Grace Cross built her entire pitch around a single idea: a library shouldn't feel like a building people are allowed to use — it should feel like a place they already belong to. She's forty seconds from landing it when a stranger in a gray suit stands up and tells the funding board her roof will kill someone. David Kessler doesn't do anything by half measures — not engineering, not honesty, and, it turns out, not love. When the board forces the city's most promising young architect into an uneasy partnership with the engineer who publicly humiliated her, neither of them expects the fight to become the foundation of something neither can walk away from. As deadlines close in, an old scandal resurfaces, a magazine article threatens to erase her from her own work, and the family legacy she's spent her whole life trying to live up to starts to feel like a weight instead of a gift — Grace has to decide whether she's brave enough to build something real with a man who never learned how to stay. A slow-burn, forced-partnership, rivals-to-lovers romance about legacy, trust, and learning that the strongest structures are the ones built to bend without breaking. Book 2 in the Cross Family Romance series — a full, satisfying standalone that can be read on its own or alongside The Billionaire's Fake Fiancée.