Mark & Alex
Mark Windsor, Australia's most feared and respected CEO, has built walls as high as his empire. After losing his parents, the only warmth left in his life comes from Mary Smith, the woman who cooks his meals and feels more like home than family ever did.
When Mary's son Alex visits the estate, Mark doesn't expect the sharp-tongued, smiling graduate to unsettle him. Alex doesn't expect to fall for the man who owns the house he lives in or the company he refuses to work for.
Forced proximity, secret glances, late-night conversations, and quiet meals slowly turn into something dangerous. When Alex finally joins Mark's company on his own merit, love becomes a risk neither of them can afford.
In a world where reputation matters more than truth, Mark and Alex must decide if love is worth the fall.
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Chapter 6
Mark's POV
I didn't go to my study.
I told Alex I would but instead, I stopped halfway down the corridor and stood there, staring at a painting I'd walked past a thousand times without ever really seeing. My reflection stared back at me from the polished glass frame: composed, controlled, untouched.
A lie.
We were learning each other's rules.
The thought unsettled me more than it should have.
I turned back.
The kitchen light was still on. The low sound of something simmering filled the air, steady and patient. Alex stood at the stove, focused, sleeves rolled up again. He hadn't heard me return.
This was a mistake.
I knew it the moment I crossed the threshold but my feet didn't stop.
"You said you'd be in your study," Alex said without turning around.
"So did you," I replied quietly.
He glanced over his shoulder, surprised and then smiled. That easy, unguarded smile that disarmed people before they realized it had happened.
"Guess we're both liars," he said.
I leaned against the counter, deliberately putting space between us. "Dinner smells good."
"Give it a minute," he replied. "It needs time."
Time.
I watched the way he stirred the pot unhurried, confident. The kitchen felt smaller than it had any right to be.
"You're avoiding something," I said.
He raised an eyebrow. "You always this blunt?"
"When I notice patterns," I said. "Yes."
Alex turned off the stove and faced me fully. "Then what pattern do you see?"
I hesitated.
Honesty was another rule I rarely bent but I found myself doing it anyway.
"You keep insisting you don't want favors," I said. "But you place yourself in situations where you give more than necessary."
His expression softened, something thoughtful flickering behind his eyes. "Maybe I don't like feeling like a burden."
"You're not," I said immediately.
There it was again that instinctive defense.
Alex noticed.
"See?" he said gently. "You do that."
"Do what?"
"Care," he replied. "Even when you pretend you don't."
The air shifted.
This was too close to truths I didn't want examined.
"You should be careful," I said, voice lower now. "This house has lines."
"So you keep saying," he replied. "But you never tell me where they are."
Because if I did, he might follow them.
Or worse he might cross them deliberately.
"I don't mix personal and professional," I said. "I don't blur roles. And I don't take advantage of imbalance."
Alex studied me for a long moment.
"Good," he said finally. "Because neither do I."
We stood there too close, not touching, yet painfully aware of each other. I could smell the faint citrus of his soap. Hear the steady rhythm of his breathing.
Dangerous.
"I should go," I said.
"Yes," he agreed. "You should."
Neither of us moved.
Alex reached past me for a towel, his arm brushing my chest brief, accidental, devastating.
I inhaled sharply.
He froze.
"I'm sorry," he said quickly. "I didn't..."
"It's fine," I said, too quickly.
It wasn't.
I stepped back, putting distance where there should have been from the start.
"Dinner," I said, grasping for control. "Thank you."
"You're welcome," he replied softly.
I left the kitchen without looking back, heart pounding harder than it had during any boardroom confrontation.
Later that night, alone in my room, I loosened my cuffs and stared out into the darkness beyond the windows.
Alex Smith was a complication I hadn't planned for.
He respected my rules.
He challenged my control.
And worst of all he made me want to bend.
This wasn't attraction born of impulse.
It was something slower. Deeper.
And if I wasn't careful, too close for comfort would become impossible to walk away from.
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7.0
Eight years ago, Alaina forced herself to say the most vicious, heartless things to break up with her fiercely loyal college boyfriend, protecting him from his billionaire family's wrath.
Now, she is a top maxillofacial surgeon, and Jarred Mcknight has returned as the ruthless CEO of Wall Street's most powerful corporation.
Their worlds collide in the ER, but Jarred isn't alone. He is accompanying his rumored heiress fiancée.
His eyes are pure ice. He treats Alaina with a suffocating, clinical detachment, fiercely protecting the heiress from Alaina's medical examination. The professional slap in the face shatters Alaina's heart all over again.
Later, at an exclusive restaurant, Jarred catches Alaina on a miserable, forced blind date. Still believing she left him for money and status, he publicly mocks her for working herself to the bone just to climb the ladder.
Her sleazy date, humiliated by the billionaire's sheer dominance, turns his bruised ego on Alaina. On the dark street outside, the lawyer aggressively grabs her arm, trying to force himself on her.
Alaina thought Jarred despised her. She thought he had completely moved on, leaving her to drown in the memories of the future they never had.
But why did Jarred suddenly explode from the shadows like a lethal predator, brutally snapping the lawyer's wrist just for touching her?
Pinning her trapped against the cold brick wall, Jarred's dark eyes burn with a terrifying, unhinged possessiveness.
"Is this the kind of garbage you date now?"
The eight years of separation mean nothing. The billionaire hasn't let her go, and this time, there is no escape.
7.1
"When she no longer believed in promises or happy endings, love crossed entire worlds to show her that magic still existed." Laura C.
Unexpected designs... Or simply capricious games of fate. A human who thinks she has lost all reason to live plunges into a world of fantasies and fangs that make her be born again. A story full of passion, fantasy, vampires, and other species that will make you shudder... Read with me and let your imagination reach wherever Valentin will take you.
8.4
I was the "diamond" of the Sargent Foundation, a perfect orphan polished for the cameras and high-society galas. But beneath the glittering chandeliers, I was suffocating. When the pressure finally broke me and I tried to flee the Sargent Gala, I wasn't met with comfort. I was hunted down by security and dragged into a sterile, white-hot spotlight in a room I was never allowed to enter.
Adrien Sargent, the cold-blooded CEO who controlled my every move, didn't want to help me. He wanted to devour me. He presented a legal cage: sign over my voting shares for his unethical hostile takeover, or he would have my only friend—the elderly butler who raised me—killed in his nursing home bed.
I became a prisoner in the East Wing, stripped of my phone and watched by hidden cameras. During a midnight storm, I tried to steal a security card to escape, but Adrien caught me in his study. Reeking of whiskey and corporate rage, he didn't just stop me. He pinned me to his desk and branded my neck with a bite so deep it bruised, treating me like a thief who deserved to be claimed.
The next morning, the house turned into a battlefield of lies. His PR consultant tried to claim she was the one in his bed, but Adrien found a pearl button from my pajamas under his desk. He didn't feel guilt; he felt violated. He accused me of orchestrating the entire encounter to blackmail him, his eyes filled with a terrifying, possessive fury.
When his grandmother caught us, she didn't see a victim; she saw a liability. To save the family stock price, she gave us an ultimatum: marriage.
"I’ll do it," I said, looking at the massive diamond ring that felt more like a shackle. Adrien thought he had finally broken me, but he didn't know about the encrypted file I just received. The corporate crisis he’s fighting was an inside job, and the trail leads straight to his own front door.
I looked at my new husband on our wedding night and let my silk dress hit the floor. He thinks he’s trapped a rabbit, but I’ve just gained total access to his world. I will sleep with the enemy, learn every dark secret he’s hiding, and then I am going to burn his empire to the ground.
7.1
Warning: R18+
His pierced cock thrust deep, the metal barbell dragging along my G-spot with every relentless stroke, sending shockwaves that made me scream his name. I came again hard, squirting around him while he growled "mine" and filled me bare, hot pulses claiming every inch inside me.
Thirty minutes earlier I'd been drowning in heartbreak and gin at a Mayfair club.
Now I was unraveling in a billionaire's penthouse, owned by a stranger whose name I still didn't know.
One forbidden night.
No names. No promises.
Or so I thought.
One reckless night with a stranger ignites a billionaire's obsession.
Elara thought it was over at dawn.
Damian Blackwood doesn't let go.
When her world crumbles, he offers salvation-with strings: Become his contract wife.
One forbidden night becomes a lifetime of possession...
8.9
BLURB
Lena Hale thought heartbreak couldn't get worse until she walked into a luxury restaurant with a Christmas gift in her hand and found her boyfriend on a date with another girl. Broken and humiliated, she flees home for the holidays, hoping her mother's new marriage will give her a quiet place to recover.
Instead, she walks straight into a nightmare.
Her cheating ex, Bryce Carter, is waiting at the mansion...
as the beloved nephew of her new stepfather.
And her new stepbrother, Cassian Ward, the cold, quiet son who sees too much and says too little can't seem to look away from her.
Trapped together for Christmas, Lena is forced to face the boy who broke her and the man who's slowly undoing her in ways she doesn't understand. Bryce wants her back. Cassian wants her safe. And Lena wants to forget she still feels anything at all.
But secrets run deep in the Ward family...
and desire runs deeper.
And this Christmas, falling for the wrong brother might be the most dangerous mistake she's ever made.
9.0
For a whole year, April believed her billionaire husband, Bartholomew, abandoned her in Europe the day after their arranged wedding. She hated him so much she drunkenly prayed for his death at a club.
But he suddenly returned that very night, catching her red-handed. Instead of a divorce, he trapped her, threatening to bankrupt her bloodsucking family unless she moved into his penthouse to play the devoted wife.
Forced to comply, she attended a dinner with her toxic family. Her stepmother deliberately served her lobster—knowing April had a fatal allergy.
"Eat up, darling. I know hospital food is dreadful."
When April refused and exposed their massive gambling debts, her furious father raised his hand to strike her across the face.
But it was Bartholomew, the ruthless tyrant she despised, who caught her father's arm and snapped his wrist.
"If you ever try to touch my wife again, I will erase your family by sunrise."
April was completely stunned. Why was he defending her with such murderous rage? And why did he keep a cheap paper airplane she had made at age six preserved under a glass dome in his study?
The answer came that night. When Bartholomew stepped out of the shower, April saw the massive, jagged surgical scar sliced directly over his heart. He hadn't run away; he had been fighting for his life on an operating table. Staring at the man who had silently survived just to come back to her, April made her choice. She was going to uncover the truth behind his surgery and their past.