Blog Tour Stop: Patience Griffin's HAPPILY EVER ALASKA.

Hi and welcome to my blog tour stop for Patience Griffin's Happily Ever Alaska! This cover is so precious--I love how cozy the image is. You can pick up your copy of this contemporary today. 

​A big thanks to the publisher for the promotional materials. All opinions provided are my own.

​Summary. 

Lolly Crocker keeps a warm bakery in her chilly Alaskan town, but can she handle the rekindling of an old flame?

Whenever things get too serious, baker Lolly Crocker knows it’s time to break it off with a guy. Without fail, her gut will tell her that the man she's dating is not Mr. Right. 
 
The one exception was Shaun Montana, her high school sweetheart. With Shaun, life felt complete; but her mother convinced her she was too young to be tied down, and Lolly broke up with him the night before she left for college.
 
While Lolly keeps every relationship light, Shaun is never less than fully committed—and still somehow his romances have all ended badly. When he comes back to Sweet Home, his attraction to Lolly is as fiery as ever, but he's determined to keep things casual for once...just when Lolly is finally ready to risk her heart on a second chance.

Excerpt. 

Lolly Crocker stepped outside to get her mail, glad for the warmer days of July and to be free of a jacket. A group of her home ec students would arrive any minute at her humble abode on the cheap side of Sweet Home, Alaska, population 573. Over summer break, Lolly was giving baking lessons based on The Great British Baking Show, a favorite binge for both her and the girls, who were in her class at Sweet Home High. Today's bake was macarons, a treat that Lolly loved. Which was perfect-it was her thirty-fourth birthday. She'd returned to her hometown around this time last year to take a position teaching family and consumer science, but since the end of school, she'd basically been holding her breath. Rumor had it that noncore subjects like hers might be cut from the curriculum in the fall. But as each day passed and the new school year drew nearer, she felt more confident. No teachers had been laid off, according to the grapevine, which was more accurate than the Nightly News. And yet, Lolly couldn't breathe easy until the district sent her a new contract. Hers must've fallen through the cracks. On Monday, she planned to call and find out what the holdup was. The first day of school was in one month and four days. Surely her missing contract was just an oversight.

As she reached for the mailbox handle, a blue Ford pickup pulled in beside her. Newlyweds Jesse and Tori Montana grinned at her as they disembarked.

"Hey, Lolly." Tori gave her a hug with a gift bag in hand.

"How is your staycay-honeymoon going?" But Lolly needn't have asked. They both seemed to be floating on air.

"We've made progress on our new home," Jesse said, "and when Shaun gets back, it'll go much quicker." But as soon as he said it, he seemed to regret bringing up his brother.

Probably because he'd seen Lolly blanch.

Shaun Montana was Lolly's one regret in a long line of breakups. She had quite the record of dating good guys and then cutting them loose. A couple of times-okay, three-she'd even been engaged: Howard from Missouri, whom she'd met her senior year of college; Ted the history teacher, who taught at the same high school in Oregon as she had; and Frank, who owned three dry cleaners, all three men whom she'd met when she lived outside of Alaska. Each time, after she got engaged, when her stomach started hurting, she knew without a doubt that Mr. Right This Time hadn't really been right after all, and she broke it off. Her only consolation was that all three of her ex-fiancés had married soon afterward, started families, and had their happily-ever-afters, in spite of her.

But the story of Shaun had gone differently. They'd never been engaged, but Lolly had been convinced that they'd had a love for the ages.

Lolly looked up into Jesse's face and realized the air surrounding them was fraught with awkwardness. "Sorry? What did you say?"

Looking embarrassed, Tori held out the gift bag. "No worries. I brought you a present."

Lolly accepted the bag, though she wasn't sure what was going on. "Present?" What she really wanted to ask was When is Shaun going to be back in town? Lolly had seen him at their wedding but only from a distance, as if he was trying to stay away from her on purpose. And then suddenly, he'd been gone. No one had said when he was coming back.
 
Excerpted from Happily Ever Alaska by Patience Griffin Copyright © 2023 by Patience Griffin. Excerpted by permission of Berkley. All rights reserved.

​About the author. 

Patience Griffin is the award-winning author of the Kilts and Quilts series of contemporary romances. She grew up in a small town along the Mississippi River, enjoying life in a close-knit community. She loves to quilt and has gained national recognition with her September 11 Story Quilt, which has toured the country as the property of the Pentagon, and her extensive collection of commercially available quilting fabrics.

Have you ever read a romance set in Alaska? Are you planning on checking this one out? Let me know what you think!

Thanks for stopping by and happy reading! ​