“He was my rival. Iron sharpens iron. Having him as an adversary made me better.”
It was then she realized the complex nature of such relationships. And she’d been somewhat relieved. That maybe her feelings for Gunnar were something along those lines. Because it wasn’t a rivalry where you wanted your enemy to die in a fire.
You needed an opponent to race against to be your fastest.
A skilled opponent was a good thing.
That was when Gunnar had assumed control of Magnum Enterprises. And he’d come back into her life in a much more regular space.
And her feelings for him had only grown more and more tangled. Because he was the one going into those meeting rooms, and she was still sitting outside.
“Someday,”her father had said, “you’ll go toe-to-toe with him. And you’ll win. Maybe you’ll win.”
He’d smiled at her sadly.
“I don’t think I have that kind of time. But you...you’re a brilliant mind, Olive, and you can do it. But you must remember. Compete without mercy. Never let emotion cloud your judgment. Give no quarter.”
She carried those words with her now. Because now she was the one who went into the boardroom. It was her battle now.
And Gunnar was her opponent.
They were the same. Locked in negotiations, all day every day sometimes, to secure the best and highest paying contracts.
But this... This was the big one. Her father’s baby. The one he’d worked on for years, the one he’d died before finishing.
Getting their touchscreen system, their operating system, into the largest fleet of electric cars in the world, and it would bother him so much if she won.
Gunnar Magnusson had been a vanguard of green energy for years. And while Ambient was slightly behind on that, Olive was making up for lost time. Her father had been a stickler for tradition. For doing things the way they had always been done. Not that Magnus had been any different. It was only that Gunnar had taken over Magnum Enterprises a decade ago, and Olive had only been running Ambient six months, taking over her father’s unfinished projects and working as hard as she could to fulfill his goals, to be what he’d trained her to be.
And if not for what had happened after her father’s funeral, she wouldn’t have felt at all guilty about the way in which she had gone about gaining her info for today’s meeting.
It was a bit of corporate espionage. But this contract would see her business tied up for the next decade. Constantly innovating and pushing the new technology in green energy vehicles forward, and she wouldn’t have to see Gunnar for... Well, it would at least be ten years.
Because she wouldn’t be able to compete for another contract on this level with everything existing that she had. They had been playing a chess game for years. Magnum’s technology was ubiquitous in the corporate world. Ambient was for artists. Ambient had the most successful phone.
Magnum provided the GUI and back-end software for most things that ran on computer chips. Including a massive contract with the largest airline to use their microchips to keep the planes in the sky.
It was all global domination, and the more computerized vehicles became... The more competitive that all was.
Anyway. Ambient was just better for something like that. It needed to be slick, visuals based and artistic. Clean. In her opinion, everything that Magnum did was dull. It was corporate. And it showed.
But she would save that for the pitch, rather than hyping herself up on her own achievements in the corridor.
Twenty minutes until the meeting. And her mouth was watering.
Because she wanted a chocolate cupcake.
Damn him.
This was why she needed distance. Her father might have been able to see Magnus as iron sharpening his iron, but Gunnar wasn’t iron for her. He didn’t make her sharp.
He made her soft.
She’d done this to prove it didn’t have to be that way. Done it to be who her dad had raised her to be.
She needed to be iron.
She couldn’t do that with Gunnar around her all the time.