The Terms of Us

An upmarket M/M fake relationship romance about power, performance, desire, and the contract that becomes more dangerous than either man expected.

The contract was supposed to be temporary. Wanting him was not part of the terms.

Finn Calloway has a failed restaurant behind him, a catering job under his feet, and no patience for rich men in expensive buildings with sad lobbies. Declan Marsh has a public scandal to contain, a Senate hearing approaching, and a reputation problem that requires a boyfriend—a public one, a believable one.

When Declan offers Finn a six-week contract, the terms are simple enough—appear together, manage the optics, survive the hearing, and walk away clean. Finn needs the money badly enough to consider it. Declan doesn’t need a boyfriend. He needs Finn badly enough to make that dangerous. What begins as strategy becomes proximity, then performance becomes touch, and the contract becomes the one thing neither man can control. Finn was hired to make Declan look human. He wasn’t supposed to make him feel that way.

• • •

A chef with nothing left to lose. A billionaire who can’t afford to want him.

Finn knows what it means to lose a room. He built a restaurant once, trusted the wrong contract, and paid the price. Now he’s working catering returns, subletting a room in Astoria, and trying to imagine a future that doesn’t depend on anyone else’s money or permission.

Declan’s life is measured by committee hearings, public image, board politics, and Margaux Chen managing the disaster before it becomes permanent. Every sentence is weighed, every room calculated, every vulnerability treated as a liability. Then Finn walks through the lobby and says exactly what no one else would say. Declan notices. That’s the beginning of the problem.

The contract gives them rules. The apartment gives them proximity. The public story gives them cover. But the private truth keeps changing the shape of the arrangement until neither man can tell where the performance ends. And six weeks is long enough to learn that some terms can’t be negotiated after desire has already rewritten the arrangement.

The Terms of Us opens the Meridian trilogy, an upmarket M/M romance in which a fake boyfriend contract does the one thing neither man planned for—it makes the private truth possible. The rules built to manage Declan’s scandal become the only room where he and Finn can stop performing, and six weeks is exactly long enough for that to become a problem. Finn and Declan’s story continues in The Cost of Keeping Him.

Book One begins with a catering cart in a sad lobby—and a man powerful enough to buy anything except the answer he actually wants.

Continue The Meridian Series

Book 1: The Terms of Us — The contract was supposed to protect them. It could not protect what came next.

Book 2: The Cost of Keeping Him — They chose each other in public. The private cost was the part no one prepared them for.

Book 3: What Love Demands — Love was never the question. What it demanded of them was.

Browse The Meridian Series →