THE TERMS OF US: A Billionaire Friends-to-Lovers Romance

THE TERMS OF USHe didn't call to tell her he was coming home. He bought her company instead.Six years ago, Josephine "Joey" Marsh helped her best friend build his first company out of a garage - on a stolen whiteboard, in a workspace neither of them could afford - and let him go to New York without ever telling him she loved him, because some things felt too dangerous to say out loud.Now Nate Calloway is back. Not with a phone call. With a press release, delivered at eight fifty-two on an ordinary Tuesday morning.He's a billionaire CEO. He's just acquired the architecture firm where she finally made partner. And somehow, impossibly, he's put her name on the biggest project of her career - the same week she finds out he's now, technically, her boss.Joey has spent a decade building a life she can control: a career she earned brick by brick, a family she holds together, a heart she's kept carefully, safely closed. Nate was never supposed to be part of that plan. He was always too big for this city, too easy to lose, too much of a risk for a woman who learned young that wanting things loudly is how you get hurt.But working beside him again - better coffee, old inside jokes, a friendship that never actually stopped feeling like more - is unraveling six years of careful distance one honest conversation at a time. And the closer they get, the higher the stakes become: a board that doesn't trust the two of them together, a past neither of them has fully said out loud, and the terrifying possibility that they'll break everything before they finally get it right.Joey has one rule left: never build her life around someone who might leave.Nate has one plan: prove, once and for all, that he isn't going anywhere.Some things are worth the risk. The only question is whether she's brave enough to find out.A slow-burn, friends-to-lovers billionaire romance about the terrifying, worthwhile courage it takes to want something out loud - with a mentor worth fighting for, a family worth building, and a love worth choosing, over and over again.-- Friends to lovers -- Billionaire CEO hero -- Second-chance romance -- Workplace/office romance -- Slow burn, closed-door, guaranteed HEA -- Standalone - no cliffhangerInside this book: the airport they never talked about. The fine print that changes everything. The wall she builds when she's scared. And the morning of the day it all finally comes together.