A trope-filled delight of a rom com about two strangers who enter into a marriage of convenience that becomes anything but convenient.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Married with Benefits by Ellie Palmer, which releases on July 21st 2026.
For better or worse is just the beginning.
Lainey Davis can’t wait for the day she’ll be able to escape her tiny Wisconsin town. But she’s not even close to covering her health insurance premiums and pricey migraine medication, let alone saving up enough to start over some place new. That is, until Lainey learns that through the archaic legal doctrine of adverse possession, she’s inadvertently squatted her way into owning a marvel of modern architecture.
But Lainey owns only the house. The surrounding property, a lakeside money pit the previous owner used as a front to deal illegal reptiles, has been willed to Elliot Hodges, a D.C. architect who wants to rent out the place to fellow architecture lovers. Their assets are tied together, but neither can move forward without the other.
Desperate, Elliot proposes an unconventional arrangement: marry him for health insurance and in exchange, Lainey will allow him to buy her out. Win-win: Lainey will finally have a way out of town, and he’ll own the house designed by his idol. Married in name only and living together while fixing up the property, Lainey and Elliot find themselves unable to keep their hopes, dreams, or bedsheets from getting entwined. And as their connection grows, Lainey’s no longer sure what’s more terrifying: leaving Elliot behind or letting him in.
Chapter 3
How Very Karen-y of You
67 Days until Busy Season
The next morning, like every morning, Lainey woke up surveying her body for that intangible “off” feeling that told her whether it was worth swallowing one of her precious migraine pills.
She was supposed to be taking them daily—it was the only reliable way to prevent her symptoms—but at thirty-three dollars a pill, she had to stretch them as far as she possibly could. She couldn’t afford not to. Her pain was a sleep-paralysis demon, always hovering above her. Some days, she could will it away with a dark room and powerful medication, but other days, it overtook her.
On this particular morning—while lying in her bed, in the house that blessedly was still hers—she’d found no immediate signs of looming pain. No increased sensitivity to light. No aura. No reason to waste a pill. A pill brought with it the pressure to make the most of every expensive pain-free moment. She couldn’t be creative under those conditions, even though she’d never been good at coordinating her good days with moments of artistic inspiration. Case in point, the fact that she was at present sitting on her heels atop a metal stool with no clue of what to do with the dead tree in front of her.
She had an order for one of her side hustles—selling live-edge carpentry on Facebook Marketplace—and while Lainey definitely lacked a passion for making bougie-ass tables, her experience sculpting had made her pretty good with an orbital sander and strangers seemed willing to pay a small fortune for something that took her less than an afternoon to complete. But today, instead of producing yet another coffee table for Jessica from Ironwood or an end table for Lisa in Spooner, Lainey wanted to make something for herself.
Lainey’s current artistic fixation was sculpting tree snags. She turned stumps into tiny wooden creatures and transformed dead oak trees into sculptures of witchy women rooted to the earth. Bree described Lainey’s work as “beautiful but terrifying,” which delighted Lainey, as that was almost exactly what she was going for.
Lainey’s work was an exercise in reanimating the dead. It provided nature with new life through hacking away at it, giving trees the appearance of something otherworldly.
Trees were interdependent organisms, sharing water and nutrients, but her snags were alone, cut off from their support system. Lainey saw what she did as more than art. It was care. She cared for the dead trees in a way the surrounding ecosystem no longer would.
Also, she liked sculpting with chainsaws.
Wind whistled through the branches as her eyes pleaded with her unfinished subject to tell her something. The half-carved trunk stared back with indifference. The figure in her head was without details, an animal trapped under a sheet of bark. Sculpting was noisy work, so she typically enjoyed the silence of the planning process, but when she had no vision for a piece, the quiet sounded a bit like a smug little asshole. Today, she tried a new strategy. Snapping her safety goggles to her face, Lainey cranked up the music on her noise-canceling headphones, raised her chainsaw to waist height, and let herself get lost.
Minutes or hours later, a tap at her shoulder.
Her core muscles absorbed the full-body jerk that was a natural, reflexive response to the reckless act of abruptly touching a person holding a chainsaw. She immediately powered the thing down and ripped off her safety goggles before turning to yell at whoever stood behind her with the apparent desire to leave her backyard with fewer limbs than they arrived with.
That’s when she saw who it was. The man from the other day. Olive Rain Jacket Guy. Elliot. He was dry this time, in a navy sweater that stretched across his broad shoulders. His glasses were no longer rain dappled, but his hair still had a gentle wave to it, like it was perpetually tousled in a light breeze directed only to him in a full-fledged conspiracy of irrepressible charm and casual sex appeal. The sight of him—here, behind her house—snatched the words right out of her throat. She set the chainsaw on the ground and lowered her headphones to her neck like a scarf.
She smiled. She couldn’t help herself. “You,” she said.
“You,” he repeated. But his “you” held none of the giddy excitement hers had. His “you” was surprised. Maybe even a little hurt.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, tucking the flyaways escaping her ponytail behind her ears. Nerves lit up in the tips of her fingers like lightning bugs. He didn’t seem happy to see her again. Unease and dread replaced her joy.
“I was about to ask you the same question, Elaine Davis. What are you doing at my house?”
Fragmented bits of information fell into place all at once. The attractive newcomer in the offseason and the mysterious nephew who was trying to remove her from her home were one and the same. E . Her Elliot from Ridr was Gil Hodges’s nephew. He had to be. Which made some sort of sense. Attractive people never came to Timber Creek in March without a reason. That tiny, hopeful flame that’d flickered in her chest ever since their rain-soaked encounter blew out like a birthday candle.
“Your house?” she scoffed. “So, you think because your uncle died, you’re entitled to a place you’ve never even been before? Wow.” She stretched out the single syllable, hoping a more cogent—or at least more cutting—argument would surface, but it seemed the Wisconsin public school system had failed her in this highly specific area.
“Yes, I thought when my uncle transferred to me the title to a resort that I would be, in fact, entitled to it. So imagine my surprise when I discovered that some two-bit con woman was claiming squatters’ rights on my property.”
“Two-bit?” Lainey’s laugh sliced at her insides, her eyes squinting into the sun glaring over his shoulder. The thin veil between peace and pain was lifting. She could already feel her body starting to turn on her.
“That’s the part you take issue with?” His head swung behind him as if searching for witnesses to this conversation.
His dark brows folded inward, and his long limbs paced her yard like an angry, hulking scribble. Each time their eyes caught, his face twisted like he might be sick. He pulled his glasses off his face and rubbed the lenses on his shirt. “Fine. You’re a very sophisticated scam artist—are you happy?” He put his glasses back on and eyed the piece she’d been working on. “What am I looking at here?”
“It’s . . .” She removed her work gloves and considered how best to explain that she wasn’t sure what he was looking at either.
She shook her head. “It’s not finished.” They were getting off topic. She folded her arms across her chest. “What did you come here for?” Did he think he could just show up here, flash a smile, and ask her nicely to leave her own house?
“I thought I should meet the trespasser who was trying to steal my house out from under me before I challenge your ludicrous claim on it in court.”
Excerpted from Married with Benefits by Ellie Palmer. Copyright © 2026 by Ellie Palmer. Excerpted with permission from G. P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
