’d slept like the dead, even the usual back-alley racket from the street below not waking him. A miracle, really, and his first full night of sleep in longer than he could remember. He should feel refreshed, but it was tough to shed the nitty-grittiness of street life that seemed to cling to his skin, no matter how often he showered.

Before taking another drag from his cigarette, he lifted a glass from the scarred nightstand and sucked down the last gulp of stale, cheap whisky he hadn’t finished the prior evening before passing out.

Wincing from the burn down his throat and in his gut—and the harsh flavor—he set the glass back on the table and stood. He stretched in hopes of minimizing the strain in his bunched muscles. Rolled his neck back and forth a few times. Scratched all the usual places. Then he took a step toward the window to push back the worn blanket covering the dingy pane. He stopped dead in his tracks, though. Despite the fact the window faced the brick wall of the neighboring building not more than five feet away, he reminded himself he likely had a bull’s eye tattooed across his naked chest. If anyone from Shaughnessy’s gang had seen him in the warehouse last night, he was now a moving target. They’d know he was a cop, no matter what extremes he’d gone to over the years to prove he wasn’t.

Ah, the things he’d done...

A sharp grunt fell from his lips where the cigarette dangled. Absently, his fingers closed around the black band he wore on his right wrist and he massaged all the sore spots through the thick material that covered a slit wrist and calcified lumps, only temporarily alleviating the perpetual ache from bones that hadn’t healed properly. “Initiation” scars left by the Irish thugs he intended to take down.

Turning back to the bedroom door, he passed through it, limping slightly from the dull throb in his knees, having jumped out of a two-story window at the warehouse in order to keep from getting spotted. Or shot. By the luck of the Irish, he’d landed on a stack of empty cardboard boxes, after he’d secured the recording he’d needed, both video and audio. It was enough to seal Frank Shaughnessy’s coffin shut...which provided a hint of relief to the too-tight tension Rourke had felt in his chest since the day his parents had been gunned down, thanks to Shaunghnessy, a distant descendent of the notorious mobster, Dean O’Banion, who’d run the powerful North Side Gang during the Prohibition Era.

The O’Reillys’ deaths had been a simple case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They’d been leaving an outdoor farmer’s market on the north side when a territory war between Shaughnessy’s gang and another Irish mob family had broken out. That had been ten years ago, when Rourke was twenty and entering his junior year at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on a full-ride football scholarship. He’d immediately changed his major from Environmental Agriculture to Law, with an emphasis in Criminology.

Rourke craved vengeance and justice. To this day, it was a living, breathing entity that drove his every decision, propelled his every action.

He wasn’t capable of cold-blooded murder—even his alter-ego, Royce O’Neal, wasn’t that vicious—so busting the bastard responsible for his parents’ deaths and sending him down the river for the next twenty or so years would have to suffice.

Entering the kitchen, he snubbed out his cigarette in the sink, turned on the rusty faucet and filled the cracked, glass carafe that leaked coffee as it brewed. The liquid sizzled on the small hotplate as he crossed to the far corner and, at the counter’s edge, slammed his heel against a loose floorboard. His bare foot caused the wooden plank to spring free and he bent down to retrieve the accordion folder file he’d filled with incriminating evidence. It’d all go to his lieutenant commander, who was cooperating with the FBI, since Rourke was the one to infiltrate the gang, rather than a Bureau agent.

Aside from testifying—if he lived long enough for that, because he wasn’t going back to the family after last night’s massacre and that would for sure seal his fate with the mob boss—he could wash his hands of this case. And try to figure out what the hell to do with himself going forward. A dismal, yet glaring reality he needed to face—pronto. But right now, he was dragging his feet.

He unwound the elastic cord from the bulging envelop and added his Smartphone to the stash. It had the recording on it, the footage of five men tied to posts and shot executioner-style by Frank’s men, while Frank stood by and watched. He hadn’t done the dirty work, but he’d ordered the murders, and Rourke had caught that command on his phone as well. There was plenty of other evidence to jack Shaughnessy’s program, and all of it as a whole would put an end to one of Chicago’s Irish mob families.
After returning the file to its hiding place, he turned on the small TV that sat on the counter and washed some dishes as he listened to the continuous coverage of today’s Breaking News. Of course, the top story was the murders. Shaughnessy had wanted to send a clear message to one of the other gangs in town—an Italian crew attempting to usurp Shaughnessy’s power—and he’d left the bodies in the warehouse. A ballsy, cocky thing to do. The man obviously thought he was above reproach...and the law.

Rourke needed to get on the phone and share what he knew about all of this with his superiors. What the hell was holding him up?

Maybe he wanted to savor the sweet taste of revenge a bit longer, before Shaughnessy attempted to exact his retribution. Maybe it was the fact Rourke didn’t have an exit strategy in place. He’d begun to doubt this day would ever come. Now that it was here... Well, it was sort of overwhelming to process.

Avoidance worked for him for the moment. After making a halfway decent attempt at cleaning his kitchen, he opened the fridge and inspected the minimal contents. As he calculated in his head the number of days the leftover food had been sitting on one of the shelves—wondering if all the whisky he’d consumed last night would counteract the bacteria growing on week-and-a-half old chili—another news report caught his attention. A robbery and “questionable death” that had taken place downtown.

Questionable?

That piqued his interest. Dead was dead, right?