My Rival Co-CEOS

Chapter 3

The woman in my bathroom mirror is wearing a dress that costs more than her rent, and she looks like she's about to commit a crime she hasn't fully planned.

"Stop tugging at the hem," Piper says from her perch on the edge of my bathtub, legs crossed, wine glass balanced on her knee like she's presiding over a tribunal. "You look incredible. You look like you own a boat."

"I don't want to look like I own a boat. I want to look like I belong at a family dinner without anyone checking my ID at the door."

I smooth the fabric over my hips for the fourth time. The dress is burgundy, structured neckline, fitted through the waist — the one Theo looked at and said that's exactly right in a voice that made me forget how to exhale.

"Same thing in that tax bracket."

Piper sets her wine down and claps her hands together.

"Okay, rehearsal time. I'm Victor Bracken. I'm old, I'm dying, and I'm worth more than some countries. I turn to you over the salad course and say, 'So, Wren, what do your parents do?'"

"My father manages a hardware store in Columbus and my mother teaches second grade."

"Wrong. Your father is in regional retail management and your mother shapes young minds. See? Same facts, better packaging." She waves her hand like a conductor. "Again. 'Wren, how did you and my grandson meet?'"

"We met in college. I was in his Business Strategy class and we became friends before anything romantic developed."

"Good, vague, impossible to disprove. Now say it like you're not reading a hostage note."

I let out a breath that's half laugh, half surrender. "I'm trying…"

"Try softer. These people can smell effort." She hops off the bathtub and stands behind me, chin resting on my shoulder so both our faces fill the mirror. "Mrs. Bracken, you clean up beautifully."

I grab the nearest flat shoe from the floor and whip it at her. She dodges, cackling as it bounces off the shower curtain. "Don't call me that."

"Why not? It's going to be your name if this whole performance goes the distance."

She retrieves the shoe and sets it by the door, still grinning. Then the grin softens into the expression she saves for the moments when she stops being my comedy relief and starts being my best friend. "Hey. Look at me."

I turn from the mirror to look her in the eyes.

"You deserve good things, Wren."

Her voice loses every ounce of its usual volume and it does something to my chest.

"You deserve to walk into any room on this planet and not spend the first ten minutes calculating whether you earned the right to be there. You did earn it. And if Victor Bracken or anyone else at that table makes you feel otherwise, you call me and I will show up in sweatpants and ruin their evening."

My throat tightens. "Piper…"

"No speeches. Just nod and believe me." I nod. Believing her is harder, but I keep that part to myself.

The town car arrives at seven fifteen as Theo steps out to open my door himself, which is unnecessary and devastating.

He's wearing charcoal tonight, no tie, the top button of his shirt undone just enough to expose the line of his throat. His jaw is freshly shaved, sharp enough to make my fingers itch with the need to trace it.

The evening light catches the hollows beneath his cheekbones and turns his skin warm, golden, close enough to touch if I were a braver woman or a stupider one.

If this were real, I'd close the distance between us and press my mouth to that exposed strip of skin below his collar.

I'd feel his pulse jump against my lips.

I'd slide my hands underneath that perfect suit jacket and pull him against me until there was nothing left between his body and mine except heat and the ruined remains of my self-control.

But this isn't real. So I catalog him like art I can't afford.

"You look nice," he says, and the understatement nearly makes me laugh.

"You look like the cover of a magazine that doesn't accept my subscription." I slide into the car before my face can betray anything else.

He settles beside me. The partition between us and the driver is already raised. Theo turns slightly, his knee angling toward mine, and shifts into the version of himself I think of as briefing mode—measured, precise, each sentence pre-edited.

"Victor will test you tonight. He's sharp, even now. Especially now. Dying hasn't made him kinder."

He pauses, selecting the next piece carefully.

"He'll watch how you hold your fork, how you respond to silence, whether you look at me when I'm not looking at you. He catalogs people."

"Comforting."

"I'm telling you so you're prepared, not so you're afraid."

His hand rests on his thigh, fingers loose, and I track the tendons that shift beneath his skin when he moves.

"Our story is simple. We've been seeing each other for four months. We kept it private because of your position at the company—we wanted to be sure before going public. If he asks who pursued whom, I did. If he asks about a timeline, our first date was dinner at Luca's in March."

"Luca's. That's specific."

"Victor will check. He always checks." The corner of his mouth lifts, just barely. "I actually had dinner there in March. Alone. But the reservation's on record, so it holds."

I almost say, I've been rehearsing a version of this story for six years—only in mine, none of it needed to be scripted.

But the words are too honest for this leather interior, for this arrangement, for the careful distance he maintains even when our shoulders are inches apart.

"I can handle it," I say instead.

"I know you can." He says it like a fact, like gravity, like the simplest truth he's ever spoken.

The city thins as we leave Manhattan. Streetlights give way to hedgerows, and Theo leans back against the seat and does the thing that undoes me most—he stops performing.

We pass a park where two old men sit hunched over a chessboard beneath a streetlamp, their faces lit amber, their hands moving with the unhurried certainty of people who've been playing the same game for decades.

"That's going to be us tonight," I say. "Except Victor is both players and we're the pieces."

Theo follows my gaze. The corner of his mouth shifts — not quite a smile, closer to recognition. "Do you play?"

"I know the horse moves in an L shape. That's where my expertise ends."

"The knight." He almost laughs. "Victor taught me in the estate library when I was seven." His voice drops into a register I rarely hear. Softer. Younger. "Every Sunday after brunch. He'd set up the board on this enormous mahogany desk and make me play until I could anticipate three moves ahead. He said business was just chess with more zeroes."

"Did you love it?"

"I loved that he was paying attention to me."

His gaze drifts to the window, to the darkening trees blurring past.

"Julian played too, but he didn't have the patience for strategy. He'd lose a bishop and sweep the whole board onto the floor. Victor would just reset the pieces and say, 'Again.' Julian would refuse and storm out. I'd stay."

In three years at Bracken Enterprises, I can count on one hand the number of times Theo has mentioned Julian.

A passing reference in a board meeting. A clipped response when a reporter asked.

Each time, the same careful blankness settled over his features — not anger, not resentment, but the deliberate absence of both. As if he'd trained himself to feel nothing about his brother the way he'd trained himself to feel nothing about most things.

Not about most things. Not always.

During my first year at Bracken Enterprises, a name surfaced on the executive floor the way smoke surfaces through floorboards — Camille Arnaud — spoken in lowered voices that stopped the moment Theo's office door opened.

Theo's ex. The one who came before the composure calcified, before he started treating emotional distance like a corporate policy.

I never asked him about her. I did what any woman hopelessly in love with her boss does at two in the morning when she can't sleep: I searched the name, found the photos, and studied every pixel of a face that had what I have spent six years failing to earn.

Dark hair, effortless jaw, espresso-dark eyes, the kind of beauty that doesn't audition for rooms — it simply walks in and the room rearranges itself. He had loved her. Which meant the machinery existed.

The capacity for desire, for choosing, for pulling someone close instead of holding them at arm's length — all of it was in there, locked behind the composure and the carefully managed distance. He just never turned it toward me.

He turns his head and looks at me, and the boy is right there—underneath the tailored suit and the controlled posture and the CEO mask he wears like a second skeleton.

A boy who earned love by sitting still when his brother couldn't.

My hand lies on the seat between us as his rests just three inches away. The gap is small enough to close with a shift of my fingers, a tilt of my wrist, the smallest brave gesture I could make.

I keep my hand exactly where it is up until the estate gates appear ahead, wrought iron and towering, and Theo straightens in his seat, reassembling himself piece by piece.

The boy disappears. The CEO returns.

And I follow him through the gates wearing a dress I didn't pay for, carrying a love story he didn't write, wondering how much longer I can keep pretending that pretending doesn't cost me everything.