Fall in Love Book Bundle: Small Town Romance Box Set

by Grover Swank, Denise

1. Sneak Peek: Love at First Hate, an enemies to lovers romantic comedy by Denise Grover Swank and A.R. Casella

  Sneak Peek: Love at First Hate, an enemies to lovers romantic comedy by Denise Grover Swank and A.R. Casella

  That’s when I realized that all my friends were losers. Sad, luckless losers. And I could be their savior. I wrote the rules in a flow state. When I finished, I knew I had created something with the power to change not just our lives but the world.

  Augusta Glower, Bad Luck Club

  “This is about the sourdough starter piece, isn’t it?” I ask, sitting in the transparent plastic chair across from my boss’s desk. It’s viciously uncomfortable, and my friend and coworker Beth says Constance chose it specifically because it makes people feel like they’re falling.

  “Among other things, yes,” Constance says, giving me this arch look that says I should know exactly what she’s talking about. “Our readers aren’t interested in reading a retrospective about why you decided to break up with your sourdough starter. They read Beyond the Sheets for the dating articles. For the pieces about men.”

  “I named him Fred,” I counter. “Fred’s a man’s name. Besides, it does feel like a breakup. Do you know what it takes to get a sourdough starter rolling? Serious commitment. That’s not easy for someone like me.”

  “Molly, dear,” she says in a way that makes it clear that A) I am not her dear, and B) she seriously questions my parents’ choice of name, “you’re boring me just talking about it. Imagine how our readers felt reading it. I know you did this to get back at me for not green-lighting that investigative piece about the girlfriend experience.”

  I bite my tongue to keep from launching into an explanation of how it would have been peripherally related to our whole dating schtick. And how I have an in because I actually know one of the women who works on the circuit. Because, yeah, Constance isn’t wrong. I’ve been wanting to write about something different, something interesting, for a while now. But as she has not-so-gently reminded me, many times, that’s not our thing either.

  What is our thing?

  A couple of years back, when I was our uncontested star, I was putting out content like “The Twelve Dates of Christmas,” “Microdating for Microbrews,” and—a personal favorite—“Fakesgiving,” where I posed as the fake fiancée of a guy who’d posted a personal ad online. I might have felt like I was living in a romantic comedy with that last exploit—if the guy hadn’t smelled like ham and had a tattoo of Elmer Fudd on his shoulder. I mean, go for one of the Looney Tunes characters, sure, but Elmer Fudd? I only learned about his terrible tat because he was the kind of guy who couldn’t go five minutes without finding an excuse to take off his shirt to show off his abs. While there wasn’t snow on the ground, it was Seattle in November. There wasn’t exactly any sunshine either.

  And he was shocked he was still single…

  I realize Constance is looking at me, waiting for me to grovel, but I’m in no mood to make apologies. “Did you forget what you told me after I wrote my last viral post about dating? You told me not to be so vicious. You asked me to write something softer and more feminine. What’s more feminine than writing about baking? People love that shit.”

  “Hardly,” she says, rapping a pen against the surface of her desk. Where she got it, I don’t know. I’ve never seen anyone in this office sign anything with a pen. People will add five steps to any task to make it more “efficient” (i.e., virtual). This includes everything from signing documents to sending cards and gifts to loved ones. “And let’s be real. We all love your wicked sense of humor, Molly, but the last person you should publicly eviscerate on the internet is the grandson of the man who owns us.”

  “I never used his name,” I say. “Not once. It could have been about anyone.” I cringe a little, then add, “It’s not my fault he stormed into the office with his grandfather. I mean, who does that? No one would have ever known it was him otherwise.”

  “I should have let you go then,” Constance says, shaking her head sadly. “Matthias wanted me to, but I stood up for you. I said it was an honest mistake. I told him not even you would be stupid enough to purposefully write such a harsh piece about his grandson.”

  The look she’s giving me suggests she certainly thinks I’m stupid enough, and to be fair, I knew exactly what I was doing.

  “Bigwig’s grandson,” as I called him in my blog post, showed up at Beyond the Sheets’ Christmas party. I didn’t stick around long enough to meet him, but he cornered Beth, talking up his connections. Making it pretty clear he’d find a way to get her fired if she didn’t give him a blowjob in the coat closet. She managed to slip away, thank God, but she spilled the whole story to me over drinks a few days later.

  Which was why I felt compelled to arrange a date with him. Not because I wanted to go out with him, obviously, but because I’ve gotten pretty good at getting people—men, especially—to tell me their secrets, reveal their weaknesses, and proudly hoist their freak flags. Wasn’t my fault the guy was collecting used panties from all the women he’d slept with so he could make “art” with them under a nom de plume—his words. (I’m fairly sure he didn’t realize that term only refers to writers.) I wasn’t necessarily planning for everyone to figure out the piece was about him. He would know he’d been publicly humiliated, and so would Beth, and that would have been enough.

  But then he stormed in and raised hell about it, and his name was linked to the article after all.

  Constance is giving me that look again, like she wants a proper apology for the grandson fiasco. For me being me.

  She’ll keep waiting.

  This was my first job out of college. At the time, we had a miniscule following. Now, the blog is one of the foremost dating publications in the country, and I damn well know I’m one of the people who made it that way. It’s on the edge of my tongue to say so, and to remind her that she encourages all of us to stay on brand with Beyond the Sheets’ wicked sense of humor, whether we’re writing about the best type of bedsheets for your big O or a speed dating fiasco, but I realize something a bit stunning.

  She might not have specifically brought me back here to fire me—maybe she wanted me to give her a reason not to—but hell, I want her to.

  I joined the blog because I thought it would be fun, and for a while it was. But I’m tired of what we do. I’m tired of passing up dates with men I might actually like so I can go out with people who are interesting enough for a viral article. Or for a heavily edited video other people can watch on their lunch breaks. I’m tired of the constant pressure to poke fun. Most of the men deserve it, and I consider it a public service to puncture overinflated male egos…but some of them don’t.

  I’m not sure what comes next, but I’m ready for something to come next.

  “So are you going to write a piece called, ‘Breaking up with Your Writer’?” I ask, arching my brow.

  “You’re backing me into a corner, Molly,” Constance says, letting the prop pen drop. “I don’t appreciate that. You were one of our best writers.”

  “Were?” I press. “You’re going to have to do better than that, Constance. According to the guy I went out with last week, women are incapable of understanding subtlety. Help out my tiny brain here.”

  She sighs. “You know you’re much too good to keep working here.”

  Her honesty surprises me. A greedy little part of me wants to ask for more praise. Instead, I smile at her. “You know I need unemployment, Constance. You’re not going to sweet-talk me into quitting. I might only have a studio apartment, but this is Seattle, after all, and I’m not made of money. Besides, all your talk about Fred has sweetened me on him. I just might keep him around after all, but that starter won’t feed himself. Only the organic, stone-ground best for my little yeast baby.”

  “Always with the joking,” she says, shaking her head a little. But there’s an almost fond quality to it, like she’s remembered that if I’m a monster, she’s my Victor Frankenstein. “Wha
t will you do?”

  I want to tell a story that hasn’t been told. To discover something. To find a spark.

  But I just shrug. “I guess we’ll see.”

  * * *

  Two hours later, I’m sitting at home at my kitchen counter, next to a glass of wine, Fred, who lives in a mason jar, and an Amazon box containing all the worldly possessions I had at Beyond the Sheets. It is well before five, but drinking seems like the appropriate response to being suddenly unemployed.

  There isn’t much in the box considering I’d worked there for six years, but if pens are frowned upon in that office, so are hard copies of anything. I only had a few framed pictures in my cubicle. My two older sisters and my nephew. And my parents, frozen forever in time.

  Beth was distraught when I started packing up my desk, but I was quick to assure her that Constance took issue with the wild yeast, not my article about the grandson. A white lie, maybe, but Beth is one of the good ones. She deserved it.

  She asked about my plans too, making it clear she’d follow me if I decided to start a rival dating blog.

  “And I’m not the only one,” she said in an undertone, her gaze darting around the open-concept office. There was something so cloak-and-dagger about the way she did it that I almost laughed.

  Starting my own blog would be comfortable and, dare I say, easy. But I’m sick as hell of being comfortable. Which is why I’ve spent the last hour emailing the editors-in-chief at half a dozen publications I admire more than ours, places that don’t just publish fluff pieces, but which are interested in real, investigative journalism.

  None of them are currently hiring, but Constance’s motto—be bold—has its merits.

  My phone rings, and my sister’s face flashes on the screen. It’s a picture of Maisie with her mouth open, her head thrown back in laughter, and it makes me grin every time I see it. Not her, so much. She always nags me to change it, saying she looks like a demented clown—the perils of having curly red hair—but there’s no way that’s happening.

  With about two months to go, give or take, Maisie’s at the stage of pregnancy where any man could confidently make the assumption that she has human life growing inside her bump, not the remains of a delicious burrito. She and her husband, Jack, are about to go to a little beach house in the Outer Banks this weekend for a three-week babymoon. They both deserve it. She runs a nonprofit dog shelter, and he works at his family brewery, and neither of them is the sort to take time off.

  “Is it happening?” I tease when I pick up the call. “Did you have to cancel your trip because you’re on your way to the hospital?”

  But a sob comes over the line, and my back goes rigid. Maisie is not a crier, even at the height of all of her pregnancy hormones. Old fears quicken inside of me, reminding me of another phone call. The one that changed everything. Again. “What’s wrong? Is it the baby?”

  Her sob cuts short. “No, nothing bad happened. I mean, nothing that bad. It’s just that Ein bit the dog-sitter when she came over for her meet and greet with him and Chaco. She has all this experience with old dogs, but he took an immediate dislike to her. And there’s no one else who can watch them on such late notice. My friends all have kids or pets for him to potentially terrorize, and I’ll be honest, I’m not feeling great about having him around the baby. Like, am I going to have to constantly keep them separated?”

  Einstein is her very old and very grumpy corgi. He’s a bit change-phobic, and now his whole life is being upended. He’s got plenty of sweet mixed in with his surly, but this scenario is not bringing out the best in him. Chaco is his much more pleasant and upbeat companion.

  “I don’t think you need to worry about the baby,” I suggest. “Ein might be a grumpy old man, but he’s incredibly short. How would he even get to the baby on those weenie little legs? Besides, doesn’t he have barely any teeth left?”

  He probably won’t be around by the time my niece is a toddler, in the grabbing and chasing phase of childhood, but that’s a depressing thought, and I know Maisie won’t want to hear it.

  “I guess,” Maisie says, sounding down-to-her-bones tired. “But we’re going to have to cancel the trip. You know, I was really looking forward to this.”

  “No! Absolutely not,” I say in horror. “You can’t do that. This is, like, your first vacation outside of visiting Mary and me in forever.” Mary being our older and less fun sister.

  “I don’t know what else to do.”

  She sounds so hopeless, so defeated, and it strikes me that I can be her hero. She was mine, once upon a time, and I’ve always wanted to return the favor.

  Besides, I’m newly jobless. What else do I have to do? I can spend three weeks in Asheville and come back recharged and ready for whatever comes next. It’ll be like a mini vacation.

  “I’ll do it,” I blurt. “I’ll watch them.”

  “Constance is going to give you three weeks off, just like that?” Maisie asks doubtfully. “It’s Tuesday, and we were supposed to leave on Saturday morning. I’m surprised she even let you take a personal call at the office.”

  Here’s the thing. She and Mary don’t know about the fallout of the grandson article. Or my new predilection for wild yeast. They don’t know that I’m in the thick of a somewhat late quarter-life crisis, and for the time being, I’d prefer to keep it that way. They’re both the worrying type, at least when it comes to me, their “baby” sis, and I’d rather tell them about my joblessness once I’ve landed a new gig. So I tell a white lie. “I’ll write some pieces while I’m there. You know, like the ‘Microdates for Microbrews’ one. That one got thousands of comments.”

  Some of them expressions of amusement or go get ’em, girl. Some of them of the slut/tease/bitch variety.

  “Are you sure?” Maisie asks, and I can’t blame her for sounding dubious. After all, I usually avoid going home. It brings back memories that I’d prefer to keep firmly tucked in my backstory, like I’m some kind of Seattle dating superhero. For a second I question the soundness of this venture, and then I find myself saying, “Yes. I’ll book a flight right now. Asheville, here I come. Watch out Beer Bros.”

  “That’s not a thing,” she says, laughing.

  “Is so a thing,” I say. Because it kinda is. She lives in our hometown in North Carolina, where there are an unreasonable number of breweries per capita, and her husband and his family own one of them.

  “Thank you. Seriously, thank you. I love you.”

  “I love you too, Maisie. Say hi to Jack for me.”

  We talk for another few minutes, because although we might be Irish American, we’re not great at Irish goodbyes, and then I’m left sitting at my kitchen counter, surveying my tiny box of a studio. I mean, I actually have a Murphy bed, like in one of those cartoons. In this light, my studio doesn’t look like much. I really do have the kind of life I can upend at a moment’s notice for a three-week-long trip.

  That used to feel refreshing. Like an escape. But I can’t decide whether I like it anymore.

  There’s just one string tying me down, and I give a fond tap to the top of his lid.

  “It’s not you, it’s me, Fred. You had a good run. I did make bagels with you that one time.”

  They turned out flat, but I don’t feel the need to add insult to injury. Fred’s life is about to be cut short. Let him pretend the bagels were good.

  ** END SNEAK PEEK **

  Love at First Hate is available now!