Overtime Amour

When a data-obsessed consultant finally draws the true cost of overtime on the board, she risks her career, her future, and her guarded heart on a man who has spent years smoothing the damage she refuses to ignore.

Sloane is the consultant every firm wants on their biggest projects: calm in crisis, brilliant with numbers, and always willing to work one more late night. She has learned how to turn exhaustion into tidy charts and to call it "resilience." But a visit to a struggling factory plant shakes her quiet loyalty. When she sees the real cost of overtime on bodies, families, and futures, she can't keep pretending it's just part of the job.

Asked to rehearse a safe internal talk on "high performance", Sloane does the opposite. In a small practice room she draws the overtime curves exactly as she sees them - hours, mortgages, school plays and hospital visits on the same board - and asks who is really paying. The room goes silent. Her career might have just cracked... and so might the firm's comfortable story about itself.

Callum, a senior leader who has spent years smoothing those same numbers, is in that room. Her blunt honesty hits him like a mirror. Instead of warning her to pull back, he backs her, first on the plant project and then in a new experiment: a People Impact unit with real power to challenge bad plans before they hit real people. Working side by side on late trains, in factory halls and glass offices, respect turns into slow-burn attraction that neither of them meant to risk.

When a values-driven rival firm offers Sloane a clean fresh start, and her own leadership offers her the chance to build change from inside, she has to decide what she is really staying for. If she chooses the man who loves her, can she trust that love not to tilt her choices. If she stays for the work, will it cost her the future they could have together.

"Overtime Amour" is a contemporary workplace romance about overtime, ethics and the dangerous hope of trying to fix a system from the inside - for readers who like their love stories tangled up with real careers, real consequences and the belief that the right person will never ask you to shrink to fit their world.