Addicted To His Fake Sugar Baby
While packing up her cheating ex-boyfriend's belongings, Giselle found an encrypted black smartphone hidden beneath his old textbooks.
Curiosity made her guess the passcode, only to uncover a horrifying secret.
Her ex had been using stolen lingerie photos of her beautiful roommate to catfish a man named "Oero" out of $1.5 million.
And Oero wasn't just a gullible sugar daddy. He was Dereck Campos, a ruthless Wall Street billionaire known for making his enemies permanently disappear.
The phone suddenly buzzed in her hand with a terrifying message.
"Don't be late. You know what happens when I'm kept waiting."
Giselle's blood ran cold. The lethal trap had snapped shut.
If she showed up, Dereck would see she wasn't the blonde in the photos and kill her.
If she ignored him, his private security would hunt her down anyway.
Her ex had drained the offshore accounts and fled, leaving her as the ultimate scapegoat to face a monster's wrath.
She was just a broke engineering student on a full scholarship.
She hadn't taken a single cent of that dirty money. Why should she pay with her life for a deadly scam she knew nothing about?
But Giselle wasn't going to just curl up and wait to die.
Her analytical mind kicked into overdrive. She sent him a voice note faking a severe illness, and deliberately refused his massive cash transfer to play the proud victim.
She was going to outsmart the most dangerous predator in New York, one calculated lie at a time.
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Chapter 5
Dereck was still staring at the phone when the door to the suite swung open. He didn't look up. The only person who would dare enter without knocking was the only person he tolerated.
Preston Shaw-Huxley sauntered into the room, a whirlwind of Savile Row tailoring and arrogant charm. He was already heading for the mini-bar, pulling out a bottle of Macallan 25 as if he owned the place. Which, in a way, his family almost did.
"What's the face for?" Preston asked, pouring a generous measure into a crystal tumbler. "You look like a kid who found a bug in his soup."
Dereck didn't answer. He just held out the phone.
Preston took it, his eyes scanning the screen. He read the messages, his expression shifting from amusement to disbelief. He played the voice memo, letting the raspy "Daddy" fill the silent room.
"Seriously?" Preston set the phone down on the coffee table with a clatter. "This is what's got you brooding? A catfish?"
"She refused a hundred and fifty thousand dollars," Dereck said flatly.
"She what?" Preston picked the phone up again, scrolling back through the chat. He read the refusal, his eyebrows climbing higher and higher. "Okay, now I know this is a scam. A good one, but still a scam."
He dropped onto the sofa opposite Dereck, swirling the whisky in his glass. "This is textbook PUA stuff, Dereck. Step one: establish the innocent, sick-girl persona. Step two: reject the money to make yourself seem different from all the other gold-diggers. Step three: make him feel guilty for doubting you. It's straight out of the internet playbook."
Dereck watched his friend, his expression unreadable. "You think it's an act."
"I know it's an act," Preston said, taking a sip of his drink. "Come on, man. This isn't you. You're Dereck Campos. You eat people like this for breakfast. You're just bored because you're stuck in this bed."
"Maybe," Dereck said, his voice noncommittal.
Preston leaned forward, his eyes suddenly serious. "You're not actually falling for this, are you? You forgot what happened with Lydia?"
The temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees. Dereck's hand, resting on the arm of the wheelchair, tightened into a fist. The knuckles went white.
Preston immediately held up a hand. "Shit. Sorry. I shouldn't have-forget I said that."
The silence stretched, thick and toxic. The name Lydia was a landmine, and Preston had just stepped on it. Lydia, who had smiled and lied and stolen. Lydia, who had turned Dereck into the cold, cynical bastard he was today, long before the accident that confined him to this wheelchair.
"Look," Preston said, his tone softer now, placating. "I'm just looking out for you. You're in a vulnerable state. You're isolated. It's the perfect setup for a con. Just let the legal team handle it. One letter from our lawyers, one trace on the IP address, and this 'MoonCookie' will be exposed in a few hours."
It was the logical solution. It was the Dereck Campos solution. A quick, surgical strike to remove the annoyance.
But Dereck didn't want to remove the annoyance. He wanted to play with it.
"No," he said. "That's boring."
Preston stared at him. "Boring? Since when do you care about boring? You're a results guy."
"I want to see where this goes," Dereck said, his eyes fixed on the phone. "She's different."
"Different how?" Preston scoffed. "Because she's playing hard to get? That's the oldest trick in the book!"
But even as he said it, Preston could see the change in his friend's eyes. It was a spark, a flicker of the obsessive, driven maniac who could dismantle a Fortune 500 company before lunch. Dereck wasn't just curious. He was fixated.
"Fine," Preston said, standing up and draining his glass. "If you won't end it, I will."
He walked over and snatched the phone off the table. "I'm going to test your little MoonCookie. I'm going to push a button and see if she squeaks or squawks."
Dereck didn't move to stop him. He just watched, a faint, predatory smile touching his lips. "Go ahead."
Preston looked at the screen, his thumbs hovering over the keyboard. He wasn't going to play nice. He was going to hit her with a sledgehammer. He was going to scare the truth out of this con artist, no matter what it took.
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9.3
Marissa was the perfect wife. She traded her high powered corporate ladder for home cooked meals and a designer sanctuary, all to support her husband, Ethan.
But when Ethan confesses to a four month affair not out of guilt, but because his mistress is extorting him for $300 million...Marissa's world turns to ash.Ethan's solution is as twisted as his heart.
"Cheat back. Get even. Stay married."Driven by a cocktail of rage and Revenge, Marissa decides to take him up on his offer. She heads into the night looking for a single moment of rebellion to wash away the scent of Ethan's lies.
She finds it in the arms of a cold, devastatingly masked handsome stranger who makes her forget everything.Broken and fueled by the betrayal, Marissa decides to take the ultimate risk. She slips into an exclusive, members only masquerade club...a place where names don't exist and only desires matter.
Behind a lace mask, she meets him....a man who smells of expensive bourbon and cold command.He is the first person in years to see the fire in her, not just the wife she became.They share a night of scorched....earth passion that leaves Marissa breathless and "even." She leaves before the sun rises, intending for the stranger to remain a ghost of her revenge.
But some ghosts have a name.When the masks come off and the corporate world demands her return, Marissa comes face to face with the man from the club. He isn't just anyone. He is Xavier Sterling....the ruthless billionaire CEO she once worked for, and the man Ethan calls his "best friend."Xavier knows her scent. He knows her touch. And most dangerously, he knows exactly what Ethan did to her.
Now, Marissa has to navigate a world where her husband wants her to stay, the mistress wants her dead, and the CEO wants to own the one woman he was never supposed to touch.
Now, Marissa is caught in a lethal triangle. Xavier wants to own her, Ethan wants to keep her to save his reputation, and the $300 million debt is threatening to drown them all. In a world of billionaire power plays, Marissa is about to learn that revenge is a dish best served... in the CEO's bed.
9.0
On their seventh wedding anniversary, Kiley's billionaire husband, Aden, slid a thick stack of papers across the restaurant table.
It was a petition for divorce.
He was leaving her for his college sweetheart. Thanks to a ruthless prenup, Kiley was being thrown out with absolutely nothing.
That very night, their young son Jules was rushed to the ER, bleeding profusely. The doctor's diagnosis was a death sentence: acute leukemia.
When Kiley frantically called Aden for help, he dismissed the emergency as a simple nosebleed.
"I'm not paying for this. Deal with it," Aden sneered, the sound of his mistress giggling in the background.
To force Kiley to sign the divorce papers, Aden froze all her credit cards and canceled their son's health insurance. He refused to pay a single cent for the chemotherapy.
Even Kiley's adoptive parents sided with the wealthy Aden, calling her a burden and telling her to stop fighting him.
Driven to the brink of despair, with a dying child and no money, Kiley didn't understand how a father could be so monstrous to his own flesh and blood.
Until a news article on a friend's phone caught her eye.
It featured a fallen 9/11 firefighter hero from the ultra-wealthy Whitfield family. The man in the photo looked exactly like Jules, down to the very bone structure.
Kiley's mind raced back to the fertility clinic and the anonymous sperm donor.
Could this dead billionaire hero be her son's biological father?
Looking at her sleeping, fragile boy, Kiley wiped her tears and crushed the divorce papers in her hand.
She was going to find the Whitfield family, save her son, and make Aden lose everything he held dear.
9.0
Colette stepped out of the federal prison, finally breathing the air of freedom after two agonizing years.
But instead of a bus home, a black armored SUV blocked her path. Ferris Vance's men kidnapped her right at the gates. He forced her to sign a marriage certificate, threatening to completely destroy her father's legacy if she refused.
The nightmare had only just begun. She soon learned her father had been driven to suicide anyway. Dragged into the Vance estate, Colette was beaten bloody by the family of Ellie, the girl she supposedly wronged. Ferris paraded her in a pure white gown for the cameras, playing the fiercely devoted husband. But the second the lenses turned away, he forced her into a coarse maid's uniform, making her scrub the freezing marble floors on her hands and knees.
"Your life isn't even worth the dirt on my shoes."
Ferris whispered those words as he threw his muddy boots at her bruised face. She was nothing but a piece of bleeding bait, a prop meant to lure his missing lover out of hiding. She was tortured and humiliated for a crime she had absolutely nothing to do with. The sheer injustice of paying the price for another woman's disappearance tore her soul apart.
When he cornered her in the bathroom, the last thread of Colette's sanity snapped. She hurled a bucket of filthy water right into his face, broke out of his grip, and threw herself out a window into a freezing storm. This time, she chose to escape, even if it meant death.
9.7
Emaline Finley was drowning in massive debt to keep her dying father alive, even enduring a humiliating blind date with an arrogant man just to find a financial lifeline.
But the fatal blow came from her former best friend, Kitty. Kitty, who was already engaged to Emaline's ex-boyfriend, deliberately told Emaline's father that his expensive treatments were bleeding his daughter dry.
Out of extreme guilt, her father threw away his life-saving medication and checked himself out of the hospital to die at home. When Emaline found him, he was coughing up pools of bright red blood, his lungs rapidly collapsing. As the paramedics rushed him away, Kitty called to gloat, mocking Emaline's poverty and telling her to go watch her father die.
Emaline was completely shattered, suffocating under the sheer injustice of it all. She had been betrayed, stripped of her dignity, and was now forced to watch her only parent slip away because of a cruel, spiteful lie.
Just as her world went dark, a wildly wealthy stranger stepped in. Cullen Preston, the mysterious man who had witnessed her humiliating date, paid the astronomical medical bills and brought in the city's top surgeon to pull her father back from death. But his salvation wasn't charity.
"Consider it a dowry."
He bought her father's life, and in exchange, he demanded Emaline as his wife.
8.0
My abusive step-family isolated me completely, holding my mother's medical funds hostage to control my every move.
Yesterday, they finalized my sale.
"You will marry Rudy Petrov next month. He is fifty, wealthy, and willing to overlook your lack of pedigree."
Pushed to the absolute edge, I did the insane. I posted an ad online offering my life savings of $50,000 for a contract husband. A stranger named Brennan agreed.
But my family wouldn't let me go. They forced me back for a dinner by threatening my mother's life-saving prescriptions.
At the table, they relentlessly mocked my new "poor IT guy" husband and intentionally burned my hand with boiling tea.
Worse, the housekeeper locked me in a guest room and forced drugs down my throat so Rudy could come in and assault me.
I lay there paralyzed on the floor, bleeding from Rudy's slap, utterly terrified. I couldn't understand why my own family would throw me to the wolves, and I felt a crushing guilt for dragging an innocent, ordinary guy into my nightmare.
Until a pitch-black Maybach smashed through the estate's wrought-iron gates at eighty miles an hour.
My "poor" husband kicked the solid oak doors off their hinges, beat Rudy half to death, and carried me out into the rain.
I didn't know it yet, but the ordinary man I hired to save me was a ruthless billionaire, and he was about to erase my family's entire empire by morning.
9.0
Once a pampered princess, Alaina now clutched a deactivated American Express card, staring out at Central Park. Her family’s fortune was gone, her life, over.
Her family's Hamptons estate, a four-generation legacy, was seized by Dyer Capital. The name hit her: Hardin Dyer, the poor boy she’d once scorned, had returned.
Hardin marched in, serving a divorce agreement. He'd orchestrated her family's downfall for revenge, giving her 24 hours to vacate his property. Penniless, her father faced prison, needing $50 million. Her mother forced her to beg Hardin, who sneered, offering the money for her body. Alaina ripped up the contract.
Hours later, her father had a heart attack. Desperate, she became "Lexi," a club girl enduring humiliation. In the Viper Room, Hardin's lackeys demanded she lick whiskey off his shoe for $10,000. Hardin watched. Outside, her brother Ashton's hand was threatened for a $3 million debt. Spirit shattered, Alaina returned, knelt on broken glass, offering to sign. But Hardin declared her family "dead," offering $10 million for her body, commanding her to use her mouth.
In a furious act of defiance, Alaina threw whiskey in his face, snatched the check, and fled. Yet, when he finally took her, a searing, foreign pain and blood on the sheets revealed a shocking truth: he had never touched her three years ago. Why had he let her believe such a monstrous lie?