If Not You by Ellen O’Clover
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If Not You by Ellen O’Clover

Romance

If Not You

Repeat author

by Ellen O’Clover

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Quick take

Two rival copywriters can craft a slogan for anything. Their hardest pitch yet? Admitting they might just be in love.

Good to know

  • Illustrated icon, Female_Friendship

    Female friendships

  • Illustrated icon, Salacious

    Salacious

  • Illustrated icon, Writers_Life

    Writer’s life

  • Illustrated icon, Enemies_to_Love

    Enemies to lovers

Synopsis

Five years of history. Four weeks on the road. Two rival copywriters learning love is the hardest sell of all.

Mattie French has always known how to tell a good story. It’s why she stopped at nothing to land her dream career as a copywriter at a scrappy independent advertising agency. In fact, if it weren’t for one person, Mattie would probably be the most-talked-about rising star in town.

Campbell Porter is a senior copywriter at Chicago’s slickest agency. Absurdly talented, incredibly aware of it, and the bane of Mattie’s existence since they were interns together, Campbell is always just…there, with his golden-boy smirk and the familiar gaze that never fails to taunt her across a crowded room.

Mattie would love nothing more than to avoid Campbell forever. But when their agencies are pitted against each other to compete for a luxury resort account, it’s her chance to prove she can beat him—and earn the promotion she covets.

During the month of travel required for the pitch, Mattie and Campbell are thrown together as fierce competitors and, slowly, as unexpected witnesses to each other’s hidden wounds and softest parts. As their trip barrels toward its final pitch, Mattie is forced to confront the increasingly obvious truth: the story she’s crafted for her and Campbell over the years might need a new ending.

Read a sample

Get an early look from the first pages of If Not You.

If Not You

Prologue

Slater Faust Chicago Headquarters

42nd floor intern pods

Five years ago

Campbell Porter will be the death of me.

The first time I heard his voice, I was perched ­cross-legged on an Eames chair in the Slater Faust lobby, waiting for orientation to start. It blared from the elevator bay like some kind of warning. Big and scratchy; less sexy rasp, more dust storm. The sort of thing that obliterates everyone around it.

But Campbell’s voice was only his first infraction. Then it was his desk, facing mine, the two of us set up outside our manager’s office like desperate gargoyles. So close I could see the gold sweep of Campbell’s hair above my computer ­monitor—a hat I didn’t ask for, sitting atop every Word document I opened.

Then it was his knee. The way it bounces when he’s thinking. How he spent all summer rattling the floor beneath us.

Then his Vanderbilt Phi Beta Kappa mug. As if I didn’t already get it. The old money, the whiplash speed of Campbell Porter’s brain. No, he had to carry that thing to every meeting—palming it from the top like a heathen.

Then his eyebrows. Arching in reaction to anything I said.

His email response time. A millisecond faster than mine, without fail, on every assignment I wanted that he claimed first.

His ringtone, inexplicably “Moon River,” never once set to silent.

The way he says my full name, Mattie French. Like it’s a joke he won’t let me in on.

The lopsided tug of his mouth when he writes a line and it’s better than mine. The disorienting blond of his eyelashes, flicking like fool’s gold.

And now, worst of all: Campbell with his long fingers laced together like he doesn’t even have the decency to be nervous.

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Why we chose it...


From the main characters’ first day as interns to their big pitch as seasoned copywriters, this realistic rivals-to-lovers romance is full of tension, high stakes, and big-hearted emotions.


If you’re already missing summer vacation, you’ll love this book’s jet-setting schedule, which takes the characters from Cannes to Aspen to the salt-swept beaches of NorCal.


The story perfectly captures the complicated feeling of watching your best friend move into a new stage of life without you, offering a hopeful lesson for how to grow in a friendship while staying true to yourself.

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