The Hate Date, page 1
The Hate Date
A Romantic Comedy
Alina Jacobs
Contents
Other books by Alina Jacobs
Synopsis
1. Belle
2. Greg
3. Belle
4. Greg
5. Belle
6. Greg
7. Belle
8. Greg
9. Belle
10. Greg
11. Belle
12. Greg
13. Belle
14. Greg
15. Belle
16. Greg
17. Belle
18. Greg
19. Belle
20. Greg
21. Belle
22. Greg
23. Belle
24. Greg
25. Belle
26. Greg
27. Belle
28. Greg
29. Belle
30. Greg
31. Belle
Mailing List
Family Tree
Acknowledgments
About the Author
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright ©2021 by Adair Lakes, LLC.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
Created with Vellum
Other books by Alina Jacobs
Check out other books about characters mentioned in this one on my website:
http://alinajacobs.com/books.html
To my many succulents that I can’t seem to keep alive. RIP.
Synopsis
Guys six feet and over have it made in the dating game.
Girls? Not so much.
Most guys stay far the hell away from tall girls.
The ones who don’t? You’re getting the real bottom of the barrel dates:
The guy with the height fetish who kept trying to touch my feet.
The dude with mommy issues who burst into tears and cried on my shoulder.
The alphahole billionaire who needs a whole separate town car for his ego.
At first glance (an upward glance because he was TALL!) Greg Svensson seemed perfect.
Six-feet-five of solid muscle with washboard abs and a tower with his name on it, Greg was a guy my parents would actually begrudgingly admire.
I had our future all planned out.
Until he opened his mouth.
It was hate at first sight.
The only thing we have in common is that we’re both tall.
He wears bespoke suits.
I wear flats with holes in them.
He runs a big shot investment firm.
I’m trying to start my own company with only bubble gum and circus peanuts.
He likes to show up at my horrible dates and ruin them.
I…pretended I hated when he did that but secretly was thrilled even though it was a little young adult fiction.
Don’t judge!
Six-foot tall beggars can’t be choosers.
Besides, just because I hate him doesn’t mean I won’t date him!
This is a prequel to the new Manhattan Svensson brother series. This enemies-to-lovers romantic comedy complete with all the sexy hotness on a six-foot-five stick, a heroine who is your new best friend, and all the laugh-out-loud moments that will make you choke on your wine!
1
Belle
My mom always told me to tell guys I was five feet twelve and not six feet tall.
“You don’t want to scare them off!” she would remind me. “Men don’t want tall girls.”
But it wasn’t like lying about being six feet tall made me not six feet tall. I wasn’t just taller than most men—I towered over them.
The worst thing about being tall was the comments, and not just from the guys I had dated who would stare at me over drinks, flinching at every motion I made as if they were afraid I was about to sprout up another five inches in front of them.
No, it was also the all-too-common “How’s the weather up there?” (Still raining, just like it is five inches below my head). Or the random “You should be a model!” (No, Karen, I shouldn’t because I like to eat my weight in fettuccine alfredo). Or the always obnoxious “OMG, how did you get so tall?” (Blame my parents; I sure did.)
My five-foot-nine mom would always sigh when she looked up at me and say, “I don’t understand why you’re so tall.”
Really, Dr. Diana Frost? Despite your two PhDs, you have failed to grasp the rudimentary concept that tall person plus tall person makes tall person—tall boys and tall girls. My mom had probably thought that her family was going to be like one of those sibling groups in the romance novels I would sneak at night, in which the whole puppy pound of brothers was big and tall, and the one lone sister was short and petite, and her brothers all looked after her and were protective of her.
Ha! I wish!
My brothers were the worst. They were more of a feral cat colony than a basket of puppies—stealing my stuff, fighting, and complaining.
It had been a good thing I was tall. Too busy with their careers to raise six children and too concerned about what the neighbors would say to hire a nanny, my parents left yours truly to single-handedly raise their five very tall, very large, sons. And I hadn’t done it because I was sugar and spice and everything nice. I had ruled with an iron fist.
You definitely wanted to be tall and strong when wrestling down a smelly five-foot-eight fourth grader who wouldn’t stop playing video games to come eat dinner, or when shot-putting a six-foot-one high school senior’s hockey skates at him when he left them in the hallway for the twentieth time.
Sigh. Praying hands.
I had been more of a mother to my five younger brothers than our own mother had been. I didn’t resent them—after all, I was their big sister. I would always rescue my brothers. That was my thing. Because what else was a six-foot woman to be except for the rescuer?
She definitely wasn’t the princess.
I tried to channel that badass rescuer energy as I jogged in the cold along the Hudson River side of Manhattan Island.
I am a warrior. I am a boss.
Except that I hated running. I would much rather be in bed with a book and a bowl of popcorn with Turtle Tracks ice cream at the ready.
As I huffed down the concrete running path, I watched the water. The city had spent the last few years cleaning it up. Now, in warmer weather, people would be swimming, scuba diving, kayaking, and doing other water sports in the river. Not that the sheltered New York urbanites could handle their newfound water sports access. Just last summer, I saved a kid who had been drowning.
In fact…
I peered at the water. Something human-shaped bobbed up and down about a hundred feet out. His head was back, eyes closed, head and shoulders going under the water for a brief moment then back up.
“Hey!” I yelled, cupping my hands around my mouth, “You okay?”
The man wearing the black diving suit didn’t respond. I looked around. There wasn’t anyone else in the linear park. It was New Year’s Day and freezing cold.
The cold didn’t bother me. Which was great because clearly that diver needed to be rescued.
I shrugged off my thin long-sleeved shirt, capri running pants, and tennis shoes then dove into the water. Shards of ice pricked my skin as I swam toward the drowning man.
There were times—well, most times—when I hated being the tallest girl, especially since my height hadn’t come with model thinness. I was no Princess Diana. I was built like a pioneer woman or a medieval lady knight.
But now I was glad to have my strength. The man was large, and if I were any smaller, I might not be able to drag him to shore.
Once I was a few feet away, I submerged myself in the water to come up under him—the proper technique for rescuing a drowning person—and grabbed him under the armpits.
He started writhing.
Sometimes during a rescue, drowning people panic and try to climb on top of the rescuer. A good pop on the sternum usually stuns them enough to get them to stop.
“Fuck!” the man roared when I used my knuckles to dig into the bone of his breastplate. It was also through a good bit of solid muscle, which I couldn’t fixate on because the diver turned on me in the water, furious.
“Are you fucking out of your mind? Where did you come from?” Gray eyes the color of the winter sky glared at me. “Why are you attacking me?”
“I’m rescuing you!” I sputtered, treading water. “You were drowning!”
“No, I’m not!” he declared.
“Your face was half submerged in the water,” I argued.
He held up a breathing regulator.
“Ah. That explains the wet suit. And,” I peered at him, “the oxygen tanks. You know those are really supposed to be yellow, but I guess that doesn’t match the whole dark, mysterious merman prince aesthetic you have going on here.”
“Did you call me a mermaid?” my not-rescue growled.
“Merman,” I corrected. “But a prince. Like in a fantasy novel? You know, king of the watery shadow realm, the dashing man from the deep. But not any tentacles or anything like that.” Shit. Stop talking! “Er…well, all that to say, I thought you needed saving. However, I was sorely misinformed.”
I blew out a breath and ended up spraying the merman in
The merman grimaced and wiped at his face.
“Sorry about that!” I reached out to brush off his face. Though mostly hidden by the black diving caul, his brow and nose were strong under my palm. I jerked my hand back.
It’s sad because this is the most action you’ve had in the last eighteen months.
“Have a great day and enjoy this beautiful weather!” I croaked at him.
As I pivoted in the water, a man cleared his throat to my right. So as not to completely embarrass myself, I turned my yelp of surprise into a curse.
The new diver from the deep laughed, then several more men wearing black diving suits surfaced around me, all gray-eyed and strong jawed, though they seemed infinitely more amused than my non-drowning rescue.
“Did you make a friend?” one of the divers joked to the merman.
“Did you find my watch?” the mysterious merman shot back.
“I feel like since we’re all brothers, you should forgive and forget.”
The merman lunged at his brother in the water so quickly it was almost preternatural.
Dayum, he really is a prince of the shadow realm.
“I don’t ever forgive and forget,” the merman warned. “I will hold a grudge until the entire planet is a wasteland.”
Then the merman let out a long, suffering sigh. “I will escort you to shore, ma’am.”
“Bro, this will be the first date you’ve been on in years!” one of his brothers said with a laugh.
Merman turned on him, giving a slight flash of teeth. “And this is going to be your last day on Earth if you don’t find my watch, Liam.”
His brothers sighed and sank back down into the cold depths.
“I don’t need an escort,” I told the merman, feeling foolish.
“The water is freezing,” he said, deep voice bouncing over the choppy waves. “You could pass out and drown, and then I will be blamed, and it will be a horrible inconvenience.”
“It’s cool and refreshing,” I retorted.
“You aren’t even shivering,” he protested, following me as I did the breaststroke back to shore. “That means you’re probably in the early stages of hypothermia.”
“It takes a lot to make me cold,” I said stubbornly. “This is nothing. I went swimming in Antarctica once. I petted a penguin. It was really cute.”
Not as cute as you, Merman!
Shut up, brain!
But the prince of the shadow realm persisted in swimming silently next to me. Which was a problem because I was wearing… not much. Not to mention that I hadn’t put on my nice underwear when I had left for my run—not that I owned any. The underwear I had on, I’d owned since high school. It had bunnies on it and holes in some inopportune places. And just because I didn’t mind the cold didn’t mean that my nipples didn’t show it.
I paused at the metal pipes drilled into the side of the concrete embankment that served as a rudimentary ladder.
“Okay, so you showed me back,” I said, starting to panic. I did not need him to see my terrible taste in undergarments.
“Do you need help?” Merman asked. Water droplets clung to his eyelashes.
I wished I could see his whole face.
I wish I could see the rest of him.
That thought did not help the nipple situation.
I blinked at him.
“Getting out?” He motioned.
“Nope,” I said, continuing to tread water. I was annoyed to see he did it a lot easier than me. “Seriously, frog prince, you can leave.”
“Ma’am, I think the cold has affected you more than you think,” he said, jaw tense. “Let me take off my flippers and—”
“Cheater,” I muttered.
“Excuse me?”
“You have flippers. That’s cheating!” I said loudly.
His mouth fell open. “Cheating at what?”
“Swimming. Treading water.”
“Are you going to get out, or am I going to have to drag you out?” he demanded.
“Don’t touch me!” I shrieked.
“Then get out of the river on your own accord.”
I continued to tread water. “Maybe I want to stay in a little longer.”
The merman moved, the flippers giving him an unfair advantage, and grabbed me around the waist, his strong arms half hauling me out of the water.
I grabbed for a rung of the pipe ladder.
“Where are your clothes?” he said in horror.
“I was performing a rescue!” I yelled as I inelegantly hauled myself the few feet out of the water to land on the concrete walkway like a beached whale. “Time was of the essence.”
“I fucking hate New York City,” the diver said, shaking his head. “It’s full of lunatics.”
“Right back atcha, bud,” I said as the river water dripped down my face.
2
Greg
I hated most things. I hated networking mixers, price stickers on books that leave a residue when you remove them, and all the stupid names for the coffees at Starbucks. I also hated most people. If I didn’t actively remind myself that I loved my brothers, I’d probably hate them, too, especially when they chewed noisily.
“It is not lunchtime,” I snapped at Liam when I walked into my office to find my five brothers. “And people who lost my two-million-dollar, one-of-a-kind Patek Phillipe watch in the Hudson River then failed to find it should especially not be eating in my conference room in my tower at a time that is not a designated mealtime.”
Liam stuffed the remaining quarter of his bagel sandwich in his mouth, jaw working furiously.
“I’m not eating,” he said, bits of lettuce flying out of his mouth.
I’m going to have an aneurysm. Or a stroke. Or kill my brother.
“You should have taken that hot blonde girl on a date,” Walker said.
“Did you get her number?” Carl drawled as I set my bag down.
I gave him my best glare. He gulped and sat up straighter.
“Care to try that again?” I asked.
“I have your coffee, boss,” Carl mumbled.
“Why do we have to have a meeting on New Year’s Day?” Beck complained.
“You could have stayed home in Harrogate,” I reminded him, taking my seat at the head of the conference table. “In fact, you can go back there right now. Archer bought all our younger brothers ten thousand dollars’ worth of fireworks for Christmas, and I’m sure you could be of use supervising the ensuing shit show.”
“Hard pass! I don’t really want to babysit,” Liam said, leaning back in his chair and wiping the back of his mouth with his hand.
I loved my brothers. I really did. But, my god, they drove me crazy. It wasn’t just their bad attitudes, lack of attention to things I considered important, or their terrible ideas, but also the fact that there were so goddamn many of them.
A by-product of a polygamist cult-leader father and his many wives, I had numerous half brothers, most of whom ran feral in the quaint small town of Harrogate a few hours away. My half brother Hunter did absolutely nothing to corral them, forcing me to trek out there on a biweekly basis just to keep some semblance of order.
The adults currently sitting around the table were my full brothers. Beck, the second oldest after me, was emotionally on a hair trigger and had inherited our father’s explosive temper. Mike, the third oldest, would lie to my face that he was going to do something then turn around and just not do it. Walker, next in line, was capable of following directions when he felt like it, which was not often. Then came Liam, who back talked and considered himself creative. Sitting next to me was the youngest, Carl, who had no goddamn sense, and it was a miracle he could make it through the day.
