On my eighteenth birthday, for my father's sake, I slept with a stranger, Julian Hawthorne, a ruthless business tycoon. Sleeping with him for one night would revive my father's business. A seven-day contract. I thought it was just a transaction. Until he held me tightly in his arms and said in a hoarse voice, "Stay." I believed him. Later, I knelt before him, crying, saying I was pregnant with his child. He didn't even glance at the pregnancy test results, coldly sneering, "Ivan Hayes, are you that desperate for a man?" Five years later, I stood before him with his biological son. He glared at me: "The child is mine." I replied, "You don't deserve it." Julian Hawthorne, you don't know that some wounds cannot be erased with an apology. Until that day, he shielded me and my child from the steel frame that was falling on us. Blood stained my face, but he smiled and asked, "Can you forgive me this time?"