Her Rival Tastes Better
Sapphic Enemies-to-Lovers Romance
by Aurora North
Free with Kindle Unlimited
Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Enemies to Lovers, Workplace Rivals, Forced Proximity, Power Exchange, Competence Kink, Rivals to Lovers, Forbidden Romance
We compete for everything… including control.
Harper Knox is the sharpest art director in the building. Ruthless, driven, immaculate — she doesn’t lose. Ever. So when her agency merges two creative teams and pits her against a rival for the only Creative Director promotion, she’s ready to fight.
Sloane Mercer is the senior copywriter who matches Harper word for word. Calm on the surface, lethal underneath. She reads every room, wins every argument, and looks far too good in cashmere for anyone’s professional concentration.
They’re supposed to be collaborating on a $14 million pitch. Instead, they’re circling each other like a lit match and gasoline. The creative tension is electric. The arguments are foreplay. And the night it finally snaps — in a storage closet, at a company party, twelve feet above their colleagues — neither of them can pretend it was a one-time thing.
What starts as aggressive, competitive encounters becomes an addictive cycle neither can win or walk away from. The sex is a power struggle. The power struggle is intoxicating. And somewhere between the claiming and the fighting and the nights that keep getting longer — the rivalry turns into something that looks a lot like love.
But there’s still only one promotion. And when the competition comes back, they’ll have to decide what matters more: winning the title, or winning each other.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ Enemies-to-lovers sapphic romance with HEAT
✅ Workplace rivals who can’t keep their hands off each other
✅ Power exchange that flips constantly — neither is the “top”
✅ Competitive sex that evolves into devastating tenderness
✅ “I hate you / I need you / I love you” in that exact order
✅ Two ambitious women who refuse to make each other smaller
✅ Graphic, explicit, emotional (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — scorching)
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes including power exchange, edging, possessiveness, and marking), strong language, workplace power dynamics, and depictions of emotional vulnerability. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.
Chapter One: Harper
I smelled the ambush before Margaux opened her mouth.
The all-hands had been called at 8 AM — a full hour before the creative department usually surfaced from their various states of caffeine dependency. That alone was a red flag. Margaux Voss didn’t do mornings unless she was about to ruin someone’s day, and she didn’t gather the whole floor unless she wanted witnesses.
I stood near the back wall of the main conference room, arms crossed, coffee untouched. I’d been at Voss & Laine for four years. Senior Art Director. Team North. I knew the rhythms of this place the way a boxer knows a ring — where the ropes were, where the corners trapped you, where the light hit your opponent’s eyes just right.
Margaux stood at the front in a cream blazer that probably cost more than my first car, her silver hair swept back like a helmet. She smiled. That was the second red flag.
“Restructuring,” she said, and the room went still. “Not layoffs — before you all start updating your portfolios. A consolidation.”
She explained it with the efficient cruelty of someone who’d rehearsed. Two creative teams — North and South — were being merged into a single unit. One pitch. The Lux Botanica account: $14 million annually, prestige skincare, the kind of brand that made agencies famous. Whoever led the winning pitch concept would be promoted to Creative Director.
The other would be… absorbed.
She didn’t say fired. She didn’t have to.
I felt the stares before I tracked them. My team looking at me to gauge the threat level. The South team doing the same to their lead.
That was when I looked across the room and found her.
Sloane Mercer.
Senior Copywriter. Team South. I knew the name, the reputation, the highlight reel. She’d written the Bellamy Hotels campaign that won a Clio. She’d poached two of our best juniors last year and I’d spent a full weekend furious about it. We’d been in the same rooms before — company events, cross-team reviews — but always on opposite sides, always at a professional distance that felt less like courtesy and more like a demilitarized zone.
She was leaning against the window ledge, ankles crossed, a ceramic mug in her hand like she was at a garden party instead of a career-defining ambush. Warm brown skin, close-cropped natural hair, a silk blouse in a shade of green that had no business being that distracting. She looked relaxed. Casual. Like she’d known this was coming and had already decided it wasn’t a problem.
That pissed me off more than the restructuring did.
Our eyes met. She didn’t look away. People usually looked away when I held a stare — it was one of my more useful skills. She held it. Took a sip of whatever was in that mug. And the corner of her mouth did something that wasn’t quite a smile but communicated, with surgical precision: This should be fun.
I broke the stare first, which I’d later rationalize as strategic disengagement and not the retreat it actually was.
The conference room assignment came down at ten.
“You’ll share Room 4A for the duration of the pitch development,” Margaux’s assistant told us, with the tone of someone handing two pit bulls the same bone.
I got there first. Deliberately. Set my laptop at the head of the table, spread my materials, established territory. This was basic. You controlled the room by arriving before the room needed controlling.
I was reviewing the Lux Botanica brand deck when the door opened.
Sloane walked in carrying her laptop under one arm and that same ceramic mug in the other hand. She scanned the room. Scanned my setup. Looked at the head of the table where I was sitting.
Then she walked to the other end of the table, set her things down, pulled out the chair, and sat.
At the other head.
It was a twelve-seat table, and we were sitting at opposite ends of it like rival monarchs at a negotiation. I understood the move immediately: she wasn’t challenging my position. She was establishing her own. Equal footing. Matching geometry.
I hated how smart it was.
“Harper,” she said. Not a greeting — a placement. Like she was pinning my name to a board.
“Sloane.” I matched her tone exactly. Flat, professional, giving nothing.
She opened her laptop. “I assume you’ve reviewed the brand deck.”
“Twice.”
“Then you know they’re repositioning toward experiential luxury. Less product-as-object, more product-as-ritual.” She pulled up a file. “Their current visual language is sterile. Clinical. It reads like a dermatologist’s office, not a sensory experience.”
She wasn’t wrong. I’d made the same note. Seeing my own insight come out of her mouth irritated me in a way I wasn’t prepared for.
“The visuals need a complete overhaul,” I said. “Bold, tactile, close-up photography. Skin as landscape. Texture and warmth instead of white space and sans-serif.”
“Agreed on the visual shift. But you’re leading with aesthetics when the brand problem is narrative. They don’t have a story. You can’t shoot your way out of a missing story.”
“You can if the images are the story.”
“Images without copy are a mood board, not a campaign.”
I set my pen down. “Are you planning to do this for the entire pitch development? Dismiss visual strategy as decoration?”
She tilted her head. Just slightly. Studying me. “Are you planning to treat copy as an afterthought every time I open my mouth?”
The room was very quiet. The glass walls made it feel like a fishbowl — the bullpen beyond was fully visible, juniors and coordinators glancing in with the poorly concealed fascination of people watching a car accident in slow motion.
“I don’t treat copy as an afterthought,” I said. “I treat bad copy as a liability.”
“And I treat undisciplined art direction as a distraction.” She smiled. It was the kind of smile that made you check your pockets. “But I’m sure we’ll find common ground.”
She went back to her laptop. Typing. Calm. As if she hadn’t just drawn a line in the sand and walked away from it.
I watched her for a moment longer than I should have. Her hands moved quickly on the keyboard — long fingers, short nails, no rings. She had a small scar on her left wrist, a thin white line that caught the overhead light. She was sitting perfectly still except for her hands, and there was something about that containment — all that energy focused into the precise motion of her fingers — that made my jaw tighten.
I looked away. Opened the brand deck for the third time.
This was going to be a problem.
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Ours — The Supply Closet (Revisited) — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon
Three months after becoming Co-Creative Directors, Harper and Sloane christen the newly locked supply closet on fifteen. The power exchange is back. The stakes are different. And the only thing they’re competing for now is who breaks first. Possessive, filthy, and deeply in love.
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