Page 1 of Love by Design (Club Rapture: Risk Aware #1)

SILAS

M arshall Covington had gray hair around his temples.

It wasn’t something I’d noticed until he sat down across from me and my father under the glaring fluorescent lights of the conference room, but the salt was definitely salting.

Reclining back in my chair, I turned my attention away from him to stare out the window.

The sunlight and the blue sky were preferable to the too-bright artificial light, but it was only four in the afternoon, and I had at least three hours of work left to do after we wrapped up this meeting that most assuredly should have been an email.

Marshall Covington owned an architectural design firm.

And so did my father.

One was better than the other, but Marshall was yet to realize he was outmatched.

If not by my father’s talent and reach, then by mine.

I was more than twenty years their junior, with fresh ideas and a solid understanding of concepts that hadn’t even existed when the two of them had gone into business.

My dad had been one of Marshall’s professors in design school, or that was the story I’d been told.

Marshall was capable, but he was arrogant and rude.

He’d left critical feedback on the graduate survey about my dad’s teaching, and the grudge had never died down.

Things had only gotten worse once my dad left teaching and opened his design firm.

Marshall was getting himself established, and the two of them had run neck and neck against each other, rising up through the ranks in the city, putting newer firms out of business before they even got started.

Both men were sickeningly competent and capable. But they were both getting old.

I would turn twenty-five in three days, which would mark twenty-five days and nine months that my father had been preparing for me to follow in his footsteps.

My mom, before she passed, had been the only thing that gave Stanley Ayres a work/life balance.

She’d been gone for just shy of seven years.

After she died, he walked away from teaching—something he’d been doing part-time for years—and threw himself headfirst into the firm.

It was only after my mom’s passing that the competition between my father and Marshall really started to take off.

It had always been there, but it quickly became so much worse.

A grumbled name around the dinner table, a contract lost here and there, but after we put my mom into the ground, my father’s focus shifted from her to Marshall.

I was even an afterthought in most cases, which was a relief…

sometimes. He’d put so much pressure on me for all of my life to be smarter, to be better, to be more innovative… sometimes I just wanted a break.

Three months back, a new bid request was circulated for a massive commercial and residential project tucked against the hillside just off the Cahuenga Pass.

It was worth millions of dollars, and my father threw us both into the bid process without even taking a breath first. The prep had been tedious, the estimation some of the hardest I’d ever tried to manage, and we were down to the wire .

Two firms in the running.

Ayres and Covington.

“I’m not walking away from this,” Marshall said to my father with a definitive pronunciation in his words that made it clear to me he was done with the conversation.

There was no further argument to be had.

I swallowed hard and turned my attention away from the sidewalk and back to my father’s rival.

He was dressed for a Friday, navy slacks and a crisp white button-up, no tie.

The top button of the shirt was undone, revealing a tan throat that fanned out into a muscular chest. I imagined Marshall had a work/life balance, with muscles like the ones he kept so neatly hidden beneath the starched seams of his shirt.

As he spoke, he popped his cuffs undone and rolled his sleeves up toward his elbows, revealing more tan skin, more muscles, these dusted with dark brown hair untouched by the gray that had already begun to wisp over his ears.

My father, on the other hand, had gone gray long ago. Gray hair to match his gray suit, and a complete lack of interest in anything that would have broken up the familiar monotony of his life.

My father had called Marshall down in an attempt to smooth-talk him out of the running entirely, which had been a flawed plan from the start.

I’d told him the offense would make him look weak.

It would let Marshall know we weren’t as surefooted with the bid as we should have been, but since my mother passed, he listened to reason less and less.

And to me—even less .

My father was going to run Ayres Design into the ground before he even handed me the keys. Winning this project was probably the only thing that would ensure I had a business to inherit, but neither of the two men in the room with me was going to budge on their morals—or their ideas.

“You’re going to lose it then,” my father warned.

Marshall made a lilting noise in the back of his throat, and I sat up straight, folding my hands together on the cool mahogany table, hoping to look like the attentive and talented son everyone knew I was.

Marshall glanced at me, his blue eyes flashing with amusement.

“You can come work for me, you know,” he said, and to my left, my father made an indignant sound. “I read the article you published in LA Design Digest about using solar panels to power water purification in tandem with greywater and rainwater collection systems.”

Marshall’s tongue darted out, worrying a spot in the corner of his lower lip.

“And?” I prompted.

“It was brilliant,” he said simply.

“It’s a cost most won’t be willing to pay,” my father interjected. “It’s not practical or necessary.”

Marshall bit the inside of his cheek. I saw how it hollowed, how he swallowed back whatever he wanted to say next, and I found myself learning forward, desperate to hear another word of praise—or argument—from the man my father had spent three decades making an enemy of.

“Like I said.” He stood up and cracked both his thumbs before sliding his left hand into his pocket. I stood up immediately after him, another ingrained trigger. The meeting was over, time to smile and shake hands, time to say goodbye, time to get back to work.

Marshall threw a quick glance at me—fleeting, dismissive—and I fought the urge to sink back down into the chair beside my father. Instead, I stuck my hand out to initiate the shake.

“I know my father and I will both hate to see you lose the bid, Mr. Covington,” I said.

He slid his palm against mine, curling his fingers around the underside of my hand. Squeezing hard, I countered back with as much pressure as I could manage, but his fingers were as muscular as the rest of him, his grip punishing.

“As you say.”

He let go of my hand, threw a disdainful glance down at my father and turned for the door. It was halfway open when he stopped, one foot in the main part of the office, the other nearly there. Marshall turned back to my father, who was still seated at the table, and he frowned.

“You’re going to ruin his career before it even gets started if you don’t listen to him, Stanley.”

That had my father out of his seat, hands flat on the table, entire body angled toward the door. “I don’t need business advice from you.”

I wiped the sweat off my palm and onto the front of my slacks.

“Wasn’t business advice,” he said, throwing one last glance in my direction before letting himself out of the conference room and closing the door behind him with a loud click of the latch.

My knees shook, so I returned to my seat, pushing the chair back at least to stretch my legs out and dry my palms again.

“I told you not to publish that article,” my father said without looking at me.

“I didn’t publish it. I submitted it.”

“You know what I meant.”

I did.

“You’ve had a good run with this, Dad, but it’s literally a new century. Can we at least try some of these ideas?”

“This industry is filled with men like me, Silas. Men my age. They’ll see things my way, not yours.”

I sighed, looking up at the ceiling until I was properly blinded by the lights that had already betrayed Marshall Covington’s age.

“Don’t you think any of them have sons or daughters?

Come on, Dad. I’m not the only person out here thinking this way.

Buildings are being designed with these very same concepts in other parts of the world?—”

He cut me off, “But not here.”

“Not yet.”

My father shook his head and held up his hand in a signal I knew meant the conversation was over.

“I won’t hear it, Silas.”

“Covington isn’t going to lose this bid,” I warned.

I hadn’t seen his offering, but I knew it would be better than ours.

My father had shot down nearly every idea I’d come up with, opting for tradition instead of innovation.

It was a wonder we’d made it to the final round, but he was probably right.

The decision was most likely being made around a table like ours, with men like him… not men like me.

My father stepped away from the table, wiped his hands together like he was wiping them clean of me.

“If you think you’re so smart, Silas, redraft the proposal.”

Breath caught in my throat. “What?”

“Redraft it the way you think it should be done.”

“And you’ll go with it?” I asked.

“I’ll look at it,” he said.

I scoffed, rolling my eyes at the notion. “I’m not going to put time and thought into you simply indulging me. I know you don’t take me or my ideas seriously.”

“If I didn’t take you seriously, you wouldn’t work here.”

“You’ll really consider it?”

“I’ll look at it,” he repeated, which was more of a concession than he’d ever given me before.

Even when I was in school, fighting my way through finals and design projects, he’d never cared unless it lined up with his philosophy of architecture.

An unexpected and unfamiliar feeling sparked somewhere in the middle of my chest.

“You’ll look at it. ”

“I’ll look,” he said, pushing himself up to his full height and heading for the door.

“Okay. Thank you.”

He shook his head, like the idea I would put more time into trying to impress him was ridiculous, and in a way, I supposed, it was.

My mom had always been the cheerleader for us both, even when our ideas were at odds.

I missed her often, but I missed her most when I had accomplishments I wanted to share.

I hadn’t told my dad about the article being published because I knew he wouldn’t care.

It could have gotten us new clients, but he refused to implement my ideas, and he refused to let me take on clients without his heavy-handed oversight.

If we didn’t win this proposal, it was going to be the end of the firm, and I’d have to leave.

I refused to let my career be ruined, but there were only so many minutes I could stay on a sinking ship.

The problem was if I left the firm, I’d have to leave my dad too.

He wouldn’t accept me branching out onto my own or going to work with anyone else.

My leaving—to him—would be the ultimate betrayal. And then I wouldn’t have my mom or him.

I’d be alone.

“This is your chance,” I said to myself, a pep talk that would never be enough to make me ready to face my father in the way he was asking.

I closed the lid on my laptop and stacked the remaining project files and their folders on top of it, then grabbed everything and headed toward my office.

It was almost five now, and it was a Friday, but there were designs for other projects that needed to be finalized and sent for approval before the end of the day, and those had somehow landed on me.

I listened to my father bang around in his office, shutting everything down for the weekend.

He didn’t even stop to make sure I had my list of items to complete before the end of the night.

He didn’t confirm I’d be sending off the final bids on three smaller projects in El Segundo or that I’d be responding to the Q&A from a potential residential build in the Palisades.

He didn’t have to because he knew I would.

He had raised me to be reliable and, for the most part, I was.

He flipped the lights off in his office and left without saying goodbye.

I spent two more hours behind my desk before checking the last item off my to-do list, then I closed my computer and grabbed my phone.

Flipping off the rest of the lights as I went, I made sure everything was shut down and locked up.

The trashcan in the lobby hadn’t been emptied, I realized, and I made a mental note to talk to our receptionist Kelly about it on Monday, but I stopped, the idea half-formed in my brain when I realized the trash had been emptied.

There was only one thing inside the fresh bag.

The most recent issue of LA Design Digest . The one with my article inside.