Bound By Contract: The Superstar's Secret Wife
Allyson was the most hated actress in Hollywood, forced to wear a cheap, tearing gown after America's sweetheart, Joanne, stole her S-tier role.
During a red carpet disaster, Allyson tripped and fell—straight into the arms of the untouchable megastar, Byron Estes.
The internet exploded, accusing Allyson of faking the fall to seduce him. Drowning in bad press and desperate to pay her agency's termination fee, she signed a reality TV contract. She was forced to play the desperate, clingy villain, acting as a pathetic stepping stone for Joanne and Byron's highly anticipated on-screen romance.
"You could throw yourself at Byron a hundred times, and you'd still never make it into his bed," Joanne mocked.
What Joanne and the furious public didn't know was that three years ago, when Byron was in a horrific crash, Joanne had abandoned him. It was Allyson who stayed.
Even more absurd? Allyson and Byron were actually secretly married, bound by a multi-million dollar NDA.
Determined to play her villainous role and get paid, Allyson memorized a book of cringe-inducing pickup lines, ready to disgust her secret husband on live television.
"The stars are in the sky. But you... are in my heart."
She expected the ice-cold superstar to push her away in disgust. Instead, when another male guest got too close to her, Byron completely shattered his untouchable facade, his eyes burning with a lethal, undeniable possessiveness that sent the internet into absolute chaos.
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Chapter 6
Allyson stood over Byron, looking down at his perfectly composed face. Her heart was beating so fast she felt dizzy, but she forced herself to commit to the bit.
Her heart hammered furiously against her ribs. This was it. Time to be the most obnoxious, clingy woman alive. She desperately hoped Joanne was watching closely, and that this ridiculous stunt would make her sick to her stomach. She leaned down suddenly. She slammed one hand against the back of his armchair, effectively caging him in.
The other guests gasped. Charlie's hand jerked, spilling water over the rim of his glass.
Byron didn't flinch. He just looked up at her, so close that he could smell the faint scent of her rose perfume.
Allyson stared directly into his dark eyes. She lowered her voice, trying to sound seductive, but mostly just sounding congested.
"Mr. Estes," she started, her voice echoing in the quiet room. "Do you know the difference between you and the stars?"
Byron's spine stiffened. A flash of utter disbelief crossed his eyes.
The live chat completely froze. Everyone was waiting for the ice-cold superstar to shove her away in disgust.
But Byron didn't push her. He tilted his chin up slightly, his voice a low, gravelly hum. "What?"
Allyson gritted her teeth, fighting the urge to die of embarrassment. She delivered the punchline. "The stars are in the sky. But you... are in my heart."
The silence that followed was heavy enough to crush bone.
Melody slapped a hand over her mouth, a choked snort escaping her lips.
The live chat exploded.
Help!
I am physically cringing!
My toes are curling into another dimension!
Joanne jumped up from her seat, trying to play the peacemaker. "Allyson, please don't make such inappropriate jokes with a senior-"
Allyson ignored her completely. She kept her arms locked around Byron's chair.
Byron's Adam's apple bobbed. He lowered his eyelashes, hiding the intense, burning heat in his gaze.
Instead of getting angry, he went perfectly still. His dark eyes locked onto hers with a heavy, unreadable intensity that made the air between them suddenly feel too thin to breathe. He didn't lean in, but the sheer weight of his silence felt like a physical touch.
"Is that so?" he asked, his voice a flat, deadpan drawl that betrayed absolutely nothing.
The deep, vibrating timbre of his voice sent a violent shockwave straight down Allyson's spine. Her brain short-circuited. The tips of her ears turned a violent shade of red under his piercing, unyielding stare.
She jerked backward as if she had been burned, her stiletto catching on the rug. She stumbled, barely catching her balance.
Byron calmly picked up his coffee mug and took a slow sip, perfectly hiding the slight upward curve of his lips. He looked completely unbothered, the picture of cold restraint.
But the high-definition cameras had caught it all. The internet was already losing its mind over the visible flush on Allyson's ears and the undeniable tension between them.
Joanne stared at them, her chest heaving with ragged breaths. She couldn't stand the fact that she was being ignored.
She walked over to her massive pink suitcases. She looked helplessly at the male guests.
Fernando stood up, offering a polite smile, ready to help her.
But before Fernando could take a step, Byron stood up. He set his coffee mug down on the glass table with a sharp clink.
He walked straight past Joanne and her pink luggage.
He stopped in front of Allyson's battered, twenty-four-inch suitcase.
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9.8
Four years ago, I was drugged on a luxury yacht and ended up pregnant with twins.
I raised them in secret, enduring my stepfamily's daily abuse, until the billionaire West family patriarch cornered us at the airport.
He instantly recognized my son's face—an exact replica of his ruthless grandson, Bernardo West.
My malicious stepmother and stepsister immediately leaked to the press that I was a delusional gold-digger using fake kids to trap a billionaire.
They wanted the West family to destroy me to save their own social standing.
Bernardo himself looked at me with pure disgust, demanding a DNA test.
"If you ever lie to me, I will take the children, and I will make you wish you were never born."
I didn't want his money. I was a victim of that night too, left with a crescent-shaped bite mark on my collarbone and zero memory of who set us up.
Why did someone drug us? And how could I protect my babies from a corporate predator who could crush me with a snap of his fingers?
But when the DNA test came back 99.9999% positive, I didn't cower.
I showed him the scar he left on me, looked the most dangerous man in the country right in the eye, and made my demand.
"If you want to claim your heirs, you have to marry me."
9.5
One night, I was a girl seeking vengeance in a velvet mask. He was the stranger who took me against a cold stone wall, his touch a silent, lethal promise.
Now, he is Caspian Blackwood-the most feared architecture professor at Aethelgard. When my "perfect" boyfriend, Dominic Calloway, cheats on me and sabotages my degree, Caspian offers a lifeline with a razor-thin edge: Be his silent, nude model for thirty days.
The rules are absolute. I must wear a silk mask and a weighted collar. I must never speak. I must hold the poses he demands until my muscles scream for mercy. In the lecture hall, he ignores me with arctic indifference. In the studio, his gaze is a physical weight, stripping me faster than his hands ever could. But as the charcoal scratches against the paper, I realize the "deal" isn't just for art. It's for the soul I accidentally gave him in the dark. Will the deal destroy his career, or consume me first?
9.1
At the project kickoff party, Isabelle casually mocked the new capital representative, calling him a suit with a trust fund.
A low, magnetic voice spoke from the shadows right behind her.
It was Bennett Lloyd, the man holding the purse strings for the entire project.
But as Isabelle turned around, her blood ran cold.
He wasn't just her new boss. He was the stranger she had a desperate one-night stand with five years ago.
The man she had fled from before dawn, leaving only a fake name.
In her panic to escape him, Isabelle tripped on the marble stairs and left behind a single, custom-made diamond heel.
Bennett found it, but instead of exposing her, he began a terrifying game of cat and mouse.
He forced her to be his exclusive on-site consultant, vetoed her vacation time, and isolated her from her team.
He trapped her in his office, his touches lingering just enough to remind her of that night, slowly suffocating her professional life as payback.
Pushed to the brink of a breakdown by his relentless torment, Isabelle sat in a hotel bar, drowning her panic in vodka.
She pulled out her phone, intending to send a voice memo to her best friend to confess the suffocating guilt she had hidden for years.
"I can't do this anymore. I'm a sinner. I killed her... I killed my mother."
She hit send, only to realize her screen didn't show her friend's name.
The confession had gone straight to Bennett Lloyd.
9.6
I was trapped in a locked-in state for six months, fully conscious but unable to move a single muscle.
My step-family, Delma and Jazmyne, marched into my hospital room, forged a Do Not Resuscitate order, and yanked out my oxygen tube just to stop paying my medical bills.
When my three-year-old daughter, Amari, leaped out from under the bed to protect me, they beat her mercilessly.
They kicked my tiny girl in the stomach, smashed a heavy metal IV pole into her fragile shoulder, and dragged her out by her ankles.
They even tied her to a tree in their backyard and let a massive Rottweiler tear into her flesh, laughing as they recorded her agonizing screams.
I lay in that hospital bed, hearing every blow and every desperate cry.
I didn't understand why they had to torture an innocent toddler just because they thought I was a worthless piece of trash with amnesia.
A tidal wave of absolute fury crashed against the invisible walls of my paralyzed body, burning away the despair.
Gritting my teeth until my jaw popped, I forced my dead weight off the mattress and dragged my atrophied legs across the freezing floor to a landline.
With trembling, bloody fingers, I punched in a twelve-digit military-grade encrypted code.
It was time for my real family—the most powerful men in the country—to make these monsters pay.
7.1
After three years of marriage, Kasie's husband forced her to sign a divorce agreement leaving her with nothing.
He destroyed her academic career just to protect his adopted sister, Calista, from a lab accident she had caused.
Forced to return to her hometown, Kasie found her biological family had also been completely brainwashed by Calista.
Her brothers dragged her to a clinic to donate bone marrow for Calista's fake illness.
When Kasie struggled, they pushed her down the stairs, breaking her arm, while her ex-husband watched and called her pathetic.
They tore up her only job offer. When she was attacked by a drunk in an alley, her own brother drove right past her desperate screams just to answer Calista's phone call.
The final blow came when Calista stole Kasie's life's work, published the research as her own, and cried on national television.
"My own sister... she was jealous. She tried to claim my research as her own."
Penniless, publicly ruined, and evicted by her own brothers, Kasie was thrown out into a mob of angry reporters.
She didn't understand why her own flesh and blood treated her like a monster, or why Calista's fake tears were worth more than Kasie's actual life.
But as she unlocked the door to a secret apartment she had rented years ago—the one safe haven they didn't know about—the tears finally stopped.
She had nothing left to lose, which meant it was time to make them pay.
8.5
"Do you enjoy this? Ignoring me like I don't exist? Do you have any idea how humiliating this feels, waiting for you like some fool?"
After three years of a cold, loveless marriage, Selene Henderson finally gathers the courage to walk away from her distant billionaire husband, Sebastian Kingsley.
She's ready to file for divorce... until a tragic accident changes everything.
When Sebastian wakes up with no memory of the woman he once pushed away, Selene finds herself trapped in a marriage she was desperate to escape, this time with a man who suddenly looks at her like she's his whole world.
But can love born from broken memories survive the truth of their painful past?
Or will the secrets she's been hiding destroy them all over again?