Can I Call You Mine

Some things aren't meant to stay hidden. Xavier Cole learned early that wanting things you can't control gets you burned in this city. As a senior advisor at the Pentagon, he's built a career on staying invisible, on being the steady hand no one notices. Then a stranger's fingers brush his over a coffee cup at dawn, and something in his chest starts humming a song he can't unhear. The stranger is Senator Andre Mitchell: Washington's golden boy, brilliant, magnetic, and very publicly spoken for. Everything about wanting him is reckless. Everything about walking away feels impossible. As stolen dinners become something neither man can name, the machinery of Washington begins to turn against them. Weaponized headlines. A partner with everything to lose. A city that has never once looked away from a scandal. Andre has spent a lifetime perfecting the mask that keeps him untouchable. Xavier has spent his learning exactly when to disappear. But the hum between them refuses to stay quiet, and the only way through the storm they've started is to walk into it together, in the open, where everyone can see. Can I Call You Mine is a slow-burn contemporary romance about the cost of being seen, and the people brave enough to pay it anyway. This book includes: - A closeted senator and the advisor who upends his careful world - Secret dinners, public scandal, and a fixer with a plan for everything - A slow burn from a coffee-shop meet-cute to a reflecting-pool proposal - Themes of family legacy, race, and what it costs to be twice as good - A hard-won happily ever after Content notes: this book includes a brief depicted historical racial slur in a quoted context, discussion of infidelity, and one consensual intimate scene.