The Billionaire's Strong Desire
Daniella Harris never imagined her life would change dramatically after graduating high school.
Diego Johnstone, her forgotten stepbrother, reappears surprisingly-paying off her adoptive parents' debt and taking her away.
Unbeknownst to Daniella, Diego wanted her for himself, even if it meant going against his own family.
But their relationship was fraught with obstacles. When Daniella's family planned her marriage, Diego found himself trapped in a matchmaking situation he didn't want, and they had to decide whether to give up on fate or fight for each other.
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Chapter 2
"I don't believe it. My mom never told me about you."
I turned to Gilbert and Anna. They showed confused faces. They didn't even know I had step-siblings.
"What's inside this paper bag?" I asked.
"You'll know when you open it." The hazel-eyed man took his crocodile leather wallet from his pants pocket, opened it, and gave me his business card.
"I'm Diego. Just call me Diego."
Gilbert and Anna stood on my right and left to look at the black business card. We were shocked to know his name, job, and the company he worked for. No one didn't know about Diego's family.
"I want to talk to Daniella," Diego said.
"Talk to me?" I pointed at myself with a confused face.
"Hey, Daniella. I'm Justin, Diego's assistant." The man wearing glasses smiled at me. I smiled back. "My boss wants to have a serious talk with you."
Justin looked at Anna and Gilbert. "I hope you'll allow Daniella to talk to her stepbrother."
Gilbert, Anna, and I looked at each other as if we could communicate through our eyes.
"Okay." Gilbert nodded. "Anna and I will stand in here."
I was shocked by Gilbert's words. Why did he let me talk to Diego? He was a stranger even though he had paid our debt.
"Do you need my ID card?" Diego asked me with a raised eyebrow.
I observed his appearance and his car. It seemed like Diego wasn't lying. Besides, I could find out the truth on the internet.
"No." I shook my head.
"Okay. I want to talk to you." I walked into the living room with my heart beating fast with anxiety.
"Tell me why I'm your stepsister?" I sat on the couch across from Diego. Justin stood beside Diego.
"You will know the answer after you open the paper bag."
I found myself staring at him. He looked like a well-established man. I wouldn't be surprised if he already had a wife and kids.
"What's wrong?" Diego asked.
"Nothing." I blinked and shook my head.
I took the phone and photo album from the paper bag and put them on the table.
"The phone is unlocked," Diego said.
I opened the pink phone, found three videos in the gallery, and watched them all.
My eyes widened, and my heart beat fast because of longing and sadness.
The three videos showed my mother marrying a man, celebrating her birthday, and playing in the garden with me and a boy.
The videos featured my mother, me, my mother's husband, and a boy named Diego.
I was speechless. My eyes were watery, but no tears came.
The three videos made me remember my mother again. All my memories with her flooded my mind.
I could feel my mother's warmth again. It was as if she had just died yesterday. In fact, she had gone to heaven and left me on earth for more than 10 years.
"The photo album will make you believe me more," Diego said.
I nodded.
I smiled at all the photos, but my eyes gradually became blurry. I blinked. I wouldn't cry.
I had promised my mother not to cry because I missed her.
Diego gave me a lot of evidence, but I hesitated to believe him because Diego was cheerful and looked like a good brother to me in all those videos and photos.
Meanwhile, Diego, sitting in front of me, now had a scary aura, and his gaze was not friendly.
I hugged the photo album and held the phone tightly, staring at Diego with the courage I had gathered in five seconds.
"Why did you suddenly come to me? You also paid off Gilbert's debt."
"I want to make Laura's wish come true," Diego said, looking at me more seriously. "I will pay for your college and all your needs, but you must live with me in Boston."
"What?" I was shocked. "Why do I have to live with you?"
"Laura used to go to college there," Diego answered. "And I happen to have a house in Brooklyn."
"Why would you pay for my college? Aren't our parents divorced? I'm not your stepsister anymore," I said.
My mom moved to Portland with me. That meant she was divorced from her husband.
"I told you why," Diego said casually, but his hazel eyes still stared at me.
"She doesn't remember anything," Diego mumbled. I could hear it, but I doubted that was what he said.
"What did you just say?"
"What did I say?" Diego looked confused, but I saw the shock in his eyes a second before.
"Forget it," I said.
"Are you going to make me your son's nanny?" I asked curiously.
"What do you mean?" Diego raised an eyebrow.
"Did you think Diego was married and had a child, Daniella?" Justin smiled.
When Diego turned to him with a cold stare, Justin returned to his professional face.
"I'm not what you think, Dala." Diego hissed. My words had offended him.
"I apologize," I said.
Wait a minute. What did Diego call me? Ah, there was no way he would call me that.
"Sorry to bother you." Gilbert and Anna entered the house.
"Are you serious about paying for Daniella's college?" Gilbert stared at Diego in disbelief.
"Yes. Why would I lie?" Diego replied in annoyance.
"Is it true that he's your stepbrother?" Anna approached me. I gave her the photo album. Gilbert stood behind Anna.
"Ah, I remember now." Anna snapped her fingers. Then she looked at me and Diego alternately.
"Laura once told me that when Daniella was 3, she married her ex-boyfriend while she was in college. Honestly, Laura didn't want to because her ex-boyfriend had a wife and a son," Anna said.
I didn't know about that.
"Daniella." Anna squeezed my hand and said softly.
"You know we want the best for you. Gilbert and I want you to have a good future, but we can't afford your college. This is a great opportunity, Daniella. Please, think about it carefully."
Gilbert nodded with a serious face.
I bit my lower lip.
"I'll give you three days to think." Diego's deep voice surprised us and took over our attention.
Diego stood up from his seat, getting ready to leave our house with Justin. He pointed at the pink phone in my hand with his chin. "That phone is for you."
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9.7
For three years, I played the role of a devoted, naive wife to billionaire Conrad Whitney. I hid my true identity and foolishly believed in our fairy tale.
Then he handed me a harsh divorce agreement, ordering me to sign and walk away with absolutely nothing. He was leaving me to marry Cindy, the fragile woman he claimed had saved him from a fire.
He expected me to cry and beg. Instead, he watched coldly as Cindy and her family illegally transferred my father's trust fund. When I confronted them at the hospital, Conrad shielded her, calling me a greedy, toxic viper. He mocked me, completely blind to the fact that Cindy was a fraud. He truly believed I was just a pathetic, useless housewife who would be utterly destroyed without his money and status.
I looked at the man I had actually dragged out of that burning debris with my own soot-covered hands. My trauma, my sacrifices, and my love had all been reduced to a joke by his sheer arrogance and a few fake tears from a manipulative liar.
I didn't shed a single tear. I calmly signed the papers, drugged his wine, and left a crumpled one-dollar bill on his unconscious chest with a sticky note mocking his terrible service.
Then, I picked up my encrypted phone. It was time for the world's top surgeon, Dr. Hades, to return, and for Conrad to finally see the god he had just thrown away.
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.
7.2
Hope worked eighty-hour weeks on Wall Street, enduring daily humiliation from her boss just to be her mother's golden ticket out of poverty.
But when a severe kidney infection left her bleeding and collapsing in the middle of a boardroom presentation, her boss didn't call an ambulance.
He slammed his hand on the table, publicly accused her of popping pills like a junkie, and threw her out of the building.
Dragging her agonizing, feverish body back home, Hope desperately needed a mother's comfort.
Instead, the moment her mother heard she had lost her six-figure job, the woman's face contorted with pure rage.
She didn't care that Hope's kidneys were failing; she grabbed a heavy glass ashtray and hurled it directly at Hope's head.
"You threw away a six-figure job? You threw away our ticket out of this dump?!"
The glass shattered against the wall, slicing Hope's bare leg open.
For twenty-nine years, Hope had sacrificed her health, her dignity, and her sanity to be the perfect daughter.
She didn't understand why her life was only worth the paycheck she brought home, or why her own mother would rather see her dead than unemployed.
Looking at the blood dripping down her calf, the guilt that had chained her for a lifetime suddenly vanished.
She pulled out her phone and hit send on a brutally honest resignation email to her toxic boss.
Then, she opened a text from the intimidating, billionaire doctor who had treated her at the clinic—the only man who had ever told her she was a fighter.
She packed her bags and walked out the door.
This time, she was going to live for herself.
9.1
The Billionaire's Blood Debt
Two empires. One scorched-earth debt. No mercy.
Elara Vance was never supposed to be more than a pawn-the brilliant architect daughter of a man who traded souls for power. But when the world's financial foundations crumble, she finds herself signed over to the one man capable of burning her father's legacy to the ground: Dante Moretti.
Dante is no savior. He is the "Lion of the Underground," a billionaire predator fueled by a decades-old vendetta. He didn't just buy Elara's freedom; he bought her life, her loyalty, and her every breath. In his obsidian tower, the lines between prisoner and queen blur in a fever dream of high-stakes espionage and raw, primal obsession.
As they hunt a shadowy global cabal from the neon streets of London to the ancient ruins of Greece, Elara discovers that the only thing more dangerous than Dante's enemies is the "disgusting" heat of his touch. In a world where every secret is a weapon and every kiss is a betrayal, she must decide: will she dismantle the system that caged her, or become the ultimate weapon for the man who owns her soul?
The debt is blood. The price is total surrender.
8.5
I was four months pregnant, weighing over two hundred pounds, and my heart was failing from experimental treatments forced on me as a child. My doctor looked at me with clinical detachment and told me I was in a death sentence: if I kept the baby, I would die, and if I tried to remove it, I would die.
Desperate for a lifeline, I called my father, Francis Acosta, to tell him I was sick and pregnant. I expected a father's love, but all I got was a cold, sharp blade of a voice.
"Then do it quietly," he said. "Don't embarrass Candi. Her debutante ball is coming up."
He didn't just reject me; he erased me. My trust fund was frozen, and I was told I was no longer an Acosta. My fiancé, Auston, had already discarded me, calling me a "bloated whale" while he looked for a thinner, wealthier replacement. I left New York on a Greyhound bus, weeping into a bag of chips, a broken woman the world considered a mistake.
I couldn't understand how my own father could tell me to die "quietly" just to save face for a party. I didn't know why I had been a lab rat for my family’s pharmaceutical ambitions, or how they could sleep at night while I was left to rot in the gray drizzle of the city.
Five years later, the doors of JFK International Airport slid open. I stepped onto the marble floor in red-soled stilettos, my body lean, lethal, and carved from years of blood and sweat. I wasn't the "whale" anymore; I was a ghost coming back to haunt them.
With my daughter by my side and a medical reputation that terrified the global elite, I was ready to dismantle the Acosta empire piece by piece.
"Tell Francis to wash his neck," I whispered to the skyline. "I'm home."
8.1
Lucy Taylor never expected to be loved when she agreed to billionaire CEO, William Ashcroft, in place of her step sister to save her family's reputation. But as she gets to know him, she finds out he's completely different from the man she thought he was. As they grew closer, they realize they're in love. But what happens when trouble lurks around the corner? With a greedy stepsister and a maniac rival on their ends? Will they be able to survive or will their relationship crash under the weight of problems coming their way?