Perfect for fans of Ted Lasso, this delicious slow burn romance turns a pretend marriage into real love.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Charlotte Stein’s My Big Fat Fake Marriage by Charlotte Stein, which releases on March 11th 2025.
Connie has always distrusted nice guys. In her experience, they’re just waiting to reveal some horrible secret. And then she meets big, adorable, Henry Samuel Beckett—editor extraordinaire, lover of bow ties, sweet and so cheery she struggles to believe he’s real.
Until Henry Samuel Beckett—or Beck, as he’s known to most—tells her the secret underneath his sunny surface: He’s been single all his life. But in a moment of panic, he’s told everyone at his publishing house that he’s married. And when Connie, an aspiring writer herself, can’t help defending him, she ends up being the fake wife he doesn’t actually have.
When they head off on a writing retreat, surrounded by people convinced this must be a ruse, both of them can’t help but agree. Until they share their first kiss, their first touch, their first time in only one bed. Side by side, every night, as the simmering tension builds…Connie starts to wonder if this might be real after all.
Chapter One
I try to be okay with living across the hall from the seemingly nicest man to ever live. But the problem is, the nicest man to ever live makes being okay with that very, very hard. And not just because he accosts me every morning in the elevator with a well, hey there, neighbor. Or keeps trying to give me really elaborate pies, for some unfathomable reason. Or constantly wears bow ties so big and bright I half expect them to suddenly squirt water in my face.
No, mostly it’s this one simple fact:
Niceness this intense is always a scam.
Or at least, it’s always been a scam in my experience.
I mean, take the last decent-seeming guy I went on a date with. He did nothing but talk about himself, then insist I have a salad instead of the steak I ordered, before finally trying to strong-arm me into accepting that he pay for dinner. Then when I didn’t invite him in, he brought out an itemized list of all the great things he’d done and furiously read it aloud to me at the door.
As if he’d paid for sex in advance with an offer to settle the bill. Or the kind advice he’d given me on losing weight. Or the fact that he’d let me choose the restaurant.
So now I had to pay up.
And he’s not the only one I remember suffering through a date with, or having to work alongside, or accidentally ending up stuck with at a party. One “nice guy” brought me a can of Pringles at my sister’s birthday, and then tried to lock me in a random bedroom. Another felt that praising me in a meeting meant I should return the favor with a blow job in the supply cupboard.
And it made zero difference that this man had told me he was married.
A lot of the time, married Nice Guys are even worse than single ones. They harbor secret seething hatred for their wives under a veneer of jovial sweetness and hollow laughter. Like the laughter he aimed at me the other day, when we passed each other in the hall and I asked how his wife was doing without him, over there in America, and he did this big ha, ha, ha.
Like I’d told a joke.
Instead of asking a question he clearly didn’t know how to answer. I swear, it felt like he was three seconds away from telling me he had abandoned her so he could be free to screw me. Even though I never said I wanted to screw him.
So I think it’s understandable that I’m nervous.
And that goes double when I step into the elevator like always, ready for another day of creating terrible marketing copy for companies that feel like they’ve been made up to fill in gaps on dying social media sites, and the nicest man alive seems just a little bit different from normal. He says, “Hey there, neighbor,” as the elevator doors seal us in, just like usual. But neighbor sounds different somehow. Like it’s been hollowed out, and all that’s left is the shell of supposed cheeriness.
So I glance at him.
You know, just to see if I imagined it.
And there are other signs of a shift in him. Tiny details, like that enormously thick black mustache of his not being quite as neatly groomed as usual. Or that tidy hair of his kind of seeming a little bit more sideways than it typically does. Plus I don’t think he has ironed that line down the front of his trousers like always. And when I say always, I mean always. In fact, once I saw him with the same thing down both legs of a pair of jeans.
But not today.
Today, for some reason, he’s missed it out.
And missed-out things are always something you should be on your guard for with suspiciously nice men. Most often it means they’ve moved from the pretending-to-be-decent-so-you’ll-have-an-affair-with-them stage to their resentful-that-you’re-not-immediately-falling-in-love-with-them era. With a side order of being absolutely horrible to their poor wives.
And anything can happen once that’s the case.
Doubly so, I think, when I realize something else about him. Something that wasn’t clear before, when he was all bow ties and goofy catchphrases and creases pressed into his jeans, but is very clear now that I’m trapped in an elevator with him, just as he potentially may become belligerent.
Because I swear to god, the man is enormous.
I’m five-five and wearing heeled boots, and the top of my head still barely reaches past his shoulders. And of course those shoulders are also completely massive. They look like boulders in my peripheral vision, leading down to this burly chest and great slab of a stomach.
It’s unsettling. I find myself anxiously watching the electronic numbers on the elevator crawl from five to four. Then four to three. And three to two. And finally, finally we’re on the ground floor, and the doors slide open, and I swear I come this close to dashing out. Just in case he’s about to viciously demand to know why I haven’t done anything more than send him a thank-you note for the pies. Or maybe confess to me that he’s abandoned his wife on an oil rig.
In fact, the only reason I don’t is because of my bestie, Mabel. Mabel, who is the reason he even lives across the hall from me. Mabel, who heard the place was available and knew he needed somewhere more permanent after his temporary position at her publisher became a long-term thing, and so suggested it. None of which she would have done if he were truly that awful.
Though that does not let him entirely off the hook, in my book.
I mean, true, he might not be the kind of Nice Guy who traps you in an elevator with him so he can deliver his twelve-part lecture: why women are ungrateful bitches and wives are even worse. But he could be a lesser tier of the same sort of thing, in a way sweet, trusting Mabel is simply not primed to spot. She thinks real nice guys are actually out there. That I’ve just been very unlucky, and if I hold out I’ll find one.
You just haven’t found a truly decent man, she said to me once. All you’ve encountered are Nice Guys—the fakers who use the idea of being nice as some kind of currency. All of which is probably true, I assume. But I can’t afford to completely believe her right now. Not even when it comes to this buddy of hers.
Because she doesn’t know the signs like I do.
She’s never seen that darting, furtive, harried look in their eyes that always tells me things are about to go disastrously wrong. Or that smile—the one that seems just a little bit frozen and fixed, on a face three degrees too small for it. And even if she has, she’s likely never noticed it on this man’s face.
I bet she isn’t even looking.
But I am.
I see it as he glances over his shoulder at me one last time.
Then he hurries out of the elevator in a way that tells me something worse than maybe he isn’t actually nice. He is nervous, very nervous. And what else could he be nervous about but this one simple fact:
I’m on to him.
And he knows it.
From My Big Fat Fake Marriage, by Charlotte Stein. Copyright © 2025 by the author, and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group
