Snowed In with Her Rival Producer

I have spent six seasons trying to beat Kendra Reyes, and not once did I picture the score ending with my mouth on her. I am Talia Voss, thirty-two, a reality-TV producer with a reputation for a sharp tongue and a meaner cut. Kendra is thirty-one, confident, curvy, and the only competitor at the network who has ever made me lose a pitch and like her for it. Our retreat was supposed to be panels and polite knives at a remote mountain lodge. The blizzard canceled the flights, the vans, and every other colleague. By dusk it was the two of us, a humming generator, and snow banking the windows until the mountain felt like a locked door.

We had circled each other for years. In the bay I shredded her notes and she smiled as if she were saving the real ones. At wrap parties she wore dresses that dried my mouth and then asked, sweet as sugar, whether I planned to steal her slot again. I called it professional hatred. It was not. The wanting started the season I turned thirty, the first time she leaned over my shoulder to fix a transition and her breast brushed my arm and neither of us stepped back. Three years of that heat, carefully renamed as rivalry. No confusion about who we were. Two adult women who knew exactly how to wreck a show and had no polite language for what our bodies kept proposing.

The lodge left us one working fireplace and a bottle of red the chef had abandoned on the sideboard. We chose it. We poured two modest glasses and left the bottle where it was. I was clearheaded. So was she. The wine was warmth and color, not an excuse. I sat on the hearth and watched the fire move across her cheekbones, and the armor I usually wore started to feel like a costume I was tired of buttoning.

Kendra dropped onto the rug beside me, close enough that her knee touched mine. “So,” she said. “No audience. No executives. Just the woman who has spent three years pretending she doesn’t stare at my ass in the hallway.”

“I stare at everyone’s ass,” I said. “Yours is merely the one that refuses to lose.”

She laughed, low. “Flattery from Talia Voss. The storm must have cut the oxygen.” She took a sip and set the glass down, deliberate, sober eyes on me. “You know what the PAs say about you? That you fuck like you edit. Fast, mean, and nobody comes until you decide the scene is over.”

Heat climbed my throat. “And they say you talk through the whole thing. Narrating. Giving notes.”

“I give excellent notes.” Her gaze dropped to my mouth, then to the open collar of my sweater. “I’ve also heard you go quiet when someone gets their hand where you want it. I’d like to test that rumor. On your body. Not as a bit.”

The insult I reached for never arrived. What came out was thinner, honest. “You’ve thought about my body.”

“Since the night you turned thirty and wore that gray dress to the upfronts.” She didn’t blink. “I have wanted, for years, to shut that clever mouth with mine. Not to win. Because I want to. I’m saying it while I’m stone sober, in case you need that on the record.”

My pulse kicked. I looked at her mouth, full and sure, and at the curve of her hips under soft pants, and I felt the decision settle in my chest like a lock turning. I wanted this. Not because we were trapped. Because I had wanted it in offices and elevators and I was done pretending the snow had invented it.

“Then try,” I said. “Shut me up. I’m asking you to.”

She didn’t lunge. She waited one breath, reading my face, and I nodded so there would be no mistaking it. Then she kissed me.

It was not polite. Her mouth opened over mine, wine-warm and hungry, and I met her with the same hunger, years of barbs turning into teeth and tongue. I grabbed her waist. She fisted my sweater and hauled me closer until our chests crushed together and I could feel how hard her nipples were through the thin knit. We broke for air and I said, “Yes. More. I want your hands on me,” and she answered by sliding one palm up under my sweater, over my ribs, and cupping my breast like she had been owed it. I groaned into her mouth. My own hands found the heavy warmth of her ass and squeezed, possessive, and she rocked against me with a sound that was half laugh and half plea.

“Still talking,” she murmured against my lips.

“Then keep going until I can’t.”

We stripped without ceremony, sweaters and pants and panties kicked toward the hearth, skin flashing gold in the firelight. She was lush, soft belly and thick thighs and breasts that filled my hands when I reached for them. I was leaner, sharper, and she looked at me like a meal she had finally been served. We were both breathless and entirely present. No haze. No one else in the building. Just consent spoken and then proven with every grab we didn’t pull back from.

I pushed her down onto the thick rug. The wool scratched my knees in the best way as I settled between her spread thighs. “My turn to edit,” I said, and she laughed until my mouth found her.

I ate her like I had been starving for the job. Long, possessive strokes of my tongue from the slick entrance of her up to her clit, slow on the way down, firmer on the way back. She tasted salt and heat and something sweet I wanted to chase. I sealed my mouth over her and licked in steady, claiming passes, holding her hips when she tried to jerk away from how good it was. Her fingers sank into my hair and gripped, not guiding so much as anchoring, and the pull went straight to my own cunt.

“Fuck, Talia—yes, like that, don’t you dare rush it.” Her voice broke into a moan that filled the rafters. I flattened my tongue and dragged it through her again, long and greedy, then circled her clit until her thighs trembled around my ears. I sucked, released, licked her open, and did it again, owning every inch she offered. She was soaked. I slid two fingers into her while my tongue stayed ruthless on her clit, and she cursed, hips rolling, hand tight in my hair. “God, your mouth. I knew you’d be mean with it. Harder.”

I gave her harder. Possessive strokes, deep and unhurried, then faster when she begged, my nose buried against her, my free hand spreading her so I could taste all of her. She came with a shocked, open sound, cunt pulsing around my fingers, thighs clamping my head, and I licked her through it until she tugged my hair in surrender and laughed, wrecked.

“Up,” she said, voice hoarse and delighted. “My turn to shut you up properly.”

We switched without losing the thread of yes. She got me on my hands and knees on the rug, fire hot on my side, her body warm behind me. One arm banded my waist. The other hand slid between my legs from behind, two fingers pushing into me in one sure stroke that made my arms shake. She was thick-fingered and unkind in the way I had dared her to be, curling, thrusting, the heel of her hand grinding my clit every time she drove in.

“Listen to you,” she said, pleased. “No notes. Just noise.”

I ground back against her hand, fucking myself on her fingers, chasing the pressure. She set a hard pace and I met it, ass rocking, sweat slicking the small of my back. Her breasts brushed my spine. She added a third finger when I gasped for it, stretching me, and I dropped my forehead to the rug and moaned her name like a confession I would never air. Every thrust shoved a bright, filthy pleasure up through me. I was close, shaking, and she knew it. She slowed just enough to make me whine, then fucked me harder, her thumb slick on my clit, her mouth at my ear. “Come if you want. Or hold it. I can do this all night, and you asked for it.”

I held, barely, because I wanted the next thing too. “Scissor me,” I managed. “I want your cunt on mine. I want to feel you lose it.”

She pulled her fingers free, glistening, and we rearranged in a sweaty tangle, legs woven, her thigh over mine, our pussies pressed together in a slick, grinding seam. The first full slide made us both swear. She was swollen and hot and so wet we slipped, then found the angle and stuck to it, clits catching, dragging, catching again. I grabbed her hip and set the pace, slow and mean, rolling up into her until she was panting and her nails bit my shoulder. Then she took it back, bracing a hand on the rug and fucking against me harder, faster, her breasts swaying, her eyes locked on mine like this was the pitch she refused to lose.

We traded dominance without speaking much, only the slap of skin and the wet sound of us and the occasional “there” or “don’t stop” or “mine.” I pinned her rhythm for a long, grinding minute, making her take every slow drag, watching her mouth fall open. She flipped the pressure, hooked her leg higher, and rode the seam of us until I was the one breaking. The orgasm hit me first, sharp and total, ripping up from where we were joined. I shattered against her, crying out, hips jerking, and the clutch of my body dragged her over a breath later. She came with her forehead pressed to mine, a raw moan, cunt pulsing against mine in helpless pulses, both of us shaking through it, back to back, neither willing to pull away until the aftershocks turned sweet and stupid.

We stayed naked and tangled on the rug, her thigh still hooked over mine, my hand lazy on the curve of her ass. The fire snapped. Outside, the storm kept its own counsel. My pulse slowed. Hers did too, under my palm when I rested it between her breasts.

“This changes nothing at the network,” I said, because one of us had to. “I will still gut your cuts. You will still smile like you have a better one in your pocket.”

“Good.” She kissed my shoulder, unhurried. “I don’t want a girlfriend who goes soft in the bay. I want my rival. And the next time we’re snowed in, we skip the insults and go straight to fucking. Agreed?”

“Agreed.” I was already smiling into her hair, already turning the calendar over in my head. Next season’s retreat. The same lodge if I could swing the booking before she did. A forecast I might watch a little too closely. A ride I might miss on purpose if the sky looked mean. “I’ll even let you pick the wine. We won’t need much of it.”

“Arrogant,” she murmured, pleased, already half asleep against me.

“Accurate.” I closed my eyes, her warmth everywhere, and let the plan settle: get us stranded again, on purpose, and this time start with her mouth. We fell asleep smiling, the rivalry intact and the next time already ours.