About This Book
Laurie has built her life carefully — the career, the relationship, the plan — and then her long-term partner ends things out of nowhere, leaving her to face him every day across the same office floor. When she learns he's already moved on with a pregnant girlfriend, survival instinct kicks in. Enter Jamie Carter, the charming, commitment-allergic colleague who needs a respectable partner to clean up his image. The fake-dating pact they strike is purely transactional — until, of course, it isn't. McFarlane understands that the real stakes in a romance like this aren't about getting together; they're about figuring out who you are when the scaffolding collapses.
What sets this one apart is McFarlane's sharp, witty prose and her talent for writing female interiority without making it feel like navel-gazing. Laurie is smart and funny and wrong about herself in ways the reader will recognize before she does, which creates a particular pleasure of reading. The workplace setting gives the fake relationship real friction — these two can't just retreat into romance-bubble softness — and McFarlane uses that pressure to keep the tension honest. It's a book that earns its warmth.