The Billionaire's Contract Wife
To secure a drama-free marriage, cold billionaire Lucas Lancaster demands a wife who wants convenience, not love. Heartbroken Sophia Bennett fits his criteria perfectly. After their wedding, Lucas flies to Europe, keeping their relationship strictly professional. But distance changes everything. When a tipsy Sophia accidentally mutters her ex’s name during a rare, passionate embrace, the ice prince completely loses his cool. Consumed by jealousy, Lucas begs her to forget the past and love him. In this captivating billionaire romance novel, he is the first to fall—and he falls hard.
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Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
The Return
The Meridian Fashion Preview was the kind of event I normally loved — a hundred designers competing for a hundred buyers' attention, the air thick with ambition and perfume and the particular high of work you've made with your hands on display for strangers to judge.
Tonight I was distracted.
Lily and I were at the far end of the venue when I saw him.
Ethan Carter moved through the crowd like he'd rehearsed it — which, knowing him, he had. Tall, easy smile, the kind of confidence that reads as charm until you've seen what it conceals. He was heading toward me with the particular focus of a man who'd decided something.
I considered leaving.
I didn't leave.
"Soph." His voice landed like a hand on my shoulder. Familiar. Presumptuous.
"Ethan." I kept mine level.
"You look—" He exhaled. "God. You look incredible."
"Thank you. Enjoy the preview." I turned.
"Wait." His hand caught my arm. Not hard. But there. "Please. Just five minutes."
Lily, beside me, had gone very still.
I turned back because walking away felt like running, and I was done running.
"I made a mistake," he said. "The biggest mistake of my life, and I know you know that." His voice dropped. "I never stopped thinking about you. Not for a day."
"Ethan—"
"You're married to a contract, Sophia. Everyone knows what that is." His eyes held mine, and for a second I saw the man I'd loved at twenty-one — the earnest version, before ambition calcified him. "It doesn't have to be permanent."
I was composing my reply when I felt it.
A hand at my waist.
Warm. Steady. Laid there with the absolute certainty of ownership.
I hadn't heard him arrive. I hadn't known he was coming.
Lucas stood at my shoulder. Not in front of me — beside me. In the particular way of someone who is not protecting you from a threat but simply making a fact known.
"Carter." One word. Silk over steel.
The warmth in Ethan's face closed off. His hand dropped from my arm.
"Lancaster." He managed a neutral tone. Barely.
Lucas didn't say anything else. He didn't need to. His hand at my waist said everything his voice declined to.
Ethan looked between us once. Then he nodded, something shuttering in his expression, and moved back into the crowd.
Lucas's hand stayed at my waist for three more seconds. Then it withdrew.
I turned to look at him.
"You didn't have to do that," I said, keeping my voice quiet.
"He was bothering my wife." Flat. Final. Like it was simply a statement of logic.
He turned his attention to the nearest display piece — a sculptural jacket in architectural white — and studied it with genuine focus, as if the entire interaction had already been filed and closed.
I stood beside him and tried to identify the feeling that had taken up residence in my chest since the moment his hand found my waist.
My wife, he'd said.
Two words. Zero sentiment. Pure contract.
I had absolutely no explanation for why they didn't feel like nothing.
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9.1
He was a ruthless CEO who always got what he wanted until he noticed her, a homeless girl surviving outside his office building. Quietly proud, clever, and impossible to read, she became the one woman who refused to fall at his feet, forcing him to chase for the first time in his life.
As she steps into his workplace, she faces ridicule, betrayal, and a wealthy woman determined to erase her from his world. While his family pushes him toward an arranged marriage with an entitled heiress, his heart is already bound to the girl everyone underestimates.
In a world ruled by power and status, she must prove her worth through strength and integrity, while he learns that love cannot be bought, controlled, or inherited.
7.8
Amara Daniels doesn't believe in destiny or happy endings; having survived from the dark shadows of her past, her life no longer has room for mistakes or attractive billionaires like Ethan Cole.
Ethan enters her life with his charming persistence, and she becomes worried after he meets her four-year-old son, her past that she has carefully buried.
He is her dangerous distraction.
But their chemistry conceals shocking secrets and connecting fates - that might either bring them together or set them apart forever. In a game where hearts and careers collide, can she have it all or will passion cost her everything?
9.2
She's stubborn, young, and craving love.
He's rich, famous, and impossible to read.
When 19 year old Liana Harper is suddenly arranged to marry Ethan Blackwell, the continent's most popular pop idol and heir to a vast empire, their worlds collide in a storm of arrogance, cold stares, and fiery clashes.
Thrown together by family pressure, mismatched personalities, and high expectations, Liana and Ethan must navigate a life neither of them chose filled with secrets, jealousy, and unexpected emotions.
Can a stubborn girl and a grumpy superstar survive a forced marriage? Or will their differences tear them apart before love even has a chance?
Enemies forced into marriage sparks everywhere.
8.1
On her eighteenth birthday, Arabella's life was destroyed when thugs attacked her and left her reputation in pieces. Brenton played the hero, sent the men to prison, and married her, becoming the man she trusted most.
For two years, she believed he had saved her, until one overheard confession shattered everything. "If she had pushed a little harder, she might've figured out Brinley was behind the whole thing. That's the only reason I married her. Lucky for me, she's so easy to fool."
He had only married her to protect the woman who truly mattered to him. When that woman came back, Arabella chose divorce without hesitation.
Brenton expected her to come crawling back. "How can she even survive without me?"
Instead, she rose in the tech world, untouchable, brilliant, and far beyond his reach-just in time for another powerful man to claim her heart.
Then Brenton begged, "Baby, I messed up. Just give me one more chance. Please."
But the tycoon pulled her into his arms. "Baby? Please. She's my wife now."
8.4
To save my toxic family's bankrupt company, I was sold for fifty million dollars to marry Arch Rush III, a notoriously ruthless and paralyzed billionaire.
Because of my severe face blindness, I couldn't even recognize my new husband. I was just a cheap, replaceable pawn. Yet, while my own parents physically abused me and treated me like livestock, my terrifying new husband actually protected me.
But entering the Rush family estate was like stepping into a snake pit. His aristocratic relatives mocked my cheap clothes and even tried to disfigure me with boiling tea.
To further humiliate me in front of a world-renowned neurologist, his grandmother pointed a bony finger at me.
"Go massage his muscles, this is your daily duty now."
Arch glared at me with a lethal warning, but I had no choice. Trembling, I pressed my hands into his thigh.
My heart instantly dropped. Beneath his expensive suit, there was no soft, withered flesh. The muscle contours were tight, dense, and incredibly firm.
How could a man completely paralyzed from the waist down have the legs of an athlete?
Before I could process the terrifying truth, my strong fingers dug into a nerve cluster. Under my touch, his "dead" muscle violently twitched.
The doctor dropped his pen in absolute shock, and I realized I had just accidentally exposed the ruthless billionaire's deadliest secret.
9.2
I was a broke freelance copywriter, tortured for three sleepless nights by an impossible corporate client.
Needing to vent, I typed out a wild, highly inappropriate rant mocking the brand's stiff heritage.
But in my exhausted, sleep-deprived blur, I accidentally sent the massive block of text to the wrong chat.
The recipient wasn't my friend. It was Emerson Beard, the elite, ruthless brand consultant I was supposed to desperately network with.
I waited for the professional execution, terrified of the massive five-figure penalty fee hanging over my head.
Instead, he didn't block me. He critiqued my unhinged draft.
He saved my career through late-night, encrypted phone calls, his deep, commanding voice becoming my only lifeline.
But when I heard a woman with a sultry French accent knocking on his hotel door during our call, my ugly jealousy flared.
I yelled at him and hung up, completely humiliating myself.
I thought I was just a pathetic, annoying workaholic interrupting his romantic getaway.
But he texted back to clarify he was entirely single, and in the process, realized I was actually twenty-five, not a fresh-out-of-school teenager like he had assumed.
The cold, distant mentor instantly vanished.
In his place was a man radiating a raw, aggressive, and predatory energy that bled right through the screen.
"Texting is too inefficient. The full integration requires face-to-face communication."
He dropped a location pin for an ultra-exclusive Manhattan club, demanding I meet him to save my contract.
Wearing a desperately bought emerald silk dress, I pushed open the heavy oak door, stepping right into the trap of a man who had just taken off his leash.