Spotlight & Giveaway: Friends Don’t Fall in Love by Erin Hahn

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Erin Hahn to HJ!

Hi Erin and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, Friends Don’t Fall in Love!

 
Hello my fellow romance nerds!
 

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

FDFIL is basically my love letter to Natalie Maines (lead singer of The Chicks). Just kidding. Mostly. It’s really the story of Lorelai Jones, fallen country music starlet, and ex-fiance of superstar Drake Colter. After spending half a decade licking her wounds in Michigan, she decides to give her dreams one more shot. She reaches out to her old friend (and Drake’s old song writing partner) Craig Boseman who is now a sought-after lyricist and indie record producer in Nashville, to help her find her footing once more. There’s only a slight issue. Craig is head over a** in love with Lorelai and always has been. The two reignite their friendship and in the process, their careers, while fighting their growing feelings. Maybe if they just scratch that itch, they can go back to being best friends and business partners… or maybe they’ll light the whole damn world on fire and rewrite both their happy endings.
 

Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:

“Nothing will make a man take a full step back, clutching his chest, like the sight of a stunning woman, indignant, haughty, hot as hell and ready to throat punch the next asshole who has the nerve to tell her to shut up and sing.”

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

• The chapter titles are my own personal soundtrack to the story, carefully curated for savvy readers!
• Jonesin’ was the easiest song I’ve ever written for a book. I wrote it in one session and never reworked it. I liked it just as it was.
• The characters Jefferson Coolidge, Annie Mathers, Fitz Jacoby, Kacie Mathers, Trina Hamilton and Jason Diaz are all carried over from my very first YA romance, You’d Be Mine. It was pure joy to check in with these characters five years later and to have them play such an integral role in Craig and Lorelai’s story!
• It really *is* my love letter to Natalie Maines and The Chicks. I hate what happened to them all those years ago, and the way that country music turned their backs on them for speaking their truth. If I could write happy endings for all my favorites, I would, but this is a solid start. I watched the Not Ready to Make Nice video on repeat when I needed to get in the mood.

What first attracts your Hero to the Heroine and vice versa?

Craig and Lorelai have a special kind of magic between them. Even when Lorelai was with Drake, she referred to Craig (or Huck as she calls him) as her song writing soul mate. I think, for both of them, there’s this connection through writing music that pulls them together. They’re in love with each other’s gift. There is no where either would rather be than sitting crisscrossed on the floor of a dingy one room apartment, knees touching, drinking cheap beer and scratching out words on a notebook between them.

Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?

Oh gosh. Well Craig Boseman has a anonymous erotic poetry account on Instagram where he secretly woos Lorelai from way, way afar. It’s one thing to create a character who you say has hidden depths and writes steamy erotic poetry, its another when you have to actually WRITE the erotic poetry as your character and it has to be legit enough that your readers will believe he’s got a large following. Why do I do this to myself? I don’t even know. Here’s a snippet so you can see what I was dealing with…

Is my breath wasted if it’s only exhaled between your lips

If my fingers print the sway of your hips,

If my eyes crave to trace your freckles unseen,

If my tongue licks and lingers just in between,

If I tease out your cries,

If I spread apart your thighs,

will you save your sated sighs only for me?

(**hides red face**)

Readers should read this book….

…if they believe best friends make the best lovers
….if you think Taylor Swift and Natalie Maines and Sinead O’conner and any number of other powerful female artists should be allowed to speak their truths without being told to “shut up and sing”, receive death threats, face career cancellation…
… if you stan a secure af beta love interest with a normal body and a wicked tongue
… if you want more of Shelby , Cameron and Maren from Built to Last!

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?

I have a super busy year ahead of me, actually. Friends Don’t Fall in Love releases in October, then my final YA romance, Even If It Breaks Your Heart (which my readers will recognize by the nickname Sad Rodeo Book) releases in February of 2024 and then I just turned in my final revisions of my third grown up romance of this series, featuring Maren’s love story, and taking place at a resort in Northern Wisconsin, due to release in October of 2024!
 
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: 2 Finished copies of FRIENDS DON’T FALL IN LOVE to 2 U.S. entries!

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: Think of a time when something you said or did changed the course of your entire life. Would you go back and do it differently if you could?

 
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Excerpt from Friends Don’t Fall in Love:

It takes me approximately five minutes to find Lorelai Jones, recently spurned country music princess, let loose in Nashville. She’s perched effortlessly at the end of a shiny bar top and appears to be up to her gorgeous eyeballs in tequila and righteous fury. As expected. And as the good Lord intended, really. Nothing will make a man take a full step back, clutching his chest, like the sight of a stunning woman, indignant, haughty, hot as hell and ready to throat-punch the next asshole who has the nerve to tell her to shut up and sing.
She’s a goddamn vision.
I pause at the entrance to Georgie’s, the seediest of seedy dive bars off Broadway, to give my eyes time to adjust. The contrast inside to the glowing neon outside is almost poetic, if not most certainly ironic as fuck. Everyone, and I mean everyone, is looking for Lorelai: her cowardly sycophant agent, her second-rate bandmates, every country music news outlet from CMT to Square to Sirius to TMZ… everyone except the one fucker who ought to be hunting her down on his hands and knees, her ex-fiancé, Drake Colter.
But since my partner is off being a supreme dickhead, rejecting his almost-wife as publicly and soundly as possible in the barely eighteen hours since she bravely played Crosby, Still, Nash, and Young’s Ohio to a sold-out stadium crowd, calling out legislators to challenge the second amendment after yet another devastating mass shooting… well. Since all that happened, I’m here. At Georgie’s.
I rub my hand against my face, catching on stubble, and grimace. I’m not the one who should be here, but somehow, I always am anyway. Can’t help it. It’s what friends do and if there’s anything I am, it’s one hell of a friend.
Lorelai still hasn’t noticed me, so I take a deep breath, straighten my shoulders and wipe all traces of exhaustion from my features, replacing it with good old-fashioned shit-eating charm. Because that’s me. Irreverent goofball. Backup bass player. Best friend trope in the flesh.
(What? I’ve read romance. Well I’ve read the alien fucking romances anyway.)
Lorelai’s head is thrown back in a loud cackle, her long slender throat exposed and the Jose Cuervo fumes rolling off her smooth skin in those wavy little heatwaves. She’s shimmying to some Halsey, which is the first clue that something’s really wrong (as if I needed confirmation). Halsey’s for bottles of overpriced cabernet on my loft balcony while the stars wink overhead; she’s for deep conversations and sarcastic avoidance.
She’s not for bar top shimmying and forced hilarity in a dingy bar where the clientele is 90% bikers.
I make my way to the electronic jukebox and swipe my debit, picking Tom Petty’s Mary Jane’s Last Dance as well as loading a bunch of Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and George Strait just in case we’re here for a while. The familiar opening guitar riff kicks in and it’s as if Lorelai’s been struck by lightning. She freezes comically in place, spinning her head around, searching, until she locks eyes with who she’s looking for.
Me.
I ignore the sharp pang in the region of my long-dead heart and hitch a half-cocked grin before making my way to her side and forgoing to the stool, hopping straight onto the bar top next to her.
“Had to be Ohio, huh? Should have just gone for the full-frontal assault and pulled out Southern Man to really do the thing properly.”
She snorts into her glass, making the ice cubes clink. “Might as well have done. I was going for subtle.”
“Fun fact: subtle and stadium aren’t as synonymous as you think.”
She makes a face. “Where were you with that wisdom two days ago?”
I accept my beer from a harried Georgie with a nod and raise my brow to my friend. “Would it have made a difference?”
She doesn’t respond. Doesn’t need to. It is what it is. Lorelai can’t change and I wouldn’t ask her to. Before she became famous for country crooning, she was a schoolteacher. She’ll never be able to shed the trauma of hiding twenty-five eight-year-olds in a tiny bathroom during active shooter drills every other month all while knowing if someone ever actually threatened her students with a gun, she would place her own tiny body between them without hesitation.
That shit doesn’t fade just because you sing to arenas full of people and accept gold statues. It imprints on your DNA and bleeds out in every interaction. Lorelai Jones couldn’t hold on to that mic night after night and stay silent about her biggest heartache.
And I love her for it.
So instead of criticizing, I take a long draw from my beer and say, “A Boy Named Sue.”
A relieved, pretty smile spreads across Lorelai’s flushed face and she immediately picks up on our familiar game of Best Song Ever Written. She thinks a minute and says, Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.”
“Hell,” I mutter. “I handed you that one,” I concede that round and start another. “Night Moves.”
“Tennessee Whiskey,” she counters.
“Jolene,” I fire back. This time, she concedes my win with the tilt of her head, her dark waves falling over her shoulder. There might be better songs than Jolene. Arguably, Dolly Parton’s Coat of Many Colors or even 9 to 5 are mighty contenders. The fact that Lorelai doesn’t even try is plenty telling. That’s not what we’re about tonight.
“Next round’s on me,” she offers, tipping back the rest of her drink and I work to catch up, gulping my beer down. If Lorelai wants to sit in this bar and get drunk, then that’s just what we’ll do.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

Erin Hahn’s Friends Don’t Fall in Love is about long-time friends, taking chances, and finding out that, sometimes, your perfect person was right there in your corner all along.

Lorelai Jones had it all: a thriving country music career and a superstar fiancé. Then she played one teenie tiny protest song at a concert and ruined her entire future, including her impending celebrity marriage. But five years later, she refuses to be done with her dreams and calls up the one person who stuck by her, her dear friend and her former fiancé’s co-writer and bandmate, Craig.

Craig Boseman’s held a torch for Lorelai for years, but even he knows the backup bass player never gets the girl. Things are different now, though. Craig owns his own indie record label and his songwriting career is taking off. If he can confront his past and embrace his gifts, he might just be able to help Lorelai earn the comeback she deserves—and maybe win her heart in the process.

But when the two reunite to rebuild her career and finally scratch that itch that’s been building between them for years, Lorelai realizes a lot about what friends don’t do. For one, friends don’t have scratch-that-itch sex. They also don’t almost-kiss on street corners, publish secret erotic poetry about each other, have counter-top sex, write songs for each other, have no-strings motorcycle sex, or go on dates. And they sure as heck don’t fall in love… right?
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Meet the Author:

ERIN HAHN is the author of the young adult novels You’d Be Mine, More Than Maybe, and Never Saw You Coming as well as the adult romance Built to Last. Romance is her vibe, grunge is her soundtrack and fall is her signature color. She fell for her flannel-clad college sweetheart the very first day of school and together, they have two hilarious kids who keep her humble. She lives outside Ann Arbor, Michigan, and has a cat named Gus who plays fetch and a dog named June who doesn’t.
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