Aloha With Love
Lindy Miller with Terence Brody
Published by: Rosewind Books
Publication date: July 13th 2021
Genres: Adult, Contemporary, Romance
Soon to be a motion picture.
From the screenwriter of Rescuing Madison and
A Lesson in Romance on Hallmark“[A] charming romance. Miller and Brody do a masterful job of pacing and plotting, while creating a hero and heroine readers will easily relate to. This sweet, G-rated contemporary should draw in Hallmark Channel devotees in droves.” ~Publishers Weekly
After a tough week that includes losing a big job opportunity and being dumped by her long-term boyfriend, Jenna Burke receives word that her beloved Aunt May passed away.
Traveling back to her Hawaiian hometown for the reading of the will, Jenna discovers she and her sister have inherited May’s dilapidated Victorian home on desirable beachfront land. The sisters can do whatever they want with the property, but there’s one catch: the house must be renovated before it can be sold, and Jenna has to oversee the work. Their Aunt even stipulated the contractor for the job—Ben Fletcher—who has a gift for making things beautiful again. He also has another skill: driving Jenna crazy.
Jenna vows to sell the property the moment the job is done. But as Aunt May’s broken old house starts to feel like home again, Jenna is torn between the life she’s been chasing in the city, and the one she’d left behind.
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EXCERPT:
Jenna screamed as pain radiated down her arm. Ruby fell to the floor, the jewel-inlaid hammer clattering at her feet and sending the small pile of nails she’d assembled scuttling in every direction.
“My thumb!” she screeched, holding her fist tightly against her chest as a hot rush of tears pushed against the backs of her eyes. She’d been daydreaming while she worked, her thoughts becoming more and more distracted as she hammered each of the nails into the wood planks. She’d nipped her thumb once or twice, but the last blow had been a full-contact bang. It didn’t smart, it seared, and her whole body was awash with pain. “Son of a banana tree, that hurts so bad!”“Let me see.” Ben immediately stopped what he was doing and rushed over, pulling her hand into his so he could see the damage.
Somehow, Ben’s touch made the pain hurt even more. “No!” Jenna wrenched her hand back, dancing around the room in angry little hops as she tried to fan the pain out of her fingers. The tears were leaking out through her eyes now, and she clamped her eyelids shut to dam them.
Jenna felt Ben move behind her, trying to catch her like she was a butterfly evading a net. “Let me see.”
“No, please leave me alone.” It was hard to speak around the pain.
Growling with frustration, Ben abandoned the chase and rushed to the cooler. He plucked out the plastic baggie containing his sandwich, tossed the leftovers from his lunch out, and refilled the sack with ice cubes from the cooler. Jenna gave up on shaking the pain out of her poor finger and stuck the tip of it in her mouth, trying to suck the hurt out instead. Aunt May had taught her once how to do that with bee stings. It probably wouldn’t work with hammer injuries, but she was willing to give it a try.
“Give me your hand.”
She heard Ben’s voice, demanding this time, somewhere behind her.
Jenna planted her feet and shook her head, still fixated on the awful sensation in her finger. The sharp sting of the pain had lessened but not diminished. It was now all the way up to her elbow. Tears had started to stream down her cheeks without her permission, and she couldn’t be sure if they were from pain or embarrassment—or both. She felt Ben’s hand on her shoulder and scooted away.
“No.” The word came out in a whimper. She could feel her heartbeat in her thumb, and it throbbed. “It’ll burn.”
“Jenna.” Ben sighed, his tone patient. Jenna felt the icy coolness of the plastic bag on her back as Ben planted both hands on her shoulders and spun her to face him, painfully pulsing thumb and embarrassing tears and all.
Ben seemed surprised to see the tears collected on her cheeks, but he didn’t remark on them or give her one of those pandering looks men sometimes did when they saw women cry. Instead, he reached for the handkerchief in his back pocket, then shook it out and lifted it to her cheek. Very softly, he patted her tears dry. In return, Jenna allowed him to take her hand and he did, pressing the bag of ice against her thumb and inspecting her hand gingerly so as to not induce any additional discomfort.
“It doesn’t look too bad. Nothing’s broken, nothing’s bleeding.” The sharp pain in her thumb seemed to recede, leaving a powerful ache in its wake held in check by the pressure of Ben’s skin against hers.
Jenna sniffed between sobs. Her eyes were still wet, but the tears had stopped. Her face flushed. “It hurts.”
Ben lifted the ice bag enough to peer more closely at her injury. “The ice will prevent swelling and the cold will help the pain,” he promised, looking from her thumb to her face as he spoke to make sure she was listening. His gaze caught hers and with their eyes locked, Ben leaned in and laid a chaste kiss on Jenna’s thumb. The gesture felt automatic, familiar and endearing, and Jenna’s breath caught in her throat.
A cool spot bloomed on her skin from where Ben’s lips had touched her. From there it spread upward, chasing away the throbbing in a pleasurable flood of sensation until her heartbeat in her throat pulsed back to its rightful place in her chest. “Did you just kiss my boo-boo?”
“I suppose I did.” Ben sounded surprised, and red blossomed on his cheeks.
Author Bio:
Lindy Miller is an entrepreneur, award-winning professor, and publishing professional. In 2011, Miller was part of the executive leadership team that founded Radiant Advisors, a data and business intelligence research and advisory firm, where Miller developed and launched the company’s editorial and research divisions, and later its data visualization practice, for clients that included 21st Century Fox Films, Fox Networks, Warner Bros., and Disney. She is the author of numerous papers and two textbooks under the name of Lindy Ryan, The Visual Imperative: Creating a Culture of Visual Discovery (Elsevier) and Visual Data Storytelling with Tableau (Pearson) Miller holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration: Entrepreneurship and Strategy, and a Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership and a Doctorate in Education, Organizational Leadership.
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Terence Brody is an active captain in the New York Fire Dept, assigned to Ladder 10 in lower Manhattan.
Two of his feature scripts, RESCUING MADISON (Ethan Peck, C. Thomas Howell, Alona Tal) and A LESSON IN ROMANCE (Kristy Swanson, Scott Grimes, directed by Ron Oliver) aired on the Hallmark Channel.
In 2021, his script, ALOHA WITH LOVE, was produced by Oren Kamara/Fade to Black Films, Branscombe Richmond, and Brian Bird of When Calls The Heart. The movie starred Trevor Donovan and Tiffany Smith and was directed by Brian Herzlinger. The novel is co-written with author Lindy Miller (July 2021).
Brody also wrote the screenplay for Miller’s novel Sleigh Bells on Bread Loaf Mountain (2021) and The Christmas Spirit by Alexandrea Weis (Nov 2020).
Brody resides in Long Island, NY with his wife and two children.
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