Everything You Cost Me

Hating him was supposed to be the easy part.

Mona Olsen has spent three years rebuilding her career after Cole Soares — brilliant, infuriatingly talented Cole Soares — cost her the promotion she’d earned and the future she’d planned. She didn’t fall apart. She didn’t look back. She moved companies, did the work, and became exactly the senior strategist she was always going to be. Without him.

Then her firm pairs her with his creative agency on the pitch of the year, and Cole walks back into her professional life like no time has passed at all — except that it has, and both of them know it.

What follows is six weeks of shared conference rooms, late-night strategy sessions, and the kind of slow, electric tension that builds in the space between two people who are trying very hard not to look at each other too long. This is an enemies to lovers standalone set entirely in the world of Chicago’s competitive marketing industry — sharp, grounded, and achingly real. Mona tells herself it’s manageable. Cole tells himself the timing was never right. They’re both lying.

Because the closer they work, the more impossible the distance becomes. Every flat white he leaves on her side of the table. Every room he redirects in her favor. Every almost-moment outside a building in the November cold — these are not nothing, and Mona knows it. She’s built her adult life around not wanting things she can’t afford to lose. Cole has spent three years fixing problems he never actually faced. And somewhere between a brand strategy meeting and a lakeside working retreat in Michigan, the walls they’ve both been living behind start to come down.

This is not a love story about grand gestures. It’s about two intelligent, driven people learning that accountability and affection are not the same thing — and that the distance between them is exactly as wide as the things they haven’t said yet.

If you love slow burn romance with professional tension, emotionally complex characters, and a clean contemporary love story where the feelings hit harder than anything explicit ever could, Everything You Cost Me is the standalone romance you’ve been waiting to one-click.

Read it for the tension. Stay for the moment they finally stop pretending.