Spotlight & Giveaway: When Grumpy Met Sunshine by Charlotte Stein

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Charlotte Stein to HJ!

Hi Charlotte and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, When Grumpy Met Sunshine!

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

When Grumpy Met Sunshine is a funny, sexy, heartwarming Romcom with a gruff Roy-Kentish hero, and a sweet, sassy curvy heroine. She has to ghostwrite his memoirs, somehow he has to let her. Then fake dating shenanigans ensue!
 

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

“You are lovely, Mabel. And not just lovely in your soul, nei-
ther. No, I mean lovely like a painting of someone important from a long time ago, reclining on some fancy thing with their thighs all soft and their shoulders all round and everything so plush it makes you ache to touch it. Lovely like the bit of moor- land I used to go near me, all wild and free, with that tangle of hair down your back and those eyes that sometimes seem brown and sometimes seem green and always, always feel like they see right into you. Sharp as a knife, but so soft you hardly care if it goes in. You want it to go in. You say thank you when it does. Because Lord, it feels so good.”

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

• It was in large part inspired by Ted Lasso, and my deep love for that show. I wanted it to have a HEA, and so I made my own!
• Much of the book was informed by my own experiences of life in the North of England, and I had a lot of fun with turns of phrase and very Northern banter.
• The telephone shoes Mabel wears actually exist, and if I could wear heels I would have bought and worn nothing but them for the rest of my life.

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

For both of them, I think it’s just sensing a kindred spirit. They both know almost right away that this person sees them for who they really are, and most importantly, likes who they really are. They value the true soul of the other person, and treat it with gentleness. And that reinforces and deepens the physical attraction between them.

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

Lol, I cannot reread the car/concert scene without blushing. I don’t even know if I can post any of it here, but I’ll give it a shot:

“Like everything is just one long, sweet ache, she thought. Like all
that exists is the thrum of your pulse between your legs, and the greed for whatever comes next, and his low voice coming out of the darkness at you, telling you all the things you never knew could make you feel this way.
And yet they do, all the same.”

Readers should read this book….

…they love Romcoms, Roy Kent, curvy heroines and delicious sex scenes.

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

I have a sexy, funny paranormal romance/Romcom coming out in the Fall—How To Help A Hungry Werewolf. And at the moment I’m working on my second contemporary Romcom, about a sweet cinnamon roll, and the woman who sorts him out!
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: 3 Finished Copies of When Grumpy Met Sunshine by Charlotte Stein

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Excerpt from When Grumpy Met Sunshine:

“Yes. No. I mean wait. Let me just think for a second, you’re going too quick.”

Good lord who is this person, she found herself thinking.

Because it wasn’t just how flummoxed she was making him—a man who once played the entire second half of a game of football after breaking his leg. No, it was the fact that she could hear something in the background. A kind of rustling and shuffling that sounded really familiar.

Then the dots connected in her head.

“Are you . . . are you reading from notes right now?” she said, and fully expected to be shot down in some way. Now, she thought, he would come back at her with something good. Something that made sense. Like maybe he’d taken a part-time job in a paper factory. Or was currently reading the script for the sequel to that movie he’d been in, about a footballer who gets sent to prison for killing the referee.

Both of which sounded mad, of course.

But less mad than what she’d just floated.

Or so she thought.

Until he answered.

“That is outrageous. I’m offended you’d suggest such a
thing,” he said.

In the most overblown and obviously lying sort of way that
she’d ever heard.

It was all she could do not to laugh. “Alfie, I can hear the
pages rustling every time you pause. And I’m pretty sure that you just muttered I’ve lost my place now under your breath.”

“Well, you try keeping track of tiny font when you haven’t got your glasses.”

Jeepers, she thought. He’s really doing it. He’s just accidentally admitted it.

Then could not help going further into whatever this was.

“I didn’t even know you needed glasses. Is that why you were squinting all the way through one of your appearances on A Question of Sport?” she asked.

And didn’t know what to expect as an answer. He’d already given her so much weirdness, it seemed impossible that he would go with more. Surely now, he would return to the Alfie Harding he had always appeared to be, on the pitch and on telly and in interviews and even while acting: never saying anything above a single syllable, always full of confident swagger, temper flaring in only the most on-the-ball sort of way.

Only he didn’t. He did not at all.

That Alfie had flown the coop, apparently.

And this absolutely terrible liar had taken his place.

“No. The studio lights were just very bright.”

“But you did it again at that awards ceremony.”

“That was only because I was tired.”

“So tired that you called Helen Mirren Helga Muppet?”

Okay that was too far, her brain immediately informed her.

Yet strangely, she didn’t feel bad about it. She felt something else, instead. Something that she didn’t immediately recognize, after years of never quite knowing how to respond when someone was mean to her. And especially when that person was powerful—which Alfie Harding undoubtedly was.

He was famous, and rich, and used to people kowtowing to him.
Yet here it was, all the same: the sense that she had won. She knew she had, before he even replied.

And when he did, oh lord in heaven.

It was glorious.

“See, I knew this would be a mistake. I could tell you’d be all insufferable with me, saying all your cute things until I’m com- pletely turned around. Well, I’m not having it,” he said all in a big, angry, frustrated rush. Then he quite clearly tried to slam the phone down on her. Because apparently, he’d forgotten that phones didn’t work that way anymore.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

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Meet the Author:

Charlotte Stein has written over thirty sexy novellas and novels, including the RT award nominated Intrusion and the DABWAHA nominated Run To You. When not writing she can be found eating jelly turtles, watching terrible sitcoms and occasionally lusting after hunks. She lives in West Yorkshire with her husband and their totally real dog.
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