Excerpted from THE PERFECT ROM-COM, by Melissa Ferguson. Thomas Nelson, 2025. Reprinted with permission.
Interstate Bowl is, in a word, busy.
In a series of words, it’s full to the gunwales of polyester shorts and replete with the scent of nacho cheese dip and tobacco. James, one of the many high school employees tasked with keeping up with obsessed middle-aged league members who have decidedly made rolling heavy balls down a glossy surface a major part of their identity, is covered in a cloud of bowling shoe disinfectant beside the jukebox, which is beside the cheap food bar flanked by splitting red-cushioned stools.
I plop my shoes on the floor next to Gloria and sit down.
“He loves you.” Gloria casts her gaze over at Jack, who’s leaning against the bar.
I shake my head. “He dates more women than are in this building.”
“What women? Look around.” Gloria takes in the swaths of males around us. Fair. “And dated. Past tense being the key tense here. I think he’s waiting for you.”
“For what?” I throw out, giving a disbelieving laugh. “I’m right here.”
“Have you forgotten Parker so easily?”
My face warms slightly, internally slapped by surprise at the remark. Of course. Parker. Only the guy I’ve been dating across the world. For two-plus years.
“Jack loves you.”
“He’s paid to love me, nothing more.” I lace up my bowling shoes.
They are a smidge too big, given they were a graduating gift to me last year from a teammate and, you guessed it, former student. Actually three whole lanes are made up almost entirely of former and current students.
My idea for the Wednesday Night Hangout came three years ago on a whim. Partly because I knew it’d be good to help them practice their English outside of the classroom and partly because they became friends.
I missed the students when they graduated the class, and they missed me.
Hence, a hangout.
And what started as a social outlet for students in the middle of a cold, dark winter turned quickly into a weekly gathering, which turned quickly into a league. Or rather, a set of leagues. Enough students, both past and present, came to fill up six teams. And before we knew it, we were the Pin Pals.
Which, naturally, Jack resents.
“You actually think that your agent would haul that stupid bowling ball you got him last Christmas on a train forty-five minutes out of the city, put on that T-shirt jersey he complains about to us every week, and throw such pathetic balls that you had to appeal to the team to keep him—which of course everyone did because it’s you— because he’s paid to? He’s not your bodyguard, Bryony. He’s not paid to stick around.”
“Of course he’s not. He sticks around because my brain and hands are now precious cargo to Amelia and the agency, and as such, part of his job is to secretly make sure I don’t go off and ruin everything by becoming an alcoholic or falling in love with a billionaire on a remote island or losing one of my typing hands in a freak bowling accident. Or who knows?” I stand up. “Maybe he’s afraid that if I’m left alone too long, I’ll leak everything to the press.”
Gloria inhales furiously through her nostrils. As she does every time we have this conversation and I refuse to give in.
“But really,” I say, smiling, “we all know it’s because bowling night with my students is reality television on steroids, and he comes for the drama.”
A Romance Novel for Book Lovers
She's written dozens of smash hit romance novels. Too bad no one knows it.
Aspiring author Bryony Page attends her first writers conference bursting with optimism and ready to sell her manuscript with long-shot dreams of raising awareness for The Bridge, her grandmother's financially struggling organization where she teaches ESL full-time. But after a disastrous pitch session, she stumbles into correcting another author's work in a last-ditch attempt to make a good impression with the agent. And she, as it turns out, is spot on.
No one is more surprised than Bryony when the agent offers her the opportunity to be a ghostwriter for Amelia Benedict, popular rom-com novelist. Bryony agrees on one condition: she'll write books for this vain, demanding woman just as long as Jack Sterling, literary agent of the legendary Foundry Literary Agency, works to sell her own book too.
What nobody predicted, however, was that Bryony's books would turn Amelia Benedict into the Amelia Benedict, household name and bestselling author with millions of copies sold around the world.
And just like that, the Foundry Agency can't let her go.
But on a personal note, Jack is realizing he can't either.
Romance Comedy [Nelson, Thomas, Inc., On Sale: February 11, 2025, Paperback / e-Book , ISBN: 9780840716880 / eISBN: 9780840716897]
Melissa Ferguson is the bestselling author of titles including Meet Me in the Margins, The Dating Charade, and The Cul-de-Sac War. She lives in Tennessee with her husband and children in their growing farmhouse lifestyle and writes heartwarming romantic comedies that have been featured in such places as The Hollywood Reporter, Travel + Leisure, Woman’s World, and BuzzFeed.
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