Loathe to Love You
Praise for Ali Hazelwood
“A literary breakthrough. . . . The Love Hypothesis is a self-assured debut, and we hypothesize it’s just the first bit of greatness we’ll see from an author who somehow has the audacity to be both an academic powerhouse and [a] divinely talented novelist.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Contemporary romance’s unicorn: the elusive marriage of deeply brainy and delightfully escapist. . . . The Love Hypothesis has wild commercial appeal, but the quieter secret is that there is a specific audience, made up of all of the Olives in the world, who have deeply, ardently waited for this exact book.”
—New York Times bestselling author Christina Lauren
“With her sophomore novel, Ali Hazelwood proves that she is the perfect writer to show that science is sexy as hell, and that love can ‘STEM’ from the most unlikely places. She’s my newest must-buy author.”
—#1 New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult
“Funny, sexy, and smart. Ali Hazelwood did a terrific job with The Love Hypothesis.”
—New York Times bestselling author Mariana Zapata
“Gloriously nerdy and sexy, with on-point commentary about women in STEM.”
—New York Times bestselling author Helen Hoang
“STEMinists, assemble. Your world is about to be rocked.”
—New York Times bestselling author Elena Armas
“This tackles one of my favorite tropes—Grumpy meets Sunshine—in a fun and utterly endearing way. . . . I loved the nods toward fandom and romance novels, and I couldn’t put it down. Highly recommended!”
—New York Times bestselling author Jessica Clare
“Pure slow-burning gold with lots of chemistry.”
—PopSugar
“A beautifully written romantic comedy with a heroine you will instantly fall in love with, The Love Hypothesis is destined to earn a place on your keeper shelf.”
—Elizabeth Everett, author of A Lady’s Formula for Love
“Smart, witty dialogue and a diverse cast of likable secondary characters. . . . A realistic, amusing novel that readers won’t be able to put down.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“Hilarious and heartwarming, The Love Hypothesis is romantic comedy at its best. . . . A perfect amalgamation of sex and science, sure to appeal to readers of Christina Lauren or Abby Jimenez.”
—Shelf Awareness
“With whip-smart and endearing characters, snappy prose, and a quirky take on a favorite trope, Hazelwood convincingly navigates the fraught shoals of academia.”
—Publishers Weekly
TITLES BY ALI HAZELWOOD
• • • •
The Love Hypothesis
Love on the Brain
LOATHE TO LOVE YOU
Under One Roof
Stuck with You
Below Zero
BERKLEY ROMANCE
Published by Berkley
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
penguinrandomhouse.com
Copyright © 2023 by Ali Hazelwood
Under One Roof, Stuck with You, and Below Zero copyright © 2022 by Ali Hazelwood
Penguin 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 this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.
BERKLEY and the BERKLEY and B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Ebook ISBN: 9780593638002
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hazelwood, Ali, author.
Title: Loathe to love you / Ali Hazelwood.
Description: First edition. | New York: Berkley Romance, 2023.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022021252 | ISBN 9780593437803 (trade paperback)
Subjects: LCGFT: Romance fiction. | Novellas.
Classification: LCC PS3608.A98845 L63 2023 | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20220502
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022021252
Under One Roof, Stuck with You, and Below Zero were originally published separately as audio editions, February, March, and April 2022 respectively, and then as ebook editions, May, June, and July 2022 respectively, by Jove, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.
First Edition: January 2023
Cover illustration by lilithsaur
Book design by Daniel Brount, adapted for ebook by Molly Jeszke
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Under One Roof
Stuck with You
Below Zero
Bonus Chapter
_142201953_
Under
One Roof
For Becca, who is the best and had the best prompt
Prologue 
Present
I look at the pile of dishes in the sink and reach a painful realization: I’ve got it bad.
Actually, scratch that. I already knew I had it bad. But if I hadn’t, this would be a dead giveaway: the fact that I cannot glance at a colander and twelve dirty forks without seeing Liam’s dark eyes as he leans against the counter, arms crossed on his chest; without hearing his stern-yet-teasing voice asking me, “Postmodern installation art? Or are we just out of soap?”
It comes right on the trail of arriving home late and noticing that he left the porch light on for me. That one . . . oh, that one always makes my heart hiccup in a half-lovely, half-wrenching way. Also heart-hiccup inducing: I remember to turn it off once I’m inside. Very unlike me, and possibly a sign that the chia seed sludge he’s been making me for breakfast in the mornings when I’m late for work is actually making my brain smarter.
It’s good that I’ve decided to move out. For the best. These heart hiccups are not sustainable in the long term, not to my mental or cardiovascular health. I’m only a humble beginner at this whole pining thing, but I can safely state that living with some guy you used to hate and somehow ended up slipping in love with is not a wise move. Trust me, I have a doctorate.
(In a totally unrelated field, but still.)
You know what is good about the pining? The constant nervous energy. It has me looking at the pile of dishes and thinking that cleaning the kitchen could be a fun activity. When Liam enters the room, I’m riding the unexpected urge to load the dishwasher as far as it will carry me. I glance up at him, notice the way he nearly fills the doorframe, and order my heart not to hiccup. It does it anyway—even adds a flip for good measure.
My heart’s a jackass.
“You’re probably wondering if a sniper is forcing me to do the dishes at gunpoint.” I beam at Liam without really expecting him to smile back, because—Liam. He’s next to impossible to read, but I’ve long stopped trying to see his amusement, and I just let myself feel it. It’s nice, and warm, and I want to bathe in it. I want to make him shake his head, and say “Mara” in that tone of his, and laugh against his better judgment. I want to push up on my toes, reach out to fix the dark strand of hair on his forehead, burrow into his chest to smell the clean, delicious smell of his skin.
But I doubt he wants any of that. So I turn back to rinse a cereal bowl hiding under the colander.
“I figured you were being mind-controlled by those parasitic spores we saw on that documentary.” His voice is low. Rich. I will miss it so, so much.
“Those were barnacles— See, I knew you fell asleep halfway.” He doesn’t reply. Which is fine, because—Liam. A man of few smiles and even fewer words. “So, you know the neighbors’ puppy? That French bulldog? He must have gotten away during a walk, because I just saw him run toward me in the middle of the street. Leash hanging from his neck and all.” I reach out for a towel and my hand bumps into him. He’s standing right behind me now. “Oops. Sorry. Anyway, I carried him back home and he was so cute . . .”
I stop. Because all of a sudden Liam is not just standing behind me. I’m being crowded against the sink, the edge of the counter pressed into my hip bones, and there’s a tall wall of heat flat against my back.
Oh my God.
Is he . . . Did he trip? He must have tripped. This is an accident.
“Liam?”
“This okay, Mara?” he asks, but he doesn’t move away. He stays right where he is, front pressed against my back, hands against the counter on each side of my hips, and . . . Is this some kind of lucid dream? Is this a heart-hiccup-generated cardiovascular event? Is my brain converting my most shameful nighttime fantasies into hallucinations?
“Liam?” I whimper, because he is nuzzling my hair. Right above my temple, with his nose and maybe even his mouth, and it seems deliberate. Very much not an accident. Is he—? No. No, surely not.
But his hands spread on my belly, and that’s what tips me off that this is different. This doesn’t feel like one of those accidental brushing of arms in the hallway, the ones I’ve been telling myself to stop obsessing over. It doesn’t feel like that time I tripped over my computer cord and almost stumbled into his lap, and it doesn’t feel like him gently holding my wrist to check how badly I burned my thumb while cooking on the stove. This feels . . . “Liam?”
“Shh.” I feel his lips at my temple, warm and reassuring. “Everything’s okay, Mara.”
Something hot and liquid begins to coil at the bottom of my belly.
One
Six months ago
Frankly, “They get on like a house on fire” is the most misleading saying in the English language. Faulty wiring? Misuse of heating equipment? Suspected arson? Not evocative of two people getting along in the least. You know what a house on fire has me picturing? Bazookas. Flamethrowers. Sirens in the distance. Because nothing is more guaranteed to start a house fire than two enemies blowtorching each other’s most prized possession. Want to trigger an explosion? Being nice to your roommate is not going to do it. Lighting a match on top of their kerosene-soaked handmade quilt, on the other hand—”
“Miss?” The Uber driver turns, looking guilty about interrupting my pre-apocalyptic spiel. “Just a heads-up—we’re about five minutes from your destination.”
I smile an apologetic Thank you and glance back at my phone. My two best friends’ faces take up the entire screen. Then, on the upper corner there’s me: more frowny than usual (well justified), more pasty than usual (is that even possible?), more ginger than usual (must be the filter, right?).
“That’s a totally fair take, Mara,” Sadie says with a puzzled expression, “and I encourage you to submit your, um, very valid complaints to Madame Merriam-Webster or whoever’s in charge of these matters, but . . . I literally only asked you how the funeral went.”
“Yes, Mara—how’d—funeral—go—?” The quality on Hannah’s end of the call is pitiful, but that’s business as usual.
This, I suppose, is what happens when you meet your best friends in grad school: One minute you’re happy as a clam, clutching your shiny brand-new engineering diploma, giggling your way through a fifth round of Midori sours. The next you’re in tears, because you’re all going separate ways. FaceTime becomes as necessary as oxygen. There are zero neon-green cocktails in sight. Your slightly deranged monologues don’t happen in the privacy of the apartment you share, but in the semipublic back seat of an Uber, while you’re on your way to have a very, very weird conversation.
See, that’s the thing I hate the most about adulting: at some point, one has to start doing it. Sadie is designing fancy eco-sustainable buildings in New York City. Hannah is freezing her butt off at some Arctic research station NASA put up in Norway. And as for me . . .
I’m here. Moving to D.C. to start my dream job—scientist at the Environmental Protection Agency. On paper, I should be over the moon. But paper burns so fast. As fast as houses on fire.
“Helena’s funeral was . . . interesting.” I lean back against the seat. “I guess that’s the upside of knowing that you’re about to die. You get to bully people a bit. Tell them that if they don’t play ‘Karma Chameleon’ while lowering your casket your ghost will haunt their progeny for generations.”
“I’m just glad you were able to be with her in the last few days,” Sadie says.
I smile wistfully. “She was the worst till the very end. She cheated in our last chess game. As if she wouldn’t have beaten me anyway.” I miss her. An inordinate amount. Helena Harding, my Ph.D. advisor and mentor for the past eight years, was family in a way my cold, distant blood relatives never cared to be. But she was also elderly, in a lot of pain, and, as she liked to put it, eager to move on to bigger projects.
“It was so lovely of her to leave you her D.C. house,” Hannah says. She must have moved to a better fjord, because I can actually make out her words. “Now you’ll have a place to be, no matter what.”
It’s true. It’s all true, and I am immensely grateful. Helena’s gift was as generous as it was unexpected, easily the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me. But the reading of the will was a week ago, and there’s something I haven’t had a chance to tell my friends. Something closely related to houses on fire. “About that . . .”
“Uh-oh.” Two sets of brows furrow. “What happened?”
“It’s . . . complicated.”
“I love complicated,” Sadie says. “Is it also dramatic? Let me go get tissues.”
“Not sure yet.” I take a fortifying breath. “The house Helena left me, as it turns out, she didn’t really . . . own it.”
“What?” Sadie aborts the tissue mission to frown at me.
“Well, she did own it. But only a little. Only . . . half.”
“And who owns the other half?” Trust Hannah to zoom in on the crux of the problem.
“Originally, Helena’s brother, who died and left it to his kids. Then the youngest son bought out the others, and now he’s the sole owner. Well, with me.” I clear my throat. “His name is Liam. Liam Harding. He’s a lawyer in his early thirties. And he currently lives in the house. Alone.”
Sadie’s eyes widen. “Holy shit. Did Helena know?”
“I have no clue. You’d assume, but the Hardings are such a weird family.” I shrug. “Old money. Lots of it. Think Vanderbilts. Kennedys. What even goes on in rich people’s brains?”
“Probably monocles,” Hannah says.
I nod. “Or topiary gardens.”
“Cocaine.”
“Polo tournaments.”
“Cuff links.”
“Hang on,” Sadie interrupts us. “What did Liam Vanderbilt Kennedy Harding say about this at the funeral?”
“Excellent question, but: he wasn’t there.”
“He didn’t show up to his aunt’s funeral?”
“He doesn’t really keep in touch with his family. Lots of drama, I suspect.” I tap my chin. “Maybe they’re less Vanderbilts, more Kardashians?”
“Are you saying that he doesn’t know that you own the other half of his house?”
“Someone gave me his number and I told him I’d be coming around.” I pause before adding, “Via text. We haven’t talked yet.” Another pause. “And he didn’t really . . . reply.”