The Rivals
She has a drawer for things she doesn't examine.
He's been in it for three years.Nora V squez is thirty, a Senior Editor at Linden Press, and ruthless about the only thing that matters: the work. She edits literary fiction-the difficult, beautiful kind-and she can spot the wound beneath a sentence in a single pass. She's shepherded one Booker winner, dozens of acclaimed novels, and exactly zero regrets she's willing to name.
She has also spent three years not thinking about Callum Reid.
Callum runs acquisitions at Ashford Books, the rival imprint one floor below hers in the same Manhattan building. He's polished when it helps, precise when it counts, and-infuriatingly-the only editor at Meridian Group who reads the way she does. They've been circling each other for years, pretending their past doesn't exist. It lives in a drawer neither of them opens.
Then Meridian Group changes the rules of its biggest prize.
One collaborative anthology. One shared acquisition. One promotion: Director of Acquisitions-the job that would give the winner editorial authority over every imprint in the group. Nora and Callum are forced into the same room, the same budget, the same impossible mandate: find the single best debut manuscript in New York... together.
And when they discover a novel so extraordinary it makes fighting feel like wasted time, the real problem isn't the competition. It's what happens when two guarded, hyper-perceptive people finally have to look directly at each other-on the page, in the margins, and in all the places they've been avoiding.
The Rivals is a slow-burn, closed-door romantic contemporary set inside the high-stakes world of New York literary publishing. Told in dual present-tense POV, it's a story about ambition, taste, power-and the one person who can see through every careful sentence you write. Hopeful, earned step-forward ending.
For readers who love:
Slow-burn tension with real intellectual chemistry
Workplace rivals in a competitive, high-status industry
Sharp, literary voice with commercial readability
Dual POV that makes you root for both leads
Closed-door romance (no explicit scenes)
Perfect for fans of: The Hating Game (Sally Thorne) - People We Meet on Vacation (Emily Henry) - Act Your Age, Eve Brown (Talia Hibbert) - The Dead Romantics (Ashley Poston)
Standalone. Dual POV. Closed-door.
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