Book One
Everything
I Told Her
He made the rules. She makes him ask.
- Author
- Nova Kingsley
- Series
- Book One
- Paperback
- Thursday, Nov 26, 2026
- Kindle ebook
- Tuesday, Dec 1, 2026
- Formats
- Paperback · Kindle ebook (Amazon)
- Genre
- Dark romance · Office romance · Multi-POV
- Setting
- Chicago
- Heat
- 🌶 Spicy · adults 18+
Rule number one: no one can know.
Sloane Becker needs this job to stick. Then she spills coffee on the man in the elevator, and he turns out to be her new boss.
Graham Whitlock is the executive everyone at Kestrel Energy fears. Brilliant. Controlled. And still married to a wife who refuses to let him go. He tells Sloane he can't touch her. He even tells her why. Then he asks what she wants.
They write the rules on a cocktail napkin above the Chicago River. Not at the office. No nights. No feelings. And one word, Wabash, that ends everything, no questions asked.
Sloane keeps the rules. Mostly. She tells only one person: Margot, the fearless new friend who listens like no one ever has. The hotel. The times. Everything.
Margot listens very carefully.
She has her reasons.
Everything I Told Her is a work of fiction. All characters, companies, hotels and places are invented.
Content warnings
Heat level: spicy, adults 18+. Contains explicit, open-door scenes.
Everything I Told Her is a dark contemporary romance intended for adult readers. It contains:
- Explicit sexual content, including consensual dominance/submission and a stop word
- Infidelity in the context of a separation, and an earlier relationship with a subordinate; divorce and litigation
- A workplace relationship across a power imbalance (manager/employee); an HR investigation
- An unplanned pregnancy, and a heroine who weighs whether to continue it (no termination takes place); labor and birth; pregnancy discrimination at work
- Past pregnancy loss and IVF, remembered by characters; ovarian hyperstimulation and an ICU stay, told in retrospect
- Stalking, surveillance, manipulation and emotional abuse by a secondary character; betrayal by a friend
- A private (non-explicit) photograph shared without consent; public humiliation; workplace harassment
- Parental abandonment; grief; alcohol use
Mother and baby survive. No miscarriage or stillbirth happens on the page; the losses in this book are in the past, remembered and not shown.
A chapter guide with chapter notes is in the back of the book.
Lines from the pages
Spoiler-free, taken from the opening chapters.
“At 8:52 on my first morning, I throw six dollars and forty cents of oat milk latte at the man who decides whether I keep my job.”
“She saw it. I watched her see it.”
“Graham Whitlock bought a coat for Iowa, and it still has the fold lines from the box.”
“Something I can’t have yet.”
“Then don’t answer yet.”
“I counted to forty first,” I say. “That was my self-control.”
“The Calder. River North. Thursday, 8 p.m. Room 1104. You can say no.”
“You keep saying that.”
“I’ll keep saying it.”
“That’s a technicality.”
“Rules are made of technicalities. That’s the whole point of them.”
Paperback Nov 26 · Kindle Dec 1, 2026