PRAISE FORThe Love Hypothesis“Contemporary romance’s unicorn: the elusive marriage ofdeeply brainy and delightfully escapist. . . .The LoveHypothesis has wild commercial appeal, but the quietersecret is that there is a specific audience, made up of all theOlives in the world, who have deeply, ardently waited forthis exact book.”—New York Times bestselling author ChristinaLauren“Funny, sexy, and smart. Ali Hazelwood did a terrific job withThe Love Hypothesis.”—New York Times bestselling author MarianaZapata“This tackles one of my favorite tropes—Grumpy meetsSunshine—in a fun and utterly endearing way. . . . I lovedthe nods toward fandom and romance novels, and I couldn’tput it down. Highly recommended!”—New York Times bestselling author JessicaClare“A beautifully written romantic comedy with a heroine youwill instantly fall in love with,The Love Hypothesis isdestined to earn a place on your keeper shelf.”—Elizabeth Everett, author ofA Lady’s Formulafor Love“Smart, witty dialogue and a diverse cast of likablesecondary characters. . . . A realistic, amusing novel thatreaders won’t be able to put down.”—Library Journal (starred review) “With whip-smart and endearing characters, snappy prose,and a quirky take on a favorite trope, Hazelwoodconvincingly navigates the fraught shoals of academia. . . .This smart, sexy contemporary should delight a wide swathof romance lovers.”—Publishers Weekly Titles by Ali HazelwoodThe Love HypothesisLOATHE TO LOVE YOUUnder One RoofStuck with YouBelow Zero Stuck with YouAli HazelwoodJOVENEW YORK A JOVE BOOKPublished by BerkleyAn imprint of Penguin Random House LLCpenguinrandomhouse.comCopyright © 2022 by Ali Hazelwood Excerpt fromLove on the Brain copyright © 2021 by Ali HazelwoodPenguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices,promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of thisbook and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of itin any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House tocontinue to publish books for every reader.A JOVE BOOK, BERKLEY, and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin RandomHouse LLC. Ebook ISBN: 9780593437827Jove audio edition: March 2022Jove ebook edition: June 2022Cover illustration by lilithsaurAdapted for ebook by Cora WigenThis is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’simagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businessestablishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.pid_prh_6.0_140138093_c0_r0 ContentsCoverPraise for The Love HypothesisTitles by Ali HazelwoodTitle PageCopyrightDedicationChapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3Chapter 4Chapter 5Chapter 6Chapter 7Chapter 8Chapter 9Chapter 10Chapter 11Chapter 12EpilogueExcerpt from Love on the BrainAbout the Author For Marie, my fave Elizabeth Swann Chapter 1PresentMy world comes to an end at 10:43 on a Friday night, whenthe elevator lurches to a stop between the eighth andseventh floor of the building that houses the engineeringfirm where I work. The ceiling lights flicker. Then go offcompletely. Then, after a stretch that lasts about fiveseconds but feels like several decades, come back with theslightly yellower tinge of the emergency bulb.Crap.Fun fact: This is actually the second time my world cameto an end tonight. The first was less than a minute ago.When the elevator I’m riding stopped on the thirteenth floor,and Erik Nowak, the last person I ever wanted to see,appeared in all his blond, massive, Viking-like glory. Hestudied me for what felt like too long, took a step inside, andthen studied me some more while I avidly inspected the tipsof my shoes.Re-crap.It’s a slightly complicated situation. I work in New YorkCity, and my company, GreenFrame, rents a small office onthe eighteenth floor of a Manhattan building. Very small. Ithas to be very small, because we’re a baby firm, stillestablishing ourselves in a pretty cutthroat market, and wedon’t always make a ton of money. I guess that’s whathappens when you value things like sustainability,environmental protection, economic viability and efficiency,renewability rather than depletion, minimization of exposureto potential hazards such as toxic materials, and . . . well, Iwon’t bore you with the Wikipedia entry on greenengineering. Suffice it to say, my boss, Gianna (whocoincidentally is the only other engineer working full-time at the firm), founded GreenFrame with the aim of creatinggreat structures that actually make sense within theirenvironment, and is delightfully, crunchily hard-core aboutit. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always pay very well. Or well.Or at all.So, yeah. Like I said, a slightly complicated situation,especially when compared with more traditional engineeringcompanies that don’t focus as much on conservation andpollution control. Like ProBld. The giant firm where ErikNowak works. The one that takes up the whole thirteenthfloor. And the twelfth. Maybe the eleventh, too? I lost track.So when the elevator began to slow down around thefourteenth floor, I felt a surge of apprehension, which Inaively discarded as mere paranoia. You have nothing toworry about, Sadie, I told myself. ProBld has tons of offices.They’re always expanding. Orchestrating “mergers” andeating up smaller firms. Like the Blob. They are truly thecorrosive alien amoeboidal entity of the business, whichtranslates to hundreds of people working for them, which inturn means that any one out of those hundreds of peoplecould be calling the elevator. Any one. There’s no way it’sErik Nowak.Yeah. No.It was Erik Nowak, all right. With his massive, colossalpresence. Erik Nowak, who spent the entirety of our five-floor ride staring at me with those ruthless, icy blue eyes ofhis. Erik Nowak, who’s currently looking up at theemergency light with a slight frown.“The power’s out,” he says, an obvious statement, withthat stupidly deep voice of his. It hasn’t changed one whitsince the last time we talked. Nor since that string ofmessages he left on my phone before I blocked his number.The ones that I never bothered answering but also couldn’tquite bring myself to delete. The ones I could not stopmyself from listening to, over and over.And over. It’s still a stupid voice. Stupid and insidious, rich andprecise and clipped and low, with acoustic properties all itsown. “I moved here from Denmark when I was fourteen,” hetold me at dinner when I asked him about his accent, slight,hard to detect, but definitely there. “My younger brothersgot rid of it, but I never managed.” His face was as stern asusual, but I could see his mouth soften, a slight uptick onthe corner that felt like a smile. “As you can imagine, therewas lots of teasing growing up.”After the night we spent together, after all that happenedbetween us, I felt as if I couldn’t get the way he pronouncedwords out of my head. For days I constantly squirmed,turning around because I thought I’d heard him somewherein my proximity. Thought that maybe he was nearby, eventhough I was jogging at the park, alone in the office, in lineat the grocery store. It just stuck to me, coated the shell ofmy ears and the inside of my—“Sadie?” Erik’s infamous voice cuts through my thoughts.It has that tone, the one of someone who’s repeatinghimself, and maybe not just for the first time. “Does it?”“Does . . . what?” I glance up, finding him next to thecontrol panel. In the stark shadows of the emergency lighthe’s still so . . . God. Looking at his handsome face is amistake. He is a mistake. “I’m sorry, I . . . What did yousay?”“Does your phone work?” he asks again, patient. Kind.Why is he so kind? He was never supposed to be kind.After what happened between us, I decided to torturemyself by asking around about him, and the wordkindnever came up. Not once. One of New York’s top engineers,people would often say. Known for being as good at his jobas he is surly. No-nonsense, aloof, standoffish. Though hewas never any of these things with me. Until he was, ofcourse.“Um.” I fish my phone out of the back pocket of my blacktailored pants and press the home button. “No service. But this is a Faraday cage,” I think out loud, “and the elevatorshaft is steel. No RF signal is going to be able to make aloop and . . .” I notice the way Erik is staring at me andabruptly shut up. Right. He’s an engineer, too. He alreadyknows all of this. I clear my throat. “No signal, no.”Erik nods. “Wi-Fi should work, but it doesn’t. So maybethis is—”“—a building-wide power outage?”“Maybe even the whole block.”Shit.Shit, shit, shit. Shit.Erik seems to be reading my mind, because he studies mefor a moment and says reassuringly, “It might be for thebest. Someone is bound to check the elevators if they knowthat the power’s gone.” He pauses before adding, “Althoughit might take a while.” Painfully honest. As usual.“How long?”He shrugs. “A few hours?”A few what? A few hours? In an elevator that is smallerthan my already-minuscule bathroom? With Erik Nowak, thebroodiest of Scandinavian mountains? Erik Nowak, the manwho I . . .No. No way.“There must be something we can do,” I say, trying tosound collected. I swear I’m not panicking. No more than alot.“Nothing that I can think of.”“But . . . what do we do now, then?” I ask, hating howwhiny my voice is.Erik lets his messenger bag drop to the floor with athump. He leans against the wall opposite mine, whichshould theoretically give me some room to breathe, eventhough for some physics-defying reason he still feels tooclose. I watch him slide his phone in the front pocket of hisjeans and cross his arms on his chest. His eyes are cold, unreadable, but there is a faint gleam in them that has ashiver running down my spine.“Now,” he says, gaze locked with mine, “we wait.”It’s 10:45 on a Friday night. And for the third time in lessthan ten minutes, my world crashes to an end. Chapter 2Three weeks agoThere are worse things in the world.There are, without a single doubt, giant heaps of worsethings in the world. Wet socks. PMS. TheStar Wars prequels.Oatmeal raisin cookies that masquerade as chocolate chip,slow Wi-Fi, climate change and income inequality, dandruff,traffic, the finale ofGame of Thrones, tarantulas, food-scented soap, people who hate soccer, daylight saving time(when it moves one hour ahead, not behind), toxicmasculinity, the unjustly short life span of guinea pigs—allof these, just to name a small handful, are truly terrible,dreadful, horrific things. Because such is the way of theuniverse: it’s full of bad, sad, upsetting, unfair, enragingcircumstances, and I should know better than to pout like aten-year-old who’s half an inch too short for the rollercoaster when Faye tells me from behind the counter of hersmall coffee shop:“Sorry, honey, we’re all out of croissants.”To be clear: I don’t even want a croissant. Which I knowsounds weird (everybody shouldalways want a croissant;it’s a law of physics, like the Fermi paradox or Einstein’sfield equation), but the truth is, I would gladly do withoutthis specific croissant—if this were a regular Tuesdaymorning.Unfortunately, today is pitch day. Which means that I’mmeeting with potential future GreenFrame clients. I talk tothem, tell them the hundreds of little things I can do to helpthem manage large-scale sustainable building projects, andhope they’ll decide to hire us. It’s what I’ve been doing forabout eight months, ever since I finished my Ph.D.: I try tobring in new clients; I try to keep the ones we already have; I try to ease Gianna’s workload, since she just had her firstbaby—who, incidentally, is three babies. Apparently, tripletsdo happen. And they’re adorable, but they also wake oneanother up in the middle of the night in a never-endingspiral of sleeplessness and exhaustion. Who would havethought? But back to the clients: GreenFrame has beenventuring dangerously close to not-quite-in-the-blackterritory, and today’s pitch meeting is critical to keep thered at bay.Enter the croissants. And that other little problem Ihappen to have: I am a little superstitious. Just a tad. Just alittle stitious. I have developed a complex system of ritualsand apotropaic gestures that need to be performed toensure that my pitch meetings will go as planned. I havemore years of science education than anyone ever needed,and should probably know better than to believe that thecolor of my socks is in any way predictive of my professionalsuccess. But do I?Nope.Back in college, it was exactly three braids in my hair forevery single soccer game (plus two coats of L’Oréal mascaraif we were playing away) and I had to listen to “DancingQueen” and “My Immortal” before each and every final—strictly in that order. Thank God I managed to graduate ontime, because the emotional whiplash was starting to grindat me.Not that this issue of mine is something I like to admitwidely. Mostly just to Mara and Hannah, my supposed bestfriends. We met during the first year of our Ph.D.’s and havebeen lumbering together through the tribulations of STEMacademia ever since. For the most part, having them in mylife has been my one true joy, but there have been less-than-outstanding aspects of it. For instance, the fact thatduring the four years we lived together they oscillatedbetween staging anti-superstition interventions andpranking me by inviting stray black cats into our apartment on every Friday the 13th. (We even ended up adopting onefor a few months, JimBob, till we noticed that the kitty in theMissing flyers all over the neighborhood suspiciouslyresembled him; JimBob was, in fact, Mrs. Fluffpuff, and wereturned her quietly, in the middle of the night. She’s beendearly missed ever since.) Anyway, yes: I have horrible,amazing, superstition-unsupportive BFFs. But we don’t livetogether anymore. We don’t even live in the same city: Marais in D.C. at the EPA, and Hannah has been working forNASA and commuting between Texas and Norway. I canthrow salt over my shoulder and frantically look around forwood to knock on to my heart’s content.Why,why am I like this? I have no clue. Let’s just blamemy aggressively Italian mother.But back to this Tuesday morning: the crux of my problem,you see, is that back in the winter, before my mostsuccessful client pitch to date, I got a bit peckish. So Ipopped into Faye’s hole-in-the-wall coffee shop, and insteadof just asking for the usual—punishingly black coffee: nosugar, no cream, just the bitter oblivion of darkness—Itacked a croissant on to my order. It was just as good as thecoffee (i.e., simultaneously stale and undercooked; tastehovering between starch and salmonella) and, to my eternaldismay, was promptly followed by me bagging the mostlucrative contract GreenFrame had seen in its young history.Gianna was over the moon. And so was I, until my half-Italian brain started forming a million little connectionsbetween the croissant from hell and my big professionalwin. You know where this is going: yes, I now desperatelyfeel that I must eat one of Faye’s croissants before everysingle pitch meeting, otherwise the unthinkable will happen.And no, I have no idea how to react to her kind butdefinitive, “Sorry, honey, we’re all out of croissants.”Did I say that there are worse things in the world? I lied.This is a disaster. My career is over. Are those sirens in thedistance? “I see.” I bite into my lower lip, order it to un-pout itself,and force myself to smile. After all, it’s not Faye’s fault if mymom drilled into my baby neurons that walking under thestairs is a surefire way to a lifetime of despair. I go totherapy for that. Or I will. At some point. “Are you, um,making more?”She looks at the display case. “I’ve got muffins left.Blueberry. Lemon glaze.”Oh. That actually sounds good. But. “No croissants,though?”“And I can make you a bagel. Cinnamon? Blueberry?Plain?”“Is that a no on the croissants?”Faye cocks her head with a pleased expression. “You reallylike my croissants, don’t you?”Do I? “They’re so, um.” I clutch the strap of my fake-leather messenger bag. “Unique.”“Well, unfortunately I just gave the last one to Erik overthere.” Faye points to her left, toward the very end of thecounter, but I barely glance at Erik-over-there—tall man,broad shoulders, wears suit, boring—too busy cursing myown timing. I shouldnot have spent twenty minutes ticklingthe majestic beauty of Ozzy’s little guinea pig tush. I amnow rightfully paying for my mistakes, and Faye is giving mean assessing stare. “I’ll toast you a bagel. You’re too skinnyto skip breakfast. Eat more and you might grow a littletaller, too.”I doubt I’ll manage to finally push past five feet at the ripeold age of twenty-seven, but who’s to say. “Just to recap,” Isay, in one last pleading, whiny attempt at salvaging myprofessional future, “you’renot making more croissantstoday?”Faye’s eyes narrow. “Honey, you might like my croissantsa littletoo much—”“Here.” The voice—not Faye’s—is deep and pitched low, comingfrom somewhere above my head. But I barely pay it anyattention because I’m too busy staring at the croissant thathas miraculously appeared in front of my eyes. It’s stillwhole, set on top of a napkin, a few stray flakes of doughslowly crumbling off its top. I’ve had Faye’s croissantsbefore, and I know that what they lack in taste they makeup for in size. They are very, very large.Even when delivered by a very, very large hand.I blink at it for several seconds, wondering if this is asuperstition-induced mirage. Then I slowly turn around tolook at the man who deposited the croissant on the counter.He’s already gone. Half out of the door, and all I get is abrief impression of broad shoulders and light hair.“What—?” I blink at Faye, pointing at the man. “What . . .?”“I guess Erik decided you should have the last croissant.”“Why?”She shrugs. “Wouldn’t look a gift croissant in the mouth ifI were you.”Gift croissant.I shrug myself out of my stupor, toss a five-dollar bill inthe tip jar, and run out of the café. “Hey!” I call. The man isabout twenty steps ahead of me. Well, twenty steps with mytiny legs. Might be less than five with his own. “Hey, couldyou wait a . . . ?”He doesn’t stop, so I clutch my croissant and hurry afterhim. I channel my best Former Soccer Scholarship Kid selfand dodge a lady walking her dog, then her dog, then twoteenagers making out on the sidewalk. I catch up rightaround the corner, when I come to a halt in front of him.“Hey.” I grin up. And up and up and up. He’s taller than Icalculated. And I’m more winded than I’d like. I need to workout more. “Thank youso much! You really didn’t have to . ..” I fall silent. For no real reason other than because of howstriking he looks. He is just so . . .
