My Rival, My Partner

Chapter Two: The Favorite Son

Callum's POV

Ashworth House sat on eleven acres that used to be a farm before Callum's grandfather decided farmland was more valuable as a monument to himself. Callum had grown up counting the rooms he wasn't allowed to touch anything in. Tonight, walking through the front doors still keyed up from the pitch, he counted them again out of old habit, and found the number hadn't changed.

His father was in the study, which meant the conversation Callum had been dreading all day couldn't be postponed.

"You did well today," Robert Ashworth said, without looking up from his desk. It was the kind of compliment that came with a hook already baited beneath it.

"The Halloway pitch. I had eyes in the room."

"You always do."

"Voss & Marsh's boy is talented." His father said it the way he said everything he considered mildly threatening, flatly, like weather. "Scrappy. Sentimental. The committee loved that little speech about sneaking into museums as a child, Very touching."

Callum said nothing. There was no version of agreeing with his father about Dane that wouldn't be used against one of them later.

"I assume you'll beat him," his father continued. "That's rarely been in question. But sentiment plays well with committees, and I'd rather not leave anything to chance on a contract this size."

Callum had learned years ago that the safest response to his father's plans was silence long enough to hear the whole shape of them before objecting. He used it now, and was glad he had, because what came next made his stomach drop before his father finished the sentence.

"The committee announces their decision Thursday," his father said. "I've heard, through channels I won't bore you with, that they're leaning toward a joint proposal instead of a winner. Some nonsense about collaborative civic vision."

He said the phrase like it tasted bad. "If that happens, you're going to be spending a great deal of time with Mr. Copper. I want you to use it."

"Use it how."

"However you like, Find his weaknesses. Learn his firm's financials. A man that scrappy has debts, cut corners, something that would embarrass Voss & Marsh publicly if it ever needed to."

His father finally looked up, and his eyes were the particular gray Callum had spent thirty-one years learning to read like weather fronts.

"This family does not lose contracts it should win, Callum. Not to charity cases with a nice speech."

"He's not a charity case. He's better than half the senior architects at our firm."

Something shifted in his father's face, not anger, which would have been easier, but a kind of quiet recalibration, like a man updating a spreadsheet.

"Interesting," his father said, "that you'd defend him so quickly."

Callum kept his expression perfectly, professionally still, the same mask he'd worn into that conference room hours earlier, the one that made strangers assume he had nothing to hide. It had never once worked on his father.

"I'm not defending him. I'm correcting inaccurate information."

"Mm." His father returned to his papers, which was somehow worse than if he'd kept pushing.

"Thursday, then. We'll see what the committee decides. But Callum, whatever arrangement comes out of this, remember whose name is on this house, and whose name needs to stay on that museum. I won't ask twice."

Callum left the study without answering, because there was no answer that wouldn't be a promise he already knew he didn't intend to keep.

In the car, he pulled out his phone and typed the text to Dane before he'd fully decided to send it,

*Guess we're roommates, Copper*

something light, something that gave nothing away, because the alternative was sitting in his chest all evening with the actual truth: that some part of him had wanted the joint proposal to happen the moment the words left the committee's mouth, and he had absolutely no intention of telling his father why.

The message showed *delivered*, then sat there, unread, for four full minutes, long enough that Callum found himself watching the screen the way you watch a pot that refuses to boil. When the three dots finally appeared and then vanished without a reply, he laughed once, short and disbelieving, at how much that small silence had gotten under his skin in under a week of knowing the man was even in the running.

He sent one more line before he could stop himself. Then he set the phone in the cupholder, face up, and did not look away from it for the rest of the drive home, telling himself, unconvincingly, that he was simply waiting on a work reply.