Grumpy Boss Sunshine Assistant: A Steamy MM Enemies-to-Lovers Office Romance

He runs the most controlled company in Manhattan. He hires the one man who won't be managed.

Roman Vance built Vantage the way he builds everything: precisely, deliberately, and alone. Three years ago he let someone close, and it cost him a company. He does not intend to make that error twice. His assistants last four months. His door stays shut. His system works.

Auggie Calloway has been an executive assistant for nine years. The last man he worked for passed him over for a promotion and called him very likable — the way you'd describe a nice restaurant. So Auggie takes the job at Vantage precisely because Roman Vance is famously impossible. He needs to prove, to exactly one person, that being liked and being taken seriously are not different currencies.

They should not work.

They work immediately.

Roman doesn't smile. Roman doesn't explain himself. Roman leaves his office door open eleven inches and stops typing when Auggie laughs in the next room, and never says a word about it. And two days after a kiss on a Thursday pavement — two days early — he does something no one will understand for months. He restructures his own reporting line so that Auggie no longer answers to him.

He tells nobody why.

Auggie finds out from HR. He says nothing.

Neither of them names it. Not through the late nights. Not through the Series B. Not through the slow, catastrophic discovery that the safest man in the building has been standing behind a locked door for three years, waiting for someone to sit down on the other side of it.

Then Roman meets the man who broke him — at a party, holding a drink, perfectly happy, remembering nothing.

And Roman Vance, who chooses every word before he says it, has to learn how to ask out loud for the thing he wants.

Some men are built to hold the room. Some men are built to hand it over.