She needed a husband powerful enough to protect her.He'd been waiting seven years for exactly this chance.To escape a marriage to a man twice her age—a man whose two previous wives are both conveniently dead—Elara Vance walks into a gallery, finds the one man her family despises most, and makes him an offer: one year, a ring, and her freedom in exchange for his.Julian Hartmann should say no. Marrying a Vance is a betrayal of everything his grandfather taught him to hate. But Elara doesn't know what Julian knows—that he's spent years unable to forget a girl who once destroyed him in a debate and never even asked his name.The contract is simple. Separate bedrooms. No interference. No feelings. A signature, a year, and a quiet exit.But feelings don't read contracts.As danger closes in from the man Elara refused to marry, and old family wounds threaten to unravel everything they're building, Elara and Julian find themselves trading convenience for something far more dangerous—the truth. About their families. About the choices that were made for them long before they were born. About each other.Julian is still keeping one secret. Elara doesn't know how much it will cost her to learn it.Some vows are written to be broken.This one might be the one worth keeping.

Sebastian Hayes has spent his entire adult life preparing to take over his grandfather’s construction empire. There’s only one problem: his grandfather refuses to hand over the company until Sebastian proves he can settle down and get married.With only one week to find a suitable bride, Sebastian turns to the last woman he ever expected to ask his quiet, dependable personal assistant, Paisley Coleman.His proposal is simple, one year of marriage, one million dollars, and absolutely no falling in love.For Paisley, the offer is too tempting to refuse. She needs the money for reasons she refuses to share, and Sebastian needs a wife his grandfather will approve of. So they sign the contract, put on their wedding rings, and promise to pretend that their marriage is real.But pretending becomes surprisingly easy.Living together brings stolen glances, unexpected tenderness, family dinners, jealousy, late-night conversations, and feelings neither of them planned for. The man Paisley once knew as her arrogant, womanizing boss slowly becomes the man who knows how she takes her coffee, worries when she is hurting, and starts building a future around her without even realizing it.Then everything begins to fall apart.When Paisley’s past resurfaces and another man enters her life, Sebastian is forced to confront the truth he has been desperately avoiding: somewhere along the way, his contract wife became the woman he cannot imagine living without.But their marriage was built on a lie.And when the one year contract finally ends, Paisley must decide whether the love they found was ever real or whether it was simply another term in an agreement that was never supposed to last forever.Because sometimes the hardest part of a fake marriage isn't pretending to love someone.It's admitting that you actually do.

“Love didn’t end. It just turned into something darker.”They say time heals everything.But time didn’t heal Olivia Wilde.At Thirty two, she’s a mess stitched together with bad decisions, wine stained evenings, and a résumé built more on bluff than truth. She isn’t the type that gets second chances, or any kind of chances at all. And yet, somehow, she stumbles into the towering glass office of Fabian Stone, the boy she used to babysit when she was 19, now a man with a fortune, a vendetta, and those green eyes that still know too much.Fabian remembers. All of it.The cookies she snuck him when he couldn’t sleep.The way she told him his bullies were stupid, even when she has bullies of her own.Then she disappeared without saying goodbye.Now, he’s grown. Powerful. Beautiful. Untouchable.And still looking at her like she’s both the moth and the fire.What begins as a job offer becomes something far more dangerous. A slow unraveling of everything Olivia thought she buried. He makes her feel seen in ways that ruins her. Holds her too tightly like she might vanish. Watches her like she’s already his. And no matter how far she runs, she can’t outrun the truth,Fabian Stone didn’t just wait for her.He built a kingdom for the day she would walk back in and tear it apart.And she might let him.Because what do you do when your past doesn’t haunt you?It owns you.