Why You'll Love This
When your new boss is both your fiercest opponent and the most compelling person you've ever met, backing down stops feeling like an option.
- Great if you want: sapphic workplace romance with genuine professional tension at its core
- The experience: fast and punchy — reads in one sitting, tension stays high throughout
- The writing: Hayes keeps the power dynamic shifting — neither woman easily yields
- Skip if: you want deep plot complexity — at 120 pages, it moves quick
About This Book
When Melanie Fox lands her dream promotion as Head of Sales at a multi-million dollar company, she expects to prove herself—not to lock horns with her new CEO before the ink is dry on her contract. Vanessa Reiss is formidable, brilliant, and completely unconvinced by Melanie's strategy. What begins as a professional collision quickly becomes something more charged and harder to name, as two strong-willed women circle each other in boardrooms and beyond. The tension here is the good kind—the kind that keeps you reading past a sensible bedtime, wondering whether Melanie's biggest rival might actually be her greatest weakness.
At just 120 pages, Rival to the CEO earns its brevity. Emily Hayes writes with a sharp, economical style that wastes nothing—every scene lands a punch, and the dynamic between Melanie and Vanessa crackles with the kind of push-pull energy that's genuinely difficult to sustain at this pace. As the fifth entry in the CEO series, it rewards returning readers with deepened context while remaining accessible to newcomers. It's a compact, propulsive read that delivers more emotional weight per page than books twice its length.
