Power Play: An Age Gap Sapphic Romance, page 1
Power Play
An Age Gap Lesbian Romance
Alexa Woods
© 2024 Alexa Woods
All Rights Reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locations is purely coincidental. The characters are all productions of the author’s imagination.
Please note that this work is intended only for adults over the age of 18 and all characters represented as 18 or over.
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Table of Contents
About the Book:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Epilogue
Also by Alexa Woods
About Alexa Woods
About the Book:
The ice queen CEO and her fiery hire. a win-win contract, if only they can keep their hearts out of it.
Olivia Gartner, a 41-year-old tech CEO, is the "ice queen" of the industry. She's tough, driven, and feared by her competitors. Her company is everything to her, and she'll stop at nothing to keep it on top, even at the expense of her personal life.
Enter Emma Harvey, a young, pink-haired genius with a rebellious streak and curves that make Olivia's heart race. Emma’s pitch to Olivia was a disaster.
Nervous and inexperienced, she thought she'd blown her chance. But to her surprise, Olivia offers her a deal: she won’t invest in Emma’s startup, however, she will offer Emma a job and shares in the profits.
Olivia sees Emma as the inventor who can take her company to higher levels; Emma sees Olivia as the mentor of her dreams. It could be a win-win. The catch? They have to survive each other.
Emma's vibrant energy and wild ideas crash with Olivia's strict, controlling ways, creating a storm of tension. Soon, Emma's influence begins shaking up the corporate culture, endangering everything Olivia has built. But it’s not just their contract at risk—their passionate clashes spark a sizzling attraction neither can ignore.
Can Olivia keep her empire intact while letting her guard down? Can Emma stay true to herself and her future while falling for the ice queen?
Chapter 1
Olivia
“All these tears for a cat?” Constance Gartner clicked her tongue. In her late sixties, just shy of six feet, and with steel gray hair, she was an intimidating woman.
Olivia’s mother had a few rules. Keep it together at all costs was one of them. She was unimpressed by the wetness streaking down her daughter’s cheeks, although her stance softened just slightly, betraying her.
“You have to be strong, dear. That’s the only thing that counts in this world.”
“Mrs. Gartner, could I bother you for a glass of water? I’m parched.” That was Cassie’s very nice way of telling Constance to please leave them alone. Through her work at one of Boston’s largest art galleries, Cassie dealt with all sorts of people regularly. She was good at it.
Olivia put her hands over her face so that her mother couldn’t see the horrible way the corner of her mouth wriggled. Cassie was the nicest mean person she’d ever met. She wasn’t afraid to speak her mind, but most of the time no one realized that’s what she was doing.
Constance nodded. If there was anything more important than the almighty stiff upper lip and steel backbone, it was the laws of hospitality. “I’ll get sandwiches and lemonade on the table. Be in the house and washed up in ten minutes.”
Cassie wasn’t nearly done, but as she opened her mouth, Olivia moved her elbow subtly into her side. “We’ll be in soon, Mom. Thank you.”
Constance stalked across the thick green grass she’d just freshly mown. The smell of it was in the air, along with honeysuckles from the bushes on the far side of their land, the air fresh and sweet with just a hint of dust from the gravel road that skirted the farm.
“Jesus,” Cassie choked when Constance neared the house and couldn’t hear them. “Sorry, dude, but your mom is being so mean about this. Beans was great. Who doesn’t like cats? You can’t trust a cat hater.”
Olivia stood rigid. There was no one but Cass and her mom out here to see her with her face blotchy and her eyes swollen, her nose scarlet from swiping at it too many times. But she didn’t care what she looked like, and there were few times in the last twenty years that she could say that was the honest truth. “That’s just because… loss changes people.”
Her mom used to scowl a lot, but she was still a fun mom. She was strict, but she had a good heart. There was no one she wouldn’t help and she never spoke ill of anyone. That was before her husband and the love of her life passed. It was a stupid freak accident. They used to have horses. David Gartner adored all animals, but horses were a special passion.
Olivia had just turned eleven. It was August, a few weeks before school. She’d had a few friends over for her birthday. Themes were big back then and her mom made a cake shaped like a clown. Olivia had an obsession back then. The uglier the better. She probably couldn’t even look at a clown again without thinking about how happy she’d been at that party.
It was a warm afternoon. They’d gone to the library in the small town a few miles away. She had a few new books and in the lazy summer heat she’d been taking advantage of the hours she had just to herself. She couldn’t have known what was going to happen. Even if she had, could she have done anything to stop it? Or would she just have been there, witnessing that moment, slowed down by the horror, the memory of her father dying in front of her locked in her brain forever?
Instead, she’d been enjoying herself, while her father lay dying.
Her dad had been thrown from his favorite mare. She was so gentle and sweet and never spooked or shied, but she just snapped or something. No one could figure out what had happened other than she’d bucked him off. He was unconscious when they found him. Constance had raced to the house and called an ambulance, but they were half an hour getting to them and at least that long getting to the hospital. The damage was probably so severe he wouldn’t have survived anyway, but Olivia had always wondered. What if? What if they’d lived a little bit closer to the nearest city with a hospital? What if that hospital hadn’t been so small? What if she’d been out there with him instead of at the library? What if he’d just landed at a different angle? Would the bleed have been so bad in his brain then? Could it have been contained? Drained? Pressure relieved? Would surgery have saved him?
After her dad’s death, all the horses, all the cows and pigs, sheep and chickens, everything but the family dog and two cats were sold. It wasn’t that Constance couldn’t stand the sight of them, although that was true of the horses her husband loved so much. She had to get a job to keep up the mortgage payments. Working full-time wasn’t conducive to keeping animals. They’d only kept the dog and cats because Olivia begged and promised she’d look after them, and she had.
“That’s all well and fair, I guess,” Cassie said softly, tugging Olivia back from the graveside. “But being strong literally means the opposite of keeping all your grief in and putting on a front cold enough to freeze half the planet. She realizes that, doesn’t she?”
“Probably.” Olivia twisted her hands and stared at the small mound of freshly dug earth. The soil had a smell, just like the wounded grass. She’d had to open up the earth herself for Beans, and it was like it wept with her. The grass hadn’t given way easily. The roots were thick and hard to get the spade through. She’d dug deep, deep enough that he’d be safe from any coyotes or other scavengers that the freshly turned earth might attract. “That’s just the way she’s always been. It was how she got through losing my dad and saving this place. It was their dream, and she wasn’t going to let this land go. She worked a full-time and a part-time job to support us. She’ll never sell it, not even when I could buy her the place of her dreams. This is her dream. Or, it was.”
Cassie visibly shuddered and Olivia felt the wounded pain of those words far more keenly herself. “If it hurts her to be here, shouldn’t she just let it go?”
Her best friend picked up the stick they’d found under one of the larger trees that lined the border of the property. She pushed it into the soft earth, leaving just enough sticking out as a marker. Olivia would get something special made, but that took time. Her eyes prickled looking at that stick. It seemed so inadequate and wrong, just like putting Beans in the earth.
“She can’t. She won’t. Not just because this place was her and my dad’s greatest hope, but because they picked it out together. They poured their love and energy into fixing it up before he died. This was supposed to be the place they grew old together. The place where they sat on the porch and watched their grandchildren.”
Cassie winced. “Ouch. Does she still want that?”
“She knows that with the kind of money I have,
there’s always IVF. For all her ‘be tough and carry on no matter what the world throws at you’ speeches, she’s never held it against me that I’ll never have a husband. Would she like me to have some kind of family? A wife and kids? I’m sure she would. She’s a good mom. She just wants me to be happy. She’s accepted that I’ve made a different reality for myself without nagging me about what I had to give up to get there.”
“I knew she was cool with you being a lesbian, but you’ve never really talked about what she thought about grandkids.”
Never once in her mind had she ever thought to herself that she didn’t want kids. But having kids had never factored highly in her thoughts, either. When she was in college, she was focused on her degree, then there was the company she’d started from nothing and grown, and kids were still a distant thought for later. A family could wait.
Now she was forty-one, and if she wanted kids, she could still have them, but the concept was one she just couldn’t grasp. She’d made enough money for several lifetimes, but the thought of retirement, finding someone, having a family? It was so much easier to be CEO and owner of a multi-billion-dollar global corporation than it was to think about that.
“Being CEO doesn’t leave a lot of time for anything else,” Cassie pointed out, reading her thoughts.
Olivia nudged a clod of dirt with the toe of her shoe. They were well worn in, with grass and dirt stains. People thought that if you started and ran a company worth billions, you’d look it and live the lifestyle, and she did, but out here, she could be that small-town, salt of the earth girl again.
“Yeah. I don’t know. It’s frustrating sometimes.”
“Being who they want you to be?”
“Being who I am while they dictate what they think I am.” They being the media, the world, the occasional shots at a target that, on a slow news day, people ate up.
“I’m not going to use the phrase being a woman in a man’s world, but that’s what you are. People can’t understand you. When you become rich and untouchable, they think they can say whatever they want. They make up their own narratives. The ice queen one fits because you don’t have kids or a partner. You’re married to your work and so utterly professional that no one has ever been able to pick you apart and thrust it into the tabloids. You never make the tabloids and that’s the most frustrating thing for that industry. People don’t want to hear about a kick-ass woman who has never treated anyone more than fair. They want all the juice and all the gore.” She said that in a dark and scary way that made Olivia laugh.
“It’s still annoying to me when I go into a room and the whole place goes quiet. When I can tell people just fear me and cringe away. I would like to be respected, not feared. I have never done anything to anyone.”
“Not anything more than they deserved, at any rate.” There had been a few firings, but Cassie was right, and Olivia left that up to HR, as was appropriate. “Something else is up. You don’t look happy. I know you just buried your cat and he was the sweetest, most loyal companion and the love of your life, but it’s more than that. It’s more than how people think of you. It’s more than your mom or anything out here.”
If she was going to talk about it, now was probably the time. She didn’t know if she’d be brave enough to ever bring it up again. It was hard even admitting it to herself. “Things just feel… stale.”
“Things?” Cassie picked a leaf off the tree overhanging them. They’d picked a spot at the end of the yard, where the tree line stopped, and the field began. She thought Beans might like to look over it. It went on forever, and at the moment, the canola was so thick and yellow it was like staring into a neon sea on the surface of the sun. “Like? Like how? With your ovaries?”
Olivia snorted despite the tears that still threatened to keep coming. “No. Not with my ovaries. With my other child.”
Gartner Mind Tech Corp was more of a global behemoth than a small little brainchild, and had been for a decade and a half, but Cassie understood.
“The company is doing amazing. Isn’t it?”
“It’s not that. It… I don’t know.” She did, though. “You know how writers get writer’s block?”
Cassie cocked her head. “Sure.”
“I feel like that. Blocked. Like my personal creativity and inspiration is just drying up. Like I’ve offered the world everything I have to give.”
“You’ve certainly contributed a metric butt-ton already, so if that’s true, I wouldn’t worry.” Cassie glanced back through the trees to the window where the outline of Constance was clearly visible in the kitchen. She made no secret that she was watching them.
It was no secret either that Constance had never liked Cassie. She’d first seen her as a messy college girl. The kind of girl who went through phases, who got drunk sometimes and was promiscuous. The kind who was too free with her body and her opinions. She was too blonde, too loud, too modern, too ready to laugh, and too strong willed and spirited in all the wrong ways. She wasn’t neat or put together. She was messy and borderline dangerous.
Olivia hadn’t put her foot down on many issues with her mother, but Cassie was one of them. They’d met in college. Not at the college, but at a little fast-food place they’d both worked at near campus. Olivia was twenty-five, since it took her years to save up enough money to be able to afford school and living expenses in the city. Cassie had just turned nineteen. They were both working at a little mom-and-pop ice cream shop.
One afternoon, some sick dickweed wanted an ice cream cone with a side of Olivia. He was persistent in asking for her number, and when she finally told him she was a lesbian, he did the whole oh, I’m so sorry to hear that, you don’t really mean it, you’re just confused, you obviously have never had a man show you a good time before, and when you get a load of the heat I’m packing, I promise that you’ll change your mind routine. She’d still tried to be polite, not wanting to lose her job, and he’d turned into a real ass, harassing her and making her incredibly uncomfortable.
Cassie could only take so much of it before she’d come and chased the asshat out of the place. She didn’t care if she got herself fired. She told him in no uncertain terms where he could take himself and if he ever came back, she’d promised him the nutting of a lifetime right in his banana split.
She’d actually used those exact words.
From that moment on, she’d pretty much been Olivia’s hero.
They were two very different people, but in a friendship, that worked.
“I don’t want to be washed up at forty-one, Cassie. People are relying on me. They expect me, as CEO, to take the company in new creative directions, or at least to contribute something, not just preside over meetings and travel and manage. We’re supposed to be cutting edge. Slipping even just a little when you’re forced to be competitive every minute of the day isn’t an option.”
“Good lord, if they’re relying on you for every answer to every problem, what are you even paying them for? You have how many people working with you and for you? Let some of them be the creative genius. Let them give you good ideas. Make it a competition or something. You could do something extremely post-apocalyptic style or lottery style. That would be entertaining.”
“I’m sure the media would really appreciate that.”
“They would! They’d go on a feeding frenzy.”
Olivia was tempted to smile. It felt wrong, standing over Bean’s grave, even if he was the last being in the world who would have wanted her to be sad. She’d found him in a box in the local grocery store parking lot with a few other kittens. They’d rehomed most of them in the end, but she couldn’t rehome him. He was all black with white socks with black spots. All his toes were black. Beans was such a token name, but it fit. She was sixteen then. He’d been with her for a decade and a half of her life. It seemed impossible that he was gone.
The loss was so fucking immense she could barely fathom it. It felt like time had ripped and the universe was slowly being sucked into the vacuum. She’d felt like that when her dad died. Like he’d just left and he’d back. It hadn’t been real for her for so very long, even after she’d watched his coffin lowered into the earth in the small-town graveyard that cloudy afternoon the week school started. Life went on, even if it would never be normal again.
