Spotlight & Giveaway: PS: I Hate You by Lauren Connolly

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Lauren Connolly to HJ!

Hi Lauren and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, PS: I Hate You!

Thank you for having me!
 

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

PS: I Hate You is a road trip romance that takes place over the course of multiple years. In the beginning of the book Maddie has lost her brother to cancer, and his final request was that she spread his ashes in the eight states he never got to visit. Problem is, her brother asked his best friend Dom to go along with her. Dom, the man who broke her heart years ago.
 

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

“I love that half of your personality is puzzles and the other half is giving me shit.”

“If I have one day left, or thousands, I want you to be in every one of them.”

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

• The first state they visit is Delaware because that’s where I grew up.
• I went on the glow worm tour in Alabama so I could write the scene realistically.
• As a vegetarian I love cheese, and so does Maddie!

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

Maddie first falls for Dom when she’s just a teenager because he’s such a steady, reliable person and her life has been full of uncertainty and people leaving or rejecting her.
Dom falls for Maddie when they’re both college age and she relaxes enough around him to reveal her dry sense of humor.

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

Oh yeah, I cried a bunch during writing this book. Even though this is a romance, a lot of the book deals with grief. Maddie loved her brother Josh more than anyone in the world, and now he’s gone and she has to grieve for him in front of a man who hurt her in the past.

One of the places Maddie and Dom go to spread ashes is a beach, and I was tearing up while writing the passage:

“I dip my hand into the water swirling around my thighs and bring a finger up to my lips, spreading the salty liquid on the seam of my mouth. I sneak my tongue out, knowing this isn’t sanitary but needing to take some of this ocean into me. Testing it as if I am assessing its safety, when really I am only trying to remember everything about this place. Using all of my senses to drill this memory into my mind so I will never forget where Josh is.”

Readers should read this book….

if they want to me laughing one moment, crying the next, then swooning a few sentences later.

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

I’m working on another contemporary romance for Berkley about a flight student and her instructor–my dad flys planes for fun so he’s been my research consultant!
I would also LOVE to write some more magical romances, so I’ve been coming up with a few different proposals to see if publishers are interested. Plus I have a serialized cozy werewolf romance on Wattpad: Growls & Greeting Cards.
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: A signed paperback copy of PS: I Hate You and a character art print.

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: If you had one day left to live, how would you spend it?

 
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Excerpt from PS: I Hate You:

My brother wants his ashes spread in eight different states.
He wants me to spread his ashes in eight different states with Dominic Perry.
“He—” Dom starts, but I don’t stay to hear him finish.
I sprint out the door.
“Maddie!” His bellow follows me as I weave through strangers dressed in black, my eyes desperately seeking an exit. I need out. I need air.
I need my brother.
I hate my brother.
The words of his letter cycle through my mind as I desperately search for another meaning. How could this be his final ask? Didn’t he realize losing him would be hard enough? Now he’s demanding I spend however long touring the country with the man I most want to avoid?
And Josh doesn’t even have the decency to be here to argue with!
The large envelope crinkles in my grasping fingers as I shoulder my way into the bright midday sun, the early winter weather refusing to match the dark clouds in my mind and soul.
Even free of the stifling building, I have the urge to keep moving. Escape until I’m far enough to pretend those words I read were fiction. My laptop bag slaps the back of my legs as I stumble through a jog in my heels.
The funeral home’s door bursts open behind me.
“Maddie! Don’t run away from me!”
But that’s what I’ve been doing since I was nineteen years old, and I see no reason to stop now. My eyes catch on an open gate and my feet propel me forward faster despite the pain in my toes.
Go, go, go, my brain shouts. Go as far as you can and never look back!
“Don’t follow me!” If only Dom would leave me alone, maybe I could forget all this heartache.
“Don’t make me chase you through a graveyard.” The command of his voice and the pound of his footsteps urge me faster.
“I could never make you do anything!”
I sprint away from Dom, dodging between stone slabs with the names of people who might exist in the same realm that my brother does. They’ve all left behind people like me. Did any of them set impossible tasks for their loved ones?
The breath in my lungs burns, struggling to leave and struggling to return. The wheezing turns high pitched, a siren of warning that I’ve pushed myself too far and am about to face the consequences. I stumble to a stop next to a particularly large headstone and brace my hands on my knees as the air labors from my throat.
I shouldn’t have run.
I hate when Dom is right.
“Maddie?” The man looms over me once again. He’s good at that. Looming. Hopefully his massive form and judgmental eyes aren’t the last things I see before I pass out. “Dammit. Where is your inhaler?“
I pat my bag, attempting to find the little container of medication. A strong hand brushes mine aside and sneaks into the side pocket, as if he knows exactly where I keep the device. Dom tugs it out, checks the mouthpiece for obstructions, then presses the inhaler into my palm.
While my mind goes into desperate survival mode at the loss of oxygen, I shake the device then try to remember to time my inhale with the puff of my medicine, so the drugs make their way into my lungs. Best practice involves using a spacer—a tube-like attachment—with the inhaler, but the thing is so bulky that I never bother to carry it with me. Not when I usually go months without a flare up. Sounding like an inner tube with a leak, I squeak through a few more breaths, roughly guessing when another minute has passed, then spray a second round that’ll hopefully make it the rest of the way into my lungs to calm the damn things down and open passageways that don’t want to comply.
When I was a kid, my asthma attacks would pop up all the time. I think the only reason Florence took me to get my prescriptions filled was so she’d stop getting calls from the school nurse that I was on my way to the hospital.
As I’ve grown, things have gotten better, and I’ll go long stretches without an incident.
But the combination of grief, anger, and running was too much for my sensitive airways to handle.
As the minutes tick past slowly, breathing becomes less of a strain. At some point, I realize I’m sitting on a bench, and I wonder if I made this move or if the man standing in front of me, blocking out the sun with his broad shoulders, guided me here.
That would be a very Dom thing to do.
“Did you …” I wince and wheeze, working around the tightness in my throat. “Call an ambulance?”
“No.” He kneels in front of me, staring into my face. “I’ve seen enough of your attacks to know when to drive you to the hospital.”
“When I turn blue.” I offer. That was the joke Josh would say.
When you look like a smurf, we know things are bad.
Dom’s lips tighten, and I remind myself to keep my eyes far away from his mouth.
“Do you want to go to the hospital?” He asks.
I shake my head.
No. Hell no.
Last time I was in the hospital I was holding Josh’s hand, his skin cold and chapped as his body tried to conserve energy to survive.
Dom nods, but he stays crouched on his haunches in front of me.
I scowl. “Stop staring at me. I’ll be fine in a minute.” Probably. At least I can talk now, with only a few gasps at the end of each sentence.
Dom’s eyes narrow, but he straightens and paces away from me. My brief hope that he’s on his way out, leaving me alone to my misery, evaporates when I watch him bend over to pick up something in the grass.
The envelope.
In my frantic attempts to breathe, I must have dropped it. He spreads the opening, then tips it over. A cascade of smaller envelopes slides into his large palm. Dom shuffles through them, and my fingers curl against my stiff skirt, wanting to snatch them away.
“Eight,” he says.
“One for each state.” Just like Josh said in his letter.
That damn letter.
Dom slips them back into the large envelope then turns to face me.
“How are you doing?”
The second time he’s asked that today. At least now it’s to do with my physical well-being. “I can breathe. So, better than a few minutes ago.” I’m still lightheaded, and every part of me, inside and out feels raw.
But I’m alive, so there’s that.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

In this splendidly bittersweet romantic comedy, enemies forced together by a mutual loss are led on a cross-country journey toward a second chance.

Maddie Sanderson would be proud to honor her older brother’s dying wish, that she scatters his ashes over eight destinations that the adventurous 29-year-old never got to visit before he died from cancer. But in his will, Josh assigned her an impossible partner to help complete the mission—Dominic Perry. Seriously, if Maddie weren’t already at her brother’s funeral, she would have killed him for this.

Sure, Dom was Josh’s life-long best friend. He’s also the infuriating man who broke Maddie’s heart back when she was naïve enough to give it to him. But since Dom insists on following the rules and Josh didn’t leave much room for Maddie to argue the matter, they embark together on a series of farewell trips that span thousands of miles, exploring new places and revisiting their complicated history along the way.

After a snowstorm leads to a shared bed, Maddie starts to wonder if her brother might be matchmaking from the grave. But when grief also reopens old wounds between them, Maddie will need more than Josh’s ghostly guidance to trust Dom again.
Book Links: Amazon | B&N | kobo |
 
 

Meet the Author:

Lauren Connolly is an award-winning author of contemporary and paranormal romance stories. She’s lived among mountains, next to lakes, and in imaginary worlds. Lauren can never seem to stay in one place for too long, but trust that wherever she’s residing there is a dog who thinks he’s a troll, twin cats hiding in the couch, and bookshelves bursting with stories written by the authors she loves.
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