Sweet Rivalry (1001 Dark Nights)

by K. Bromberg

  “Yeah. It was like I’d always looked at you from afar––the girl hiding behind her shyness––and thought you were pretty.”

  “Oh, please. Me? I was a mess. I didn’t do my hair. I wore those yoga pants and hid my boobs behind that baggy sweatshirt.”

  “Now that? That was a travesty,” he murmurs, smile lighting up his face as he reaches out and cups my breast and just leaves his hand there with his thumb rubbing back and forth over its sensitized tip.

  I close my eyes and absorb the sensation and when I open them back up, his eyes are locked on mine, intense and unrelenting.

  “I went to your place the next day after asking around to find out where you lived but you’d left already. You were already moving on to your new life in New York and I was about to start mine…so I let it go.”

  “Why’d you try to find me?” I ask the question I’m not sure of the answer to, the confident woman I am now wanting to know, the shy girl I used to be needing to know.

  “There was always something about you, Harper. Sure you were horribly shy and in a constant state of fluster, but there was something about it that was intriguing. You were pretty but didn’t know it. And hell, when you went head to head with me in class, you were a different person. You were confident and demanding and I respected that. I hated you for it…maybe even resented you for it…but I damn well respected you for it. Even when you beat me time and again.”

  My grin is quick but my hand is quicker as I reach beneath the sheet and grab his dick in my hand. It’s already thick and heavy against his abdomen and makes my own body surge to life. His gasp when I stroke my hand over it is all I need to hear to know that he feels like I do right now. “I’ll beat you again, too,” I murmur. “But this time, it will be with my own two hands.” I shift from my position, pulling the sheet off us as I do, and his laugh rings out in the room.

  “The lady has mad skills in the joke department.”

  “I’ve got mad skills, all right.” I lick my lips as I look down at him in all his glory. At his impressive cock, up and over his incredible chiseled abs, to the start of his tattoos on his right ribcage that go up in a dizzying array of lines and graphics, to where his beard rests on the top part of his chest. Damn. I meet the amusement in his eyes again as I shift over his thighs and rest my ass there. “I intend to show you just how mad they are right now.”

  I dip my head down and lick my tongue over the head of his cock. His sharp inhale of breath is audible, and when I look up I see he’s arched his head back, his hands fisted in the sheets, and all I can think of is how is it possible that I want more of him already?

  Right up until I see the flashing light of the clock on the nightstand to the left of his pillow.

  “Oh my God!” I cry out, causing him to snap his head up as I scramble off of him in a frenzied panic.

  “What? What is it?”

  I’m already off the bed, my mind a cluster of thoughts, and I can’t pinpoint which one I want to tackle first.

  “It’s six-thirty. I need to finish the details on my proposal.” I hit the far end of the wall and head back the other way to get my robe. “What if we missed something last night when we left? What if you dropped the condom wrapper and didn’t see it? I’m the only woman in that room and so–– What if we didn’t put the stuff on Alan’s desk back right and he questions it? What if––”

  Ryder’s hands catch my shoulders and pull me against him, my back to his front. “Calm down,” he murmurs against my shoulder, beard tickling and dick tempting me from where it’s pressed against my backside. “Calm down.”

  “Ryder, I––”

  “You have plenty of time. You said yourself you were done last night. You just needed to tweak a few things. Right?” I nod my head despite the worry still rifling through me. “Damn, and I thought I’d sex you up so good you’d forget your numbers.”

  “Funny. Don’t you know that while sex makes men fall asleep, it reinvigorates women? Makes them sharper. So thanks for making me razor-edge sharp this morning.”

  He starts to say something, stops himself, and then barks out a laugh. “Fucking great.”

  I shrug and swat his hands off my waist. No more touching or else I’m going to do what I really want to do—turn around and finish what we were just starting. “Shoo. Go so I can get ready.”

  “Nothing like being shown the door while your dick is still hard.” That laugh again. This time it’s followed by a slow and steady scrape of his beard up the line of my shoulder, leading to an open-mouthed kiss at the base of my neck. “Take your time. I’ll head back to my room, get dressed, and head in. I’ll make sure everything is kosher there while you take a shower and finish your proposal here. Everything is fine, Harper. The bid will be fine. We will be fine regardless of the outcome. And we’ll figure things out from there because this. Here”—he motions a hand to the bed and then back to me—“will be happening again.”

  “Well, one of us is bound to get reward sex tonight,” I chuckle.

  “May the best man win.” He presses a kiss to my shoulder that makes my stomach flip-flop from the butterfly wings starting to flutter.

  “May the best woman win. It’s sexist to assume it’s going to be a man.” My smile is automatic. Winning would be the absolute icing on this cake. Let’s see if he takes the bait.

  “Semantics.” I feel his mouth spread into a smile against my shoulder. “But okay. I guess we can say, may the best woman win.” There’s a pause. I can all but hear his mental gears click into place. “Wait. That’s bullshit. There’s only one woman bidding.”

  “Exactly.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Ryder

  “You’re looking damn chipper this morning,” the security guard in the line says with a smile when I pass him by.

  “Because it’s a damn good morning,” I say. And night. And hopefully day. “Have a good one.”

  The elevator is empty, my arrival to the office quick; all the while Harper’s on my mind. Everything about her. Every minute of last night. Each sound she made. Each smile she gave me. Every ounce of hunger that remains to have her again.

  How stupid was I to tell her this was just about last night. One night. There’s so much more there, it’s blaringly obvious. But first we need to see how today goes.

  Then reward sex.

  Gotta love a woman who rewards herself with sex. That’s so damn hot.

  When I push open the door to the war room, I’m surprised to find Patrick here already.

  “Christ, Rodgers,” Patrick all but yelps, causing us both to jump, equally startled by each other. I hiss as my coffee sloshes over and scalds the skin of my hand, and when I look back over to him, Patrick is on his knees, picking up the papers he knocked to the ground off of Harper’s desk.

  I should help him since I’m the one who startled him, but I’m more concerned with what Harper and I did or didn’t leave here last night.

  “I thought this place would be dead,” I say, eyes homed in on seeing if Alan’s desk remains as unscathed by our sex as I remember it being.

  Whew. We’re in the clear.

  No condom wrapper in sight. Papers are stacked neatly.

  Let’s hope there are no grip marks from her hands…or boob marks, from where she held on.

  “You scared the shit out of me,” he says with an audible exhale as he puts the last of the fallen papers back on to Harper’s desk before focusing his attention on the floor model in front of him.

  I can’t help but laugh seeing Mr. Smooth and Asshole look so damn startled. “Yeah, well, I wanted to get a jump on finalizing a few things. You?”

  Shit. Her panties. Those are her panties.

  On the floor.

  Just beneath the leg of the desk.

  How did we forget those?

  “Same here,” he says, preoccupied with the model, allowing me to stoop down, casual as can be to pick up and then stuff a very pink, sexy-hot scrap of lace into my pocket. “This wa
s a brutal one, wasn’t it?”

  I stare at him, relieved he doesn’t give me a second look before he bends back over to take notes on the trickiest building in the bid package and wonder if that hung him up like it did me. “Definitely. There’s so much security and electronics in that building it’s hard to not feel like your numbers are high when you think they are as low as you can go.”

  “Exactly. Perfectly said.” He nods, crosses his arms over his chest, looks back to the model, and then back up to me. “It’s going to be a close one, I think.”

  “Always is.” I sit down at my desk and start up my laptop. “Good luck.” You’re going to need it.

  “You too. You too.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Harper

  “How’d it go?” Ryder murmurs from behind me as I bite back the yelp from not knowing he was there.

  “Good. Great.” I nod my head, the adrenaline rush ten times stronger than I’ve felt in forever, and it feels incredible.

  To be back in the game.

  To be confident in my numbers.

  To know reward sex is a definite.

  And to know said reward sex is with Ryder.

  “You? How do you think your presentation went?” I ask, my hands still trembling and the look on the board’s faces still etched in my mind. I’ve got a few hours to kill so I’m sure I’ll overthink what exactly those expressions meant a couple of thousand times while we wait.

  “It went well,” he says with a nod and a tone to his voice that sounds exactly like I feel: negatively optimistic and positively pessimistic.

  “Good. I’m glad.” We walk a few more steps back to the war room where lunch is being catered, the last meal before they decide our fate, and wonder how we will handle whatever happens next.

  And if I get to keep my job.

  Or lose it.

  At least I have last night to relive over and over while I sit and wait.

  Those memories will definitely pass the time.

  No complaints here.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Ryder

  “Good luck.”

  I look over to Harper sitting at her desk where this whole thing between us unknowingly began and nod my head with a smile. “See you on the flip side,” I say as Mason Van Dyken’s assistant waits at the door to usher me back into the conference room.

  I try to play it cool, like being called back in a second time is a normal thing in this situation, but it’s not. The furrowing of Harper’s brow when they called my name says she thought the same thing.

  We’d been waiting for them to reconvene all of us and announce the award of the bid, so this feels off to me.

  “Gentlemen,” I greet them as I walk into the room.

  “Please take a seat,” Mason asks as he gestures to the chair in front of the four men. I do as I’m told and wait for them to speak.

  Silence stretches as they shuffle documents in front of them—trying to look official—before looking back up so that all four sets of eyes home in on me.

  “I’d like to start by thanking you for accepting our invitation to the bid.”

  The death words. The “thank you but you’re about to get denied the job” type of death words.

  My hopes fall. My pride and ego take a kamikaze spiral down with them.

  “Thank you for inviting me.”

  “This project is rather unique. It’s highly sensitive and extremely private, as you’ve inferred by this whole process. Having you bid on a job when you can only guess about its nature must be difficult. And we understand that more than anyone. You’ve probably guessed it’s a government facility due to the secrecy, and if that were the case, then you’d be right.”

  Why are they telling me this if I didn’t get the job?

  “We here at Century Development would like to offer R Squared Management the first two phases of the project formally called DOD Project 427.”

  I stare at him, try to feign like I’m playing it cool while I’m silently slack-jawed, wide-eyed, and shocked as shit that I finally beat out Harper Denton.

  Holy fucking shit.

  Play it calm, Ryd. You knew you had this.

  “Thank you so much, sir. I promise we’ll live up to the standards you expect and get the job in under budget and on schedule.” He repeats the last words with me and chuckles at the mantra.

  “You look a little surprised, son.”

  I look over to meet Mason’s questioning stare. “Not to undercut my abilities, sir, but to be honest, I expected Meteor to be the lowest bidder.” Did I really just say that?

  “Tom Grant, here. Nice to meet you, Ryder,” the gentleman to the right of Mason says.

  “Nice to meet you too, sir.” My eyes narrow as I try to figure out why all of a sudden Mason is whispering something into his ear, a little conference before a few nods are had. Something’s off here.

  “This bid was to be handled with the utmost integrity.”

  “As they all are,” I reply with a nod, trying to feel out the sudden change of vibe in the room.

  “There were color-coded folders handed out at the beginning of the project. Each folder was unique in that it held a different set of numbers for each participant to bid from.”

  I lower my head for a moment, shake it with my eyes closed as I try to process what he just explained. “So what you’re saying is we were all bidding the concept of the project but all had different numbers?” Who the hell does that? A part of me feels played while the other part is extremely intrigued as to the reasoning behind it.

  “Exactly. The bid numbers were the same for all of the buildings except for one. That building’s square footage was different for each of you. We tracked those individual numbers with the color-coded folders.”

  “And you are with what company?” I know I may be out of line asking but I deserve to know.

  “I work for a specific branch of the Department of Defense whose interest lies in the project. I’m here to oversee the bid process and the overall project to make sure we have the right people for the job. People we can trust. People with integrity. People who we can leave unsupervised with this huge project and not worry that aspects of it will fall in the wrong hands.”

  I stare at him, try to read the etched lines in his face and what he’s saying behind his words. This is all so cloak and dagger-ish, and I wonder what I’m missing here. My first thought is it’s a training facility for the FBI or some other security agency. Pieces start to click—the different set of buildings: dorm-like rooms in one, a medical-type facility in another, classrooms in yet another area, the mandatory fence and clearance area away from the actual buildings. While the need-to-know aspect is odd to me, it is slowly starting to make sense.

  “Okay…I hear what you are saying…but why have us bid differently if we’re going to have to reconfigure our numbers in the end?” I think of the request to leave folders on the desks. The directive that all bid items were to remain in the war room. Things start to line up and yet still seem so unconventional.

  “Because this project is important. We need to know the person awarded the contract can keep things confidential. That they won’t allow the information to fall in the hands of people who might want to use it for the wrong reasons. I’m saying too much… You’ll get all your answers once the ink of your signature is dry on the contract.”

  “Okay.” What are you not telling me?

  “What he’s trying to get to,” Mason interrupts, “is you weren’t the lowest bidder, Ryder.”

  If he didn’t have my attention before, he definitely has it now. “I don’t understand.”

  “There were two bids that came in lower than yours. Actually there were two identical bids, to be honest.”

  “But that’s not possible.” If there are two sets of numbers, there can’t be matching bids.

  “Exactly.” He nods for emphasis. “And hence we have thrown those two bids out. They either co-conspired, worked together, or someone cheated and
stole the numbers.”

  “So you throw both out? If someone cheated, that doesn’t seem fair.”

  “Are you trying to talk yourself out of getting this job?” Mason chuckles but his eyes flash a warning that I heed with caution.

  “No. That’s not the case. I’m thrilled to have been awarded the job but I’m just trying to understand. Who had the low bids?” I want to know and don’t want to know, and Mason’s expression reflects the same confusion I feel.

  “Meteor and Lux.”

  Fuck.

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  Patrick. This morning. The papers that fell by Harper’s desk. Was he looking at them? Were they in his hand when I first walked in or did he really knock them off the desk when I startled him.

  Think, Ryder.

  Fucking think.

  “And so you disqualified both of them.” It’s not a question, merely a statement, and yet I know they feel like I am questioning them anyway.

  You walked in the room.

  Tom clears his throat and looks to his left, where another person sits and then looks back to Mason before meeting my eyes again.

  “Given the peculiar set of circumstances one of the bidders left her job under, we’re under the mindset that it’s best that we throw both sets of numbers out.”

  Left her job under. I think of Harper’s comment this morning. May the best woman win. And know they are referring to Harper––can’t be referring to anyone else since she’s the only female bidding––and reject the idea that she cheated immediately.

  And yet they won’t give her the bid because of New York. Her words echo in my head: When a woman stands her ground, it’s easier to get rid of her than rally behind her.

  I feel sick to my stomach.

  Did Patrick already have the papers in his hand when I walked in? Or did he accidentally knock them off Harper’s desk when I startled him?

  I try to remember. Will myself to see it all again.

  They were in his hand.

  Are you sure though? Accusing someone of cheating is a huge deal.