The Love Coupon

  The Love Coupon

  by Ainslie Paton

  How many coupons does it take to fall in love?

  Flick Dalgetty knows what she wants and how to get it, which is why she’s about to start her dream job in Washington. Until then, she needs somewhere to crash, and Tom O’Connell’s place is her sole option. He’s a repressed, antisocial ogre...but man can he kiss.

  For Tom, being around Flick is like being too close to the sun. Her untamed energy is overwhelming, and he’d spontaneously combust if he had to live with her long-term. Housemates with benefits—and an expiration date—suits him just fine.

  Then Flick gives Tom thirty coupons, each entitling him to one obligation-free activity, from bowling and bubble-bathing to morning delight, removing all the guesswork from being incompatible partners and shifting their fling into high gear.

  Now the problem is their arrangement is drawing to a close, and they might be falling in love—and there wasn’t a coupon for that.

  This book is approximately 90,000 words

  One-click with confidence. This title is part of the Carina Press Romance Promise: all the romance you’re looking for with an HEA/HFN. It’s a promise!

  Carina Press acknowledges the editorial services of Mackenzie Walton

  Dedication

  To all those partners who give up what’s important to them to gain what’s more important. Heroes for love.

  This book was made possible by date scones and other goodies.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The Thirty Coupons

  Thirty Coupons Playlist

  Excerpt from The Love Experiment by Ainslie Paton

  About the Author

  Also by Ainslie Paton

  Chapter One

  If you plugged an amusement park into Flick Dalgetty, you could light up a roller coaster and make cotton candy for days.

  Too much exposure to her and Tom figured his chances of dying from electric shock, heart failure or diabetes ratcheted up to a thousand percent.

  Everyone who was anyone in the media and public affairs industry in Chicago, which was everyone at this hacks-and-flacks mixer, knew Flick. She was tough, sharp, wrote well, pitched a story even better, knew her lobbying from her hobnobbing, got results. She had integrity. She won industry awards.

  She was a person going somewhere, but with a kind of no-holds-barred, anything-goes approach Tom found both dangerous and exhausting. If she burned out in a few years’ time and disappeared off the radar, it’d be no surprise.

  He admired her, but she was his personal definition of way outside the box.

  She’d either win big or end up in a doomsday cult. There was no middle ground.

  There had to be nearly a hundred consultants and reporters in a room made for far fewer. It was loud in here, so he had to have misheard Wren. He shoulder-bumped her. “Did you say Flick Dalgetty needs a temporary roommate?”

  “Yeah,” Wren said, “but I overheard that, so don’t ask me for the details.”

  He could no sooner live with Flick Dalgetty than he could become a man who believed whims, distractions and impulsiveness were good notions to live by. Tom’s ambitions were better contained in goal setting, scheduling, discipline. He’d get what he wanted in life methodically, by staying the course, not zigzagging all over the shop. That’s the way it had worked so far, and he had no reason to believe that strategy wouldn’t deliver him everything he wanted.

  Living with Flick Dalgetty would be like being kidnapped and trapped inside a Gravitron. The music would never stop, the lights would flash forever and the centrifugal force of her would flatten him.

  He needed a temporary housemate, not a personal wind machine who also popped corn, tamed lions and taught monkeys to dance.

  “Something about her housemate quitting on her, same problem as you,” Wren said.

  Watching Flick hold court with a bunch of business reporters who had their mouths open like fairground clown heads made Tom’s gut tighten. “Josh didn’t quit on me. He moved to Beijing.”

  “The very idea of Flick in your swanky condo has you panicked. You’re looking at her as if she’s an alien species when she might be the solution to your problem,” Wren said with an eye roll that could’ve given her concussion.

  There wasn’t any way electronic-shockagram, disco-light-strobe, tip-you-upside-down-and-shake-you-while-laughing-like-a-horror-show Flick Dalgetty could solve any problem Tom was likely to have.

  Ever.

  Still, he deserved the full-head eye roll. When Josh moved to Beijing, Tom had lost a best friend and close colleague, the perfect roommate and half a mortgage payment, making him tense about being financially overextended, but Wren had lost her work husband and any sympathy she might’ve had for Tom’s predicament.

  Across the room, Flick was doing some kind of dance routine, throwing her arms around and stomping her feet. “I think she’s made of ants. Maybe it’s bees. She never stops buzzing. She probably never shuts up either,” he said.

  “I see you re-upped your cranky-pill dosage.”

  “I don’t need a roommate badly enough to consider Flick Dalgetty. I’ll starve first. I’ll get a second job.”

  Wren made a pig snort noise. “A second job with all the free time you have after working fifteen hours a day.”

  “I came to drinks.”

  “Under protest. Like half the room, you only came because you want to see if the famous Jack Haley shows up. I bet you go back to the office tonight.”

  Wren was right, that’s why there was such a big turnout. Hacks and flacks’ monthly get-togethers were never this well attended and Tom rarely bothered showing up—he didn’t need to stand around making awkward small talk with industry colleagues for no good reason. What he needed was a word with Haley about a story.

  Wren stifled a yawn behind her hand. They’d both been working long hours on the branding and launch of MK-9371, Accord Pharma’s new enzyme-blocking Alzheimer’s drug. When your client stood to make a hundred million on the one drug, you worked fifteen-hour days and said “thank you very much” at bonus time.

  Shame it wasn’t bonus time.

  “I’ll finish up the brand report tomorrow,” Tom said. Naming the new drug was an integral part of its go-to-market strategy. It couldn’t make it into the hands of patients as MK-9371, and naming a new drug wasn’t as much fun as it sounded. They’d tested dozens of names so far and not yet found a winner. “All this being out and about has made me tired. Haley is not going to show.”

  “Poor baby.” Wren yawned, musically. She’d taken off one height-enhancing heel and stood with her weight on one stockinged foot. “No social stamina.”

  Flick had moved on from the business writer clowns. He’d lost sight of her. That felt like a bad idea. Flick woul
d be the kind of person who loved surprising you. Tom had given surprises up when he was eight and didn’t miss them; in fact, he actively campaigned against them. They were bad for business and awful for life in general.

  “It’s not my stamina you need to worry about, it’s my social capital. If I had to live with Flick Dalgetty and her constant buzzing, itching, braying, nonstop exhaust-o-thon, I’d be risking my sanity.”

  Wren yawned again, and this time Tom saw her tonsils. “I hear Gino’s needs late-shift delivery drivers,” she said with very rounded vowels.

  “I’m not kidding. There has to be someone else we know but don’t work directly with—” because that could get unnecessarily messy “—who needs a temporary roommate.”

  Once his promotion came through, Tom planned on living alone, but until that extra salary hit his account, he had no choice but to take a savage haircut on his savings—doable, but not fiscally smart—or find a short-term roommate.

  Anyone but Flick Dalgetty.

  “And if you don’t get the job?”

  Then the temporary roommate would need to become a permanent roommate while he plotted his next move. Josh had made his, taking the Beijing gig. It was Tom’s turn.

  “I’m getting the job.” And everyone knew he was the anointed heir to the MD’s corner office.

  Another yawn from Wren. Catching; it made him yawn too. “You know, you could afford to live a little,” she said.

  That was exactly the plan. One he’d had since he was a mere military brat. The new job, the condo to himself. His version of living a lot. He didn’t need much, just his promotion and the privacy of his River North address, and he’d been working at both those things since he graduated and survived a summer internship with Rendel Public Affairs.

  One mooted office managing director retirement and some slightly distasteful internal politicking up the food chain was all that stood in his way after ten years of not living much at all outside of the office and away from a keyboard and phone.

  But he wouldn’t risk his savings to keep his newfound Josh-less privacy, and much as he was all booyah about getting the top job and being the company’s youngest regional managing director, he was also hip-checking contingency plans because Tom and Plan B were best buds. That’s what a temporary roommate was. Insurance.

  “You might need to actually tell people you’re looking for a roommate if you really want to find one.”

  That was a chore he’d rather avoid. It required talking to people about the details of their life. It would ultimately require a working knowledge of what style of pajamas they wore, and how bizarre they looked with bedhead, and whether they could manage to get a cereal bowl into the dishwasher instead of the sink. Jesus, it might require him to be polite to whoever they slept with.

  Josh had been just as Type A, workaholic, neat-freak, house-proud and hardly-ever-home as Tom was. They’d seen each other more in the office than around the kitchen counter. Neither of them had been dating. They both favored discreet, casual hookups, because emotional commitments got in the way, and a regular partner wanted regular things: dinner eaten together, God forbid, actual voice contact during the day, weekends away, hanging out with each other’s posse, outdoor stuff done for fun, and the pinnacle of fears—spontaneity.

  “Why can’t you be in need of temporary accommodation?” He could live with Wren; they appreciated the same things, a rigorously well-organized daily schedule and just enough slack time to exercise and sleep. In other words, very few interruptions to what they both liked doing best—working.

  “Because I’d be in need of long-term accommodation at the expense of the state.” Wren craned her neck to look at a cluster of reporters. “I’d kill you, Tom. I love you as a friend and colleague.” He followed her eye line. Was that Jack Haley in that knot of people by the bar? “But I wouldn’t live with you if you were the last man willing to have sex with me.”

  He frowned. Wren would never have said that about Josh, and he was gay. “I thought the last man you wanted to have sex with was Spin.” He angled his glass to the bar where the sports reporter Dante Spinoza was no doubt talking about tackle counts. As unlikely as it seemed, Wren and Spin were friends from college days.

  “True. I can’t have sex with Spin—it’d feel like incest.”

  “Now I’m revolted.” And truly how did he end up talking about sex with his junior colleague? He wanted to talk to Haley if he showed, but he didn’t want to line up for the privilege.

  “You’re kind of a bore outside work,” Wren said.

  One man’s boring was another man’s insanely satisfied by his career and its eventual lifestyle benefits. “This from a woman whose idea of exhilaration is synchronizing her calendars. I cook. I hike.”

  “Which has always surprised me. It’s a plus, but I diet. I’m in mourning for Josh, I’m avoiding Spin and I’m keeping my studio. Oh look, Phil Madden has just noticed Shona Potter is here. That affair is so over. He looks like he wants to punch someone.”

  Tom smiled to see the managing editor of the Courier look discomforted. A rare event. There was still no sign of Flick. But that was definitely Jack Haley helping himself to a mini quiche.

  Since Haley was laid off from the Courier, Tom hadn’t seen him around at all. His mug shot wasn’t all over the city’s transit and he no longer showed up on TV screens, or on radio, doing his investigative reporter thing, but since he was here, the rumor must be true—Haley was back in business. And that was exactly what Tom had been hoping for.

  It’d been a long week full of fifteen-hour days, and there was no need to make it any longer. He’d speak to Haley and get out of here. All he had to do was wait till the man wasn’t surrounded, not that Haley was paying any attention to anyone but the woman who appeared at his side.

  “Delia, Delilah?” He should know her name.

  “Derelie, rhymes with Merrily,” Wren corrected. “It looks like they survived becoming an internet meme.”

  A mortifying moment. Someone at the Courier had caught Jack and Derelie in a lover’s clinch on the day Jack was fired, filmed it, posted it everywhere and next thing you know the Defender of the City was the romantic hero of the moment.

  But he had to respect the man. Haley had been shoved off his career path and Plan B–ed his way back, running his own investigative news website with private funding.

  “You could Airbnb Josh’s old bedroom,” said Wren.

  Tom had no illusions he designed his life to run like a boot camp, everything in its place at the right time, in the right order and the right level of intensity. A parade of strangers in his home...that would end him. He’d rather live with Flick Dalgetty.

  “I’m going to talk to Haley. See you Monday.”

  He left Wren, skirted a bunch of agency colleagues and that new health reporter from the Times who everyone agreed was an absolute dope, and made his way to Jack Haley. Derelie, not Merrily. Derelie, not Merrily. It wouldn’t do to get that wrong. She worked at the Courier on the lifestyle desk.

  He had his opening pitch worked out. They’d have a five-minute chat in which Tom would tempt Haley into digging into some dodgy dealings at Accord Pharma’s biggest rival, and then he could go home and die for a good six hours before he went back in to the office, to put in a half day at his desk.

  He could almost feel his head hitting the pillow, and then with his hand out ready to shake Haley’s disaster struck at three times the force of gravity.

  Someone knocked him aside and barreled into Jack Haley’s arms with a “Sorry, Tom. You can have him next.”

  That’s when he learned that up close, Flick Dalgetty was an out-of-control bumper car, and had pointy elbows to go with her electric-shock manner, and the most outrageously rusty green eyes.

  And that alone was enough to give him whiplash.

  Chapter Two

  Tom O’Connel
l had a hard body, and he put it right in Flick’s way of getting to Jack Haley. He might’ve broken her arm. She wanted to rub her elbow but she wouldn’t give Tom the satisfaction of seeing that. Besides, she was on a mission. She owed Jack a thank-you.

  “I’m glad you came, Jack,” she said, ignoring Tom, letting go of Jack’s forearms and stepping back.

  Meanwhile, hard-body O’Connell owed her an apology. Which, from a glance at the annoyance on his square-jawed face, wasn’t coming anytime soon. Nor did he back off graciously as the loser and concede space.

  He loomed.

  She had to do something about that. Flick took the flyer that she’d crumpled into her jacket pocket and shoved it at Tom. It was a discount coupon for a strip club that a guy had pressed into her hand on the street. Maybe Tom would get the hint and take his disagreeable self off to brood elsewhere.

  While Tom was distracted with the paper, she focused on Jack. “I can’t thank you enough for making that call for me.” She’d needed a high-profile person who could talk her up without endangering her current position by talking out of turn over the months of interviews.

  Having Jack Haley vouch for her proved she was well connected, a serious player, an asset to the team. Dream job nailed. She couldn’t be happier if she’d been born taller.

  “You can never invite me to a networking function again,” Jack said.

  She’d convinced him to come tonight on the basis that it would be good for his new business to show his face around. “Stay half an hour and you never need to come again. Everyone who ever thought the champion of the people was a dead duck will know how wrong they were.” That was half the reason why there were so many reporters, lobbyists and communicators here tonight. The rumor she’d started that Jack might show was a heck of a draw card.

  Jack didn’t quite laugh, which meant he was probably onto her. She’d brought Jack to hacks and flacks, and she’d also brought the who’s who of the industry to him.

  “I’m trying to give up smoking. If I crack tonight, it’s your fault, Flick.” He gestured to the woman by his side. “This is Derelie Honeywell. Derelie, Felicity Dalgetty.”