From Fake Wife To Billionaire Heiress
I spent two years as the perfect, dutiful wife to Foster Baird. I was his unpaid PR consultant and his emotional punching bag, enduring his mother’s snide comments about my orphan background all for the sake of a "marriage" I thought was real.
But when I went to the City Clerk’s office to replace a damaged document, the clerk looked at me with genuine pity.
"There is no record of a marriage license for you and Foster Baird. Legally? You aren't married."
The betrayal went even deeper. I returned to our penthouse to find Foster’s mistress on our sofa, alongside a five-year-old boy who shared Foster’s exact features. Foster hadn't just cheated; he had a secret family that predated our entire relationship. He had even bribed a doctor to lie to me about being infertile just to keep me docile and focused on his business. When the mistress moved into my guest wing the next day, Foster demanded I act as their hostess and serve them dinner.
I watched them play happy family in the home I built, realizing I was never a wife—I was just "cheap labor" he intended to discard once his company stock stabilized. He thought I was a barren charity case with nowhere to go.
He was wrong. That same afternoon, I received a call from the executor of the Arthur Kensington estate. I wasn't a nobody; I was the long-lost biological daughter and sole heir to a five-billion-dollar fortune.
While Foster was busy planning my replacement, I was accessing the Kensington Trust. I didn't scream, and I didn't cry. I simply bought a fifty-million-dollar mansion and hired a team of forensic accountants to dismantle the Baird Group from the inside out. I crushed my old phone under my designer heel and looked at my new security detail.
"Let's get to work," I said.
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Chapter 3
A week later, the atmosphere in the penthouse shifted from cold to suffocating.
"We're hosting a dinner tonight," Foster announced over his morning coffee, not bothering to look up from his tablet. "Ava is officially joining as the Art Consultant. I want to welcome her properly."
"Of course," Celena said, buttering her toast with mechanical precision. "How many guests?"
"Just us. And Ava. Oh, and she's bringing her foster child. The poor kid has nowhere else to go."
Celena paused. "A child?"
"Leo. He's five. Try not to scare him with your sour face."
At 7:00 PM, the doorbell rang.
Ava swept in wearing a silk dress that cost more than Celena's entire wardrobe. Beside her was a small boy with unruly dark hair and a scowl that mirrored Foster's perfectly.
"Leo, say hello to Mrs. Baird," Ava cooed, though her eyes mocked Celena.
Leo looked at Celena, marched up to her, and kicked her hard in the shin.
"Ouch!" Celena stumbled back, gripping the console table.
Ava laughed, a tinkling, fake sound. "Oh, he's just high spirits! He doesn't like strangers."
"I live here," Celena said through gritted teeth.
"Right. Well." Ava breezed past her into the living room.
Dinner was a torture session. Celena served the roast she had spent three hours cooking. Foster ignored her, focusing entirely on Leo.
"Do you want me to cut that for you, sport?" Foster asked, his voice tender in a way Celena had never heard. He sliced the boy's meat with surgical care.
Celena watched them. She watched the way Leo held his fork-clumsily, aggressively.
Then, Leo dropped his napkin. Frustrated, he reached up and rubbed his left earlobe with his thumb and forefinger, tugging it rhythmically.
Celena froze. The wine bottle in her hand hovered over Foster's glass.
Foster let out a sigh as the cork on the second bottle crumbled. Frustrated, he reached up. He rubbed his left earlobe with his thumb and forefinger.
The exact same motion. The exact same rhythm.
The world narrowed down to those two hands.
Celena looked at Leo's eyes. One was a deep, chocolate brown. The other was a flecked hazel-green. Heterochromia.
Foster's mother, Victoria Baird, had the exact same eyes. Celena had seen those mismatched eyes a hundred times at family gatherings, but in her desperate need to believe in the perfect life she thought she had, her brain had simply refused to make the connection. Until now. Now, with the veil of love torn away, the truth was brutally, painfully obvious.
It wasn't just an affair. It wasn't just a fake marriage.
Leo wasn't a foster child. He was Foster's son.
They had a child. A five-year-old child. Which meant this affair had been going on for at least six years. Before she even met Foster.
"I want ice cream!" Leo shouted, slamming his fist on the table.
"We don't have ice cream, Leo," Celena said, her voice sounding distant to her own ears.
Foster snapped his head toward her. "Then go get some. God, Celena, can't you do anything right?"
He pulled his wallet out and slid his credit card across the mahogany table. It spun and stopped at her fingertips.
"Go. Vanilla. And don't take all night."
Ava placed her hand on Foster's knee under the table. Celena saw the shift in fabric. She saw the smirk Ava tried to hide behind her wine glass.
Celena picked up the card. It felt cold and heavy.
"Sure," she said.
She walked out of the apartment. She took the elevator down to the lobby and walked out into the cool night air.
She didn't go to the bodega on the corner. She walked three blocks to a bank ATM.
She inserted Foster's card. She knew the PIN. It was his birthday. Narcissist.
She checked the balance. Then she hit 'Withdraw'. She took out the daily maximum. Five hundred dollars.
She stared at the cash. It was nothing compared to what she was worth now, but this was his.
She went to a drugstore and bought a pint of generic, freezer-burned vanilla ice cream for four dollars.
Walking back, she looked up at the penthouse window. They were up there, playing happy family. They thought she was the servant, the barrier, the fool.
She wasn't the barrier. She was the bank. And she was about to foreclose.
She re-entered the apartment. Foster and Leo were on the floor building a tower with blocks. Ava was lounging on the sofa, her shoes off.
"Finally," Foster grumbled.
Celena set the ice cream on the table with a smile that didn't reach her eyes. A smile that was all teeth.
"Enjoy," she said.
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7.7
A Whitmere Family Romance
Ten years ago, Sloane Hart ran from the only man she ever loved.
Not because she stopped loving him-
but because loving Rhett Whitmere meant risking everything.
Now she's back in Whitmere County, standing inside the luxury hotel he built from heartbreak, legacy, and a love he never let go of. Rhett is no longer the boy she left behind. He's a powerful CEO bound by family expectation, haunted by the past, and still hopelessly in love with the woman who shattered him.
Sloane only planned to stay long enough to complete a high-profile spa expansion.
She never planned to fall for him again.
But in a town that remembers everything, whispers turn into scandals, and old wounds reopen fast. When a dangerous betrayal threatens Rhett's empire and puts Sloane at the center of a storm, they're forced to face the truth they've both been avoiding:
Some loves don't fade.
They wait.
And this time, Rhett Whitmere isn't willing to lose her again.
Forever Yours, Almost is a slow-burn, second-chance romance filled with family legacy, small-town secrets, emotional tension, and a love worth fighting for
9.4
**Fortune between Us** is a fast-paced, dramatic tale of ambition, love, and power in the glamorous world of billionaires. Isabella Carter, a brilliant and determined strategist, navigates high-stakes corporate intrigue, rivalries, and sabotage while forging a complex, slowly unfolding romance with the enigmatic Alexander Blackwood. As secrets, betrayals, and crises threaten to unravel everything, Isabella must rely on intelligence, courage, and intuition to survive-and thrive-in a world where wealth, influence, and desire collide.
8.8
I was the despised adopted daughter of the Sanders family, hiding behind heavy gothic makeup and enduring their daily disgust.
The day my adoptive father died in a severe car crash, my adoptive mother and stepsister didn't even bother to call me.
Instead, while his body was still warm, my mother filed a multi-million dollar life insurance claim.
"I am not feeding a useless freak for another day. Pack your trash and get out."
She kicked me out into the freezing rain, but that wasn't the worst of it.
My stepsister Cornelia stole my greatest secret. Five years ago, I saved the life of Fidel Vaughan, a ruthless billionaire heir, from a burning estate.
Cornelia claimed my identity, accepted a million-dollar reward, and secured a marriage proposal from him, burning my only proof to ashes.
They thought I was just a helpless, pathetic high schooler they could discard and replace.
But when I hacked the police files, I discovered my father's crash wasn't an accident. It was a targeted hit, and the Vaughan Group had hijacked the traffic cameras to cover it up.
I washed off the ugly black makeup, shedding the disguise of a pathetic outcast.
I am Spectre, the world's most elusive hacker and underground doctor.
I intercepted the billionaire heir's heavily armed convoy in the dead of night. They thought they could steal my life and murder my father, but now, I hold the needle that controls Fidel Vaughan's sanity, and I will make them all pay.
7.5
For three years, I was trapped in a paper marriage to a billionaire I had never met, until my father forced me to finally visit his hotel suite.
But when I walked in, I found my husband, Bryton Lott, heavily drugged by my own father. Stripped of all reason, Bryton violently pinned me down and took my innocence, making me a pawn in my father's sick scheme to force a pregnancy and save his bankrupt company.
After escaping his feral grip, I overheard Bryton call my father. He called me a useless, invisible wife, vowing to hand me divorce papers the second he saw my face. The nightmare didn't end there. When I brought a priceless antique jade bracelet to my mother's birthday, she slapped me across the face in front of the entire elite crowd. My stepsister publicly accused me of selling my body. Hiding in the shadows, I even heard my mother admit she wished I was dead, only keeping me around to exploit my marriage.
I had played the obedient, impoverished daughter for years, enduring their endless abuse just to protect my grandmother's legacy. Why did my own flesh and blood treat me like a sacrificial lamb to be sold and destroyed?
The last thread holding my heart together completely snapped. I left the multi-million dollar bracelet on the cold stone sill and walked out into the freezing night. Snapping my everyday SIM card in half, I pulled out an encrypted satellite phone and activated my true identity as the underground world's top operative, "King."
"Run a full hostile intelligence sweep on Apocalypse Corp."
7.5
I had been a "decoration piece" for Kenton Parker for three years, a contract wife bought to pay off my father's gambling debts. I lived in a cold penthouse, making his coffee and answering his phones, while he treated me with the clinical indifference of a stranger.
On our third anniversary, I waited alone at the city's most exclusive restaurant, only to see a news alert flash on my phone. Kenton wasn't coming. He was caught on camera at a hospital, looking at his "friend," ballerina Blanca Donovan, with a raw, frantic worry he had never once shown me, not even when I fell down a flight of stairs.
I finally snapped and filed for divorce, citing his "irreversible erectile dysfunction" just to destroy his massive ego. I thought I was free, but Kenton retaliated with a cruelty that left me breathless. He froze every bank account I owned and had his secretary smash the last photo I had of my mother. He reminded me of the five-million-dollar penalty in my contract-money I didn't have.
"You don't get to leave until I say so," he roared, dragging me into his office. He used my father's life as a leash, forcing me to play the part of a doting wife at his family's Hamptons estate to please his sick mother. He wanted to starve me out until I crawled back to his side.
I couldn't understand how a man could be so heartless. He didn't want my heart, yet he refused to let me go, treating my life like a line item in a corporate merger. He wanted to keep me as his prisoner while he spent his nights with another woman.
But Kenton made one fatal mistake. He thought I was just a broke, submissive secretary with nowhere to turn. He didn't know that I was "Vee," a world-renowned art restorer with a secret legacy and a six-figure commission waiting for me.
As we shared a bed in the Hamptons and he pulled me against his chest, whispering that I was "his," I didn't feel comfort. I felt the cold, hard spark of a woman who was finally ready to burn his contract to the ground.
7.4
Ardella caught her fiancé Braden cheating with an actress in a downtown VIP room.
It was supposed to be a simple business marriage to save her family's bankrupt company.
But instead of supporting her, her uncle and aunt demanded she get on her knees and apologize to the cheating fiancé.
They didn't care about her dignity; they only cared about the merger capital.
Her cousin publicly mocked her, and her uncle threatened to permanently hide the police file revealing who murdered her father if she ruined the deal.
To make matters worse, Ethelbert Stone, the terrifying billionaire who raised her—and the man she was desperately trying to escape—publicly claimed he didn't know her.
Yet, moments later, he trapped her in his car, his eyes filled with a sick, possessive rage, reminding her that every inch of her belonged to him.
She was completely cornered by a cheating fiancé, a parasitic family, and an obsessed former guardian.
They had drained her father's trust fund dry and now wanted to sell her off to cover their debts.
They really thought she was just a helpless pawn they could manipulate and discard at will.
But they were dead wrong.
Ardella calmly wiped her hands after throwing scalding tea at her aunt's feet, staring down at her greedy family.
"The headline tomorrow will read: Price Group Bankrupt, Fails to Sell Niece to Cover Debts."
She backed up the video of her fiancé's betrayal to ten different servers and sent a text to her private investigator.
Tonight, at the elite society dinner, she was going to blow the scandal wide open and drag them all down with her.