Return Of The Billionaire's Ghost Wife
I died in the terrifying plunge of Flight 815. But when I opened my eyes, I was lying in a luxurious bathtub, completely unharmed.
The door opened, and my husband Jordi walked in—looking fifteen years older, his eyes glacial. He pinned me to the wall, his thumb pressing against my windpipe, demanding to know who hired me to play his dead wife.
I managed to prove I was the real Isadora, biologically still twenty-eight years old. But my nightmare had just begun.
My twenty-three-year-old son Hector looked at my unaged face with pure hatred.
"Get this cheap replica out of my father's house, or I'll have him declared incompetent!"
My twenty-year-old daughter Blossom, now a spoiled stranger treating Jordi like a personal ATM, screamed at me over the phone.
Even Jordi's ambitious female colleague showed up at our estate, treating me like a temporary toy she could easily replace.
In the space of a single breath, I had lost fifteen years. My children had grown up without me, learning to hate instead of grieve. Now, they looked at their real mother as if I were a monster trying to steal my own inheritance.
But I didn't return from the dead just to be pushed out.
I put on my old green silk dress, stepped in front of the female executive, and smiled.
If they want to treat me like a threat, I'll fight them all to get my family back.
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Chapter 7
Hector left without another word.
Isadora watched him go, his Aston Martin screaming down the drive, gravel spraying from tires that cost more than most people's cars. She stood in the silence he left behind, her scalp stinging where she'd pulled her hair, her hands shaking with delayed adrenaline.
"That was-" Jordi started.
"Necessary." She didn't turn around. "Don't tell me it wasn't. Don't tell me I should have been gentler, should have given him time, should have-" She stopped, her voice cracking. "He called me a fraud. He threatened to have you declared incompetent. He-"
"I know."
She felt his hands on her shoulders, turning her to face him. His expression was careful, controlled, but his eyes-his eyes were blazing with something she couldn't name.
"You were magnificent," he said. "I've never-" He stopped, shook his head. "I've spent fifteen years learning to fight in boardrooms, in markets, in the kind of corporate warfare that makes people disappear. And you just-" He laughed, the sound wondering. "You just stood there and dared him to doubt you. With science. With truth. With-"
"With his mother's stubbornness." She pulled away, suddenly exhausted. "I need to sit down."
"Of course. The house is-Mr. Pim prepared the west wing, but if you'd prefer-"
"The master bedroom." She said it firmly, watching his expression flicker. "Our bedroom, Jordi. Unless you've moved someone else in?"
"Never." The word was fierce, immediate. "I've never-there hasn't been anyone. Not since-"
"Show me."
He led her through halls that were familiar and strange, past rooms she'd decorated and rooms that had been reimagined by strangers, until they reached the double doors at the end of the west wing. He pushed them open, stood aside, let her enter first.
It was exactly as she remembered.
The four-poster bed, draped in linen she'd chosen from a catalog on a rainy afternoon. The windows overlooking the garden, the ones she'd insisted on despite the security concerns. And above the fireplace, in a simple wooden frame that cost nothing and meant everything-
The lighthouse.
She crossed to it immediately, her fingers finding the familiar brushstrokes, the slightly crooked perspective that proved he'd painted it himself. The only light you ever needed. She'd teased him for weeks about that inscription, about the sentimentality he'd hidden beneath his polished exterior.
"It's been here," Jordi said behind her. "Every day. Every night. I couldn't-I tried to take it down once, in the first year. Hector found me holding it, and he-" His voice caught. "He didn't speak to me for a month."
She turned. He was closer than she'd expected, close enough to touch, his expression raw and unguarded in a way she hadn't seen since the bathroom.
"You should have told him," she said. "Told them. About how you searched, about what you-"
"That I spent a fortune chasing shadows? That I bankrupted three different research foundations on the slimmest of hopes? They would have locked me up, Issy. Hector almost tried." He stopped, his jaw working as he swallowed down the darkest parts of the last fifteen years, the parts he knew would terrify her. "There are ledgers I burned, Issy. Things I'm not proud of. Ways I tried to find you that I can't-"
"Tell me."
"Not yet." He reached for her hand, his fingers threading through hers with desperate care. "Please. Not yet. Let me have this. Let me have you back, just for a little while, before I have to explain how broken I became without you."
She looked at him-the man he'd become, the damage he'd carried, the love that had survived somehow, impossibly, through fifteen years of grief and madness.
"Okay," she said. "Not yet. But soon, Jordi. You can't-" She squeezed his hand. "You can't build a future on secrets. Not again. We tried that before, and it nearly destroyed us."
He nodded, his eyes suspiciously bright. "Soon," he agreed. "I promise."
They stood in silence, hand in hand, watching the afternoon light move across the painting of their beginning.
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8.0
Elena never planned on marrying a stranger, especially not someone engaged to her sister. But when her sister disappears days before the wedding, Elena is forced into an arrangement she never agreed to, with a man she knew nothing about.
Nathaniel Sinclair, billionaire heir with his dreamy looks and charming attitude is just as unenthusiastic about the situation as she is. Their marriage begins with distance, awkward silences and the quiet understanding that neither of them asked for this.
But as days turn into weeks and forced proximity becomes a regular thing, Elena starts to wonder: what happens when two people trapped in an arrangement begin to fall for each other?
It was never meant to be love. But love has a way of rewriting the rules.
8.8
On the eve of my glamorous Waldorf Astoria wedding, I went to the penthouse to surprise my fiancé, Hugh, wearing my late mother's heirloom pearls.
Instead, I heard my stepsister's familiar laugh and caught them tangled together on the sofa.
Through the cracked door, I heard Hugh slur that he was only marrying me for my family's financial backing.
"As soon as I secure my inheritance, she's the first thing I'm getting rid of," he promised her.
Floy giggled and asked for my mother's pearl necklace, my only legacy. Hugh agreed without hesitation, mocking my dead mother's naivety and my desperate dreams of building a family.
Every sweet word he had ever said was a lie, a knife he had been patiently sliding between my ribs for years. They planned to strip me of everything the moment I signed the prenup.
I didn't cry or scream. The crushing weight of their betrayal hollowed me out, leaving behind a terrifying, absolute calm.
Why should I be the one to lose everything while they stole my future and insulted my mother's memory?
I calmly walked down the hall, set the prenuptial agreement on fire, and vanished into the rainy night.
If Hugh wanted to play dirty for the Maxwell empire, I would play for keeps.
Using a forgotten, century-old family covenant, I was going to marry Hugh's uncle-the comatose, paralyzed war hero, Fleet Maxwell.
I would return not as a naive bride, but as their worst nightmare: his aunt, and the new lady of the house.
7.9
Justice was dragged back from the slums by her biological father, only to be sold off to the billionaire Aguirre family. Her purpose was simple: marry their comatose heir to secure a three-hundred-million-dollar lifeline for his company.
Her stepmother and stepsister sneered at her cheap canvas shoes, treating her like a contagious disease.
"A high school dropout from the slums marrying a billionaire? It's a miracle your trashy bloodline is getting anywhere near the estate," her stepsister Emery mocked.
At the sprawling estate, the "comatose" heir, Auguste, was secretly conscious. Disgusted by his new bride, he orchestrated her enrollment at an elite prep school, hoping the ruthless rich kids would break her. On her very first day, Emery ambushed her, loudly broadcasting Justice's "dropout" status to the entire classroom and turning her into an instant social pariah. The teachers tried to humiliate her with impossible calculus, and the students treated her like garbage.
They all thought she was just a pathetic, uneducated pawn they could easily crush and discard. They had no idea that her "dropout" file was a manufactured ghost, or that the Aguirre family's top intelligence network had just hit a military-grade firewall trying to look into her past.
Justice didn't panic. She flawlessly solved the university-level equation on the board, then walked into the cafeteria and looked right at Emery.
"She has no Barnes blood. She is a squatter living in my father's house."
With three casual sentences, Justice completely incinerated her stepsister's elite life. The billionaire heir wanted to play games? She was about to show them all what a real monster looked like.
8.0
My wedding was tomorrow. I was a crisis counselor who had finally found peace with my loving fiancé, Dexter, and my best friend, Barbara.
A late-night call about a forced marriage led me to a hotel penthouse, where I found them naked in bed together.
It was all a cruel, three-year "savior game." They were bored heirs, and I was their project. They destroyed my career, caused me to lose our baby, and put my mother in the hospital.
They forced me to be a bridesmaid at their wedding-the one that should have been mine.
In front of hundreds of guests, they exposed my traumatic past and then tried to marry me off to a drunken stranger as a joke.
As I stood there, broken, a text from Barbara arrived.
"Your mother saw the livestream. She had a heart attack. She's not going to make it."
With nothing left, I ran to the 20th-floor window and jumped. They thought they had erased me. But my death was just the beginning.
9.3
Adrian Blackwood , billionaire CEO of Blackwood Holdings, Alpha of the Blackwood Pack... Mated to a weak, broken and wolfless female?!! No way! This is impossible, this must a sick prank by the moon goddess and fate.
9.8
For two years, I was the perfect, obedient wife to wealthy heir Grady Maddox.
Then I found a hidden compartment in his study desk. Inside were dozens of explicit polaroids of his adopted sister, Jasmine, and a worn leather diary.
The diary revealed the sickening truth.
"Kaya is the perfect shield. As long as I have a wife, no one will ever look too closely at me and my little Yue."
When Jasmine deliberately knocked a bowl of boiling soup onto my hand, Grady didn't even glance at my blistering skin.
He frantically checked Jasmine for nonexistent scratches and yelled at me.
"Why weren't you paying attention? Look at the mess you've made! You scared her."
He then kicked me out to our empty penthouse as punishment, only to move Jasmine in the very next day, letting her parade around in his dress shirts and giving her my favorite custom furniture.
Looking at the husband I had devoted my life to fawning over the sister he was secretly sleeping with, I didn't feel heartbroken. I just felt a deep, suffocating disgust.
I was nothing but a paper wall meant to hide their twisted affair.
I didn't cry, and I didn't beg for his love.
I simply locked him out of the bedroom, gathered my financial records, and called Manhattan's most ruthless divorce attorney.
I was securing my escape, completely unaware that Grady's estranged, terrifyingly powerful older brother had been waiting ten years for this exact moment.