Featured Author: Kimberly Hanson

I’m going to try something a little new over here on the blog: #FeaturedAuthorFriday. First up is my BFF, Kimberly Hanson! She is the Rachel to my Monica, and more often than not, it really bums me out that we live so far apart, haha!

Kimberly writes sweet, small town romance. Her debut is coming out in the Sweetheart Springs anthology on September 1! Sweetheart Springs is a Christmas shared world series (multiple authors releasing in the same series), with our first Christmas releases beginning in September with our prequel anthology, and then standalone releases starting in October through November.

Our anthology will be free to newsletter subscribers (sign up here to be notified of its release), or if you prefer to steer clear of newsletters, you can pre-order the anthology here. On Sept 1, it will also be available as a paperback, but alas, you can’t do pre-orders on those!

Kimberly’s story in our anthology is called Cocoa in the Candlelight.

Coming home for the holidays, all Ellie Johnson wanted to do was catch up with her best friends and family. For fun, the girls signed up for the Sweetheart Games. Little did she know, she’d be paired up with her brother’s best friend, and the one man she could never get out of her head.
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Tommy Donovan didn’t want anything to do with the Christmas Festival. Every year he was able to work and forget it was happening, especially dodging the matchmaking events. This year, his mom had other plans.
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Forced together with the stress of a town myth hanging above their heads, will they must work together under the watchful eye of the town, while trying to come to terms with their feelings for one another.

To read the whole bonus scene and to download three recipes straight from Ellie’s kitchen to yours, be sure to sign up for Kimberly’s newsletter and snag this bonus book: With Love From Ellie! It’s a super cute bonus scene, and I personally can’t wait to read more about Ellie and Tommy. It’s a good thing I get to be an extra set of eyes, haha!

Teaser from Kimberly’s bonus scene:

Letting her eyes gaze across the road at all the hustle and bustle, her breath caught in her throat as she saw a very familiar white truck parked on the street. It wasn’t just that; it was the tall, lean body standing next to it, dark brown hair that was just long enough to cover what she knew to be gorgeous emerald green eyes.

She’d memorized those eyes; dreamed of those eyes since she was a little fourteen-year-old girl that didn’t know more than they were the most beautiful and unique eye color she’d ever seen. And that when those seventeen-year-old eyes landed on her, it made her stomach turn into a rowdy bunch of butterflies.

No, no, no. Not today. Not right now.

Those same butterflies returned for the first time in the three years since she’d seen him last. Ellie had done her best to avoid him when she came back to Sweetheart Springs to visit and worked hard at not letting her thoughts stray to him while she was away at school. Now that she laid eyes on him for the first time in what felt like forever, it was as if none of her hard work of avoidance mattered.

Kimberly’s first standalone in the series: A Sweetheart Christmas, will be released on December 1, 2022. While Cocoa in the Candlelight will have a happy ending, you won’t get Tommy and Ellie’s official happily-ever-after, thanks to Sweetheart Springs, until this book. It’s a sneak peek to how they began, and serves as a fun backstory to the beginning of their second chance romance.

A Sweetheart Christmas blurb: Stepping foot in Sweetheart Springs on the eve of their annual Christmas festival felt surreal. Previously, the town and festival held an air of magic for Ellie Johnson, now it only brought sadness and regret. She needed to decide if she could ignore the ghosts of her Christmas past and move on, although in a small town, it didn’t seem likely.

Having spent the last ten years of her life building up her own graphic design business in New York City, the last thing she ever considered doing was moving back to her small hometown. Especially when her thoughts tended to stray back to her first love, Tommy Donovan. But now with a failed marriage and debt piling up with the rising costs of the big city, she didn’t have much of a choice.

There weren’t many things in Tommy Donovan was proud of. Spending his life trying to do the ‘right thing’ had left him as a single dad, stuck working for his dad’s business, and abandoning anything he’d ever wanted for himself. The only silver lining was his son, Adam. Six years old, funny, and too smart for his own good.

With the only woman who ever truly held his heart back in town, Tommy is forced to come to terms with his past while planning a future for himself and his son. Not sure if he’d be able to fully let his guard down, Tommy must decide if anything short of a Christmas miracle could make his heart open to love again and rekindle the dreams he thought were never meant to be.

If you love second chance romances, be sure to pre-order A Sweetheart Christmas! 🙂

About the Author: Kimberly lives in BC, Canada with her husband, two children and a ridiculously cute German Shepherd. When she’s not dreaming of stories, she homeschools her two children as they explore and learn the world together, reads anything she can get her hands on, and drinks a lot of coffee.

You can follow Kimberly on Facebook here or on Instagram here! Be sure you sign up for With Love From Ellie, because you’re going to get a bonus recipe of Salted Caramel Hot Chocolate. YUM!