My Rival Co-CEOS
Description
Have you ever loved someone so quietly, so completely, that you would agree to be chosen last-just to stay close? Wren Callahan has built her life around Theo Bracken: the controlled, untouchable CEO who trusts her with everything except his heart. When a dying patriarch ties a billion-dollar inheritance to marriage, Theo asks her to become his girlfriend-publicly, convincingly, temporarily. It's only a strategy. A mutually beneficial arrangement. A lie polished until it looks like devotion. But in a world where power is currency and affection is leverage, pretending to be in love becomes more dangerous than the truth. Then Julian Bracken walks in wearing Theo's face and none of his restraint. The twin brother who left the empire. The playboy with a grudge. The man who sees through the performance and enjoys dismantling it piece by piece. Where Theo is grumpy composure and calculated distance, Julian is reckless heat and brutal honesty. One brother touches her like she's part of a deal. The other looks at her like she's a secret he intends to uncover. And somewhere between family dinners, forced proximity, and kisses meant to convince an audience, Wren begins to question which desire is real-and which one was manipulated into existence.
Chapter 1
Feb 19, 2026
Wren’s POV
There are exactly two kinds of Thursday nights in my life: the ones where Piper forces me to watch reality TV on my couch, and the ones where she forces me to watch reality TV on her couch.
Tonight, we're at mine, which means I made the popcorn and she brought the wine and the unsolicited opinions about my love life.
"You need to get laid," Piper announces, like she's reading stock prices.
She tucks her legs underneath her on my secondhand sofa, her bold silver earrings catching the lamp light.
Three years of friendship—bonded over terrible orientation coffee and a shared hatred of Bracken Enterprises' parking garage—and she still opens every Thursday with the same diagnosis.
"I'm doing fine," I say.
"You reorganized your spice rack last weekend. Alphabetically." She points a piece of popcorn at me. "That's not fine. That's a cry for help."
I open my mouth to defend the merits of an organized kitchen when my phone buzzes against the coffee table. The screen lights up with a name that rearranges my entire nervous system.
Theo Bracken: Dinner tomorrow after work? Need to discuss something. I'll send the restaurant details in the morning.
My heart does the thing it always does when his name appears—kicks hard, then harder, like it's trying to break through my ribs and crawl toward him.
Six years of this.
Six years since he walked into my Business Strategy lecture as a guest speaker, twenty-three years old and already carrying the weight of a billion-dollar legacy on shoulders that somehow never slouched.
I'd tutored him through a philosophy requirement that semester. He'd opened doors to internships I couldn't have dreamed of reaching.
And somewhere between Kant's categorical imperative and his quiet laugh in the library at midnight, I'd fallen so completely in love that I'd built my entire adult life around staying close to him.
Three years as his executive assistant. Three years of pristine professionalism.
Three years of pretending the proximity was enough.
Piper snatches the phone before I can react.
"Working late again with the hot CEO?" She scans the text, one eyebrow arching toward her highlighted hairline. "Wren, this man has you on a leash and he doesn't even know it."
"It's a work dinner." I grab the phone back. "He probably wants to go over the Singapore acquisition timeline."
"At a restaurant? On a Friday night?" She shakes her head slowly. "You need a life outside that office. An actual, breathing, non-corporate life. With men who don't sign your paychecks."
"He doesn't technically sign my paychecks. Payroll does."
"Adorable deflection. Noted and ignored." She refills her wine glass. "Just promise me you won't wear that beige blouse. The one that makes you look like a census worker."
I wear my navy blouse instead. The one that makes my waist look narrow and my brown eyes look warm. Or at least that's what the saleswoman told me when I spent forty-five minutes in the fitting room convincing myself the purchase was practical.
The entire Friday is a blur of misread emails and restarted spreadsheets. My focus scatters every time I glance at the clock.
By six, I've checked my reflection in the bathroom mirror three times and reapplied lip gloss twice, which is two more times than any professional situation requires.
At seven, I step into the restaurant. Floor-to-ceiling windows frame the city skyline in gold and amber. The kind of place where the menu doesn't list prices because if you have to ask, you already don't belong.
I don't belong here.
Then I see him, and the thought dissolves. Theo stands by the window, jacket off, sleeves rolled to his forearms. The city glows behind him like it exists just to make his silhouette sharper.
His dark hair is neatly styled but there's a looseness around his jaw, a heaviness beneath those deep brown eyes that I've never seen during office hours.
He looks tired, vulnerable even.
He looks like a man carrying a weight he hasn't told anyone about yet.
Theo smiles when he spots me—the slow, quiet one that reaches his eyes before it reaches his mouth. The smile that has owned my heart since I was twenty-one years old.
"Wren." He pulls out my chair. "Thank you for coming."
"You're my boss. Was I supposed to decline?" I keep my voice light, teasing, the way I've perfected over three years of hiding everything behind humor.
But he doesn't laugh, just sits across from me and folds his hands on the white tablecloth, and the careful way he arranges his fingers tells me this isn't the Singapore acquisition.
"My grandfather is dying," he says.
In the cab ride over, I'd cycled through every possible reason for this dinner. A promotion, a project he needed my eye on. Even the reckless fantasy where he’d reached across the table and told me he'd finally noticed what had been standing in front of him for six years.
This was not on any version of that list.
I set down the menu I was pretending to read. "Theo, I'm so sorry. How long…"
"Months, maybe. His doctors aren't optimistic." He pauses, and I watch him choose his next words. "Before the diagnosis went public, he made an announcement to the family. He's leaving controlling shares of Bracken Enterprises to whichever grandson marries first."
I stare at him. "That's—"
"Manipulative. Archaic. Completely on brand for Victor Bracken." A ghost of dry humor crosses his face, then fades.
He runs a hand through his hair—a tell I've cataloged over years of reading him. Whatever he's about to say next is the real reason I'm sitting here.
"I need your help, Wren. I need you to be my girlfriend. Publicly. Convincingly. Maybe even…" He stops. Starts again. "Maybe even my fiancée, if it comes to that."
The air leaves my lungs in a single, quiet rush.
"So what would I be? A temporary wife before the inheritance is secured?" I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I deserve.
"You're the person I trust most in this world." His eyes hold mine, and I can see he means it—completely, earnestly, without a single trace of what I've been hoping to find there for six years. "I wouldn't ask anyone else."
Trusts most.
I have heard him call me indispensable, irreplaceable, his right hand. Every version of ‘I need you’ that doesn't mean ‘I want you.’
"What would it involve?" I ask, because asking practical questions is easier than feeling the ache spreading through my chest.
He lays it out—public appearances, family dinners, a timeline that revolves around convincing a dying billionaire that his golden grandson found love.
He speaks carefully, logically, the way he presents quarterly reports.
"My brother Julian left the company five years ago."
Something tightens behind his eyes when he says the name—a door closing from the inside.
"He walked away from every responsibility, every obligation, and never looked back. If he inherits controlling shares, he'll gut the company or sell it off piece by piece. I can't let that happen… This company is my grandfather's entire life. Protecting it isn't my ambition, Wren. It's my duty."
He pauses, and when he speaks again, his voice shifts—lower, more deliberate, the tone he reserves for offers he considers generous.
"If this works, if I secure the shares and take full ownership… I want you as CEO. You know this company better than half the board. You've earned it."
CEO.
The word glitters in front of me like a diamond laid on the table beside a contract. He is offering me the career of a lifetime as compensation for a love story he doesn't know I'd write for free.
I am a strategy. A variable in an equation.
I should say no. I should protect whatever is left of the heart I've been handing him in pieces for six years.
"Okay," I hear myself say. "I'll do it."
His shoulders drop with relief. He reaches across the table and squeezes my hand—brief, grateful, devastating. "You have no idea what this means to me."
Yes, I do.
It means I'll stand beside him and play the woman he chose, and he will never know I would have been her for real without being asked.
But beneath the ache, quiet and stubborn, a thought takes root that I can't quite pull out: maybe pretending will teach him what the truth never could.
My Rival Co-CEOS
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