The Love Hypothesis

When third-year PhD student Olive Smith impulsively kisses a stranger in a Stanford hallway to convince her best friend she's completely over her ex, she doesn't expect her victim to be Dr. Adam Carlsen — the most feared, most brilliant, and most infuriatingly attractive professor in the biology department.

Now they have a problem. Or rather, Olive has several.

To keep her best friend from abandoning a promising relationship on her behalf, Olive needs Adam to keep up the charade. And Adam, whose reputation for cold ruthlessness has left him oddly isolated in the department, has his own reasons for playing along. Fake dating a grad student might be exactly the kind of humanizing PR move he needs. It's a perfectly logical arrangement — a hypothesis with a clear outcome.

Except no one accounts for what happens when logic meets late-night lab sessions, unexpected vulnerability, and the slow, devastating realization that the man Olive assumed was heartless might actually be the only person who truly sees her.

Set against the pressure-cooker world of academic research where careers hang by a thread and everyone is always watching, *The Love Hypothesis* is a witty, warm, and achingly romantic story about two people who strike a deal neither intends to feel anything about — and fail spectacularly. Ali Hazelwood writes STEM romance like no one else, and this book is the reason readers keep coming back for more.