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 3
I sat on my bed.
I placed my chin on my bent knees and looked at the pink phone, the white photo album, and the framed photo of me and my mother in kindergarten.
Heavy rain poured down on my city, making the atmosphere in my room quiet and cold.
"Why did Diego come to me?"
Diego and I were not blood relatives; our parents had separated, but he still considered me his stepsister and was even willing to pay for my college education.
I recalled the three videos on the phone.
"But it seems like Diego wasn't lying. The videos show him being close to my mom."
Diego was very kind in making my mother's wish come true.
I looked at my mother and Diego's father's wedding photo.
I didn't know who my biological father was.
I once asked my mother when I was in kindergarten because my friends were taken to school by their fathers, but my mother wouldn't answer. After that, I decided not to ask about my father anymore.
So far, my mother only told me about my stepfather, who was her first love, without mentioning his name.
"My mom smiled happily when she told me that she was happy to be able to marry her first love even though their marriage only lasted a few months."
However, my mother never told me that her first love already had a wife and a son when they married.
I had looked up Diego and his family on the internet. His parents had never divorced. There was not even any news that they were fighting and going to divorce.
I shook my head as a bad assumption about my mother crossed my mind.
"I was three years old when my mother married Diego's father. I don't remember anything."
Gilbert and Anna met me and my mother when we were looking for a rental house when we arrived in this city. I was three years old at the time.
Neither I nor my adoptive parents know how long my mother was married to Diego's father.
"Maybe Diego knows. I'll ask him."
Would Diego tell me about my past that I don't remember?
"But he's scary. I can't look him in the eye for too long."
I stared at the photo of my mother holding a birthday cake with a big smile. Diego's father stood to her left, and Diego stood to her right. Meanwhile, I stood in front of Diego and held his hand.
"I can't believe I was that close to him."
I looked at the photo closely. Diego now looked just like his father. They didn't smile, and their gazes were as sharp as eagles.
Everything that happened that night was like a dream.
It wasn't a dream. My hand hurt every time I pinched it.
For three days, every night, I daydreamed before going to bed, and the next morning, I went to my mother's grave before working at my adoptive parents' coffee shop.
I brought my mother's favorite blue tulips.
I crouched down and stared at her tombstone.
I told my mother about Diego, my adoptive parents, who encouraged me to accept Diego's offer and about me not making a decision yet.
"Who is my biological father? Why don't you want me to know about him? Will I be sad if I know about him?"
I wished my mother would appear in my dreams to answer my questions.
"Is it okay for me to trust Diego?"
My eyes filled with tears. If I accepted Diego's offer, I would stay in Boston. I wouldn't be able to visit my mother's grave every time I missed her.
"Good morning, Laura, Dala."
I was so shocked that I fell to the ground. "Why are you here?"
"Laura used to be my mother." Diego placed the bouquet of blue roses next to the blue tulips.
I glared as Diego crouched next to me, but my legs couldn't move in this situation.
Did he have the power to turn other people into statues, or was my body overreacting?
Diego stared at my mother's tombstone with a look I didn't understand the meaning of.
"How do you know where my mother's grave is?" I narrowed my eyes, trying to ignore the strange atmosphere surrounding us. "Have you known for a long time that my mother died?"
"I knew Laura died when I found out about you guys," he answered.
"Why are you looking for us?"
"My arm broke six months ago." Diego looked at his left arm. He was wearing a black suit.
"I suddenly remembered Laura. When I was sick, she made chicken soup with corn, carrots, and potatoes. No one could make soup as delicious as she did." Diego's voice shook, but his facial expression and gaze remained unchanged.
"My mom always made that soup when I was sick," I said with a smile. My mother patiently fed me, who had no appetite.
"How did you find me in six months?" I asked curiously.
Diego looked at me as if he was reading my mind. I swallowed and gripped the grass, holding back the sudden tremors.
"You and Laura didn't change your identities."
"Oh, that makes sense." I nodded.
"It only took me a month to find you," Diego said with a proud face.
"Then why didn't you come to me right away?"
"I came to you."
I searched my memory with my gaze fixed on him. I couldn't find him in my brain. "I, I've never seen you before."
"Because you don't just look at me." Diego looked annoyed at me.
I stared at him questioningly. It was rare for a grown man to look like Diego in this city.
His appearance and handsomeness were striking. I should have noticed Diego if he was around me.
"When did you meet me? Tell me." I demanded his answer.
Silence enveloped us. He stared at me deeply. It was so strange, I felt hot as the gentle breeze hit us.
Diego stood up, and I spontaneously stood up, too. I took a step back to create some distance between me and him.
"Have you made your decision? Today is the third day. I came to hear your answer." Diego broke the silence just to change the subject.
"You didn't answer my question."
"That's not important." Diego waved his hand. "Now what's important is will you allow me to pay for your college and will you live with me in Boston, Dala?"
I gasped in surprise.
Diego called me that again. It felt strange and a little uncomfortable, but it made me unable to deny that Diego used to be my step-brother.
Diego's hazel eyes hypnotized me. I tried my best to avert my eyes from him.
I clenched my fists and stared at my mother's tombstone sadly.
Were you okay if I didn't visit you every month, mom?
The three videos and dozens of photos popped into my head. I wondered if Diego was still the same as before, the older brother who loved me as his little sister.
Then Anna and Gilbert's words encouraging me to accept Diego's kindness rang in my ears.
My gaze returned to Diego.
God, I hope I didn't make the wrong decision.
"Thank you so much for your kindness," I said, my fists clenched tightly. It wasn't easy to say this. "I accept your offer. When are we going to Boston?"
"I'll pick you up tomorrow morning," Diego replied.
Diego's gaze was still as sharp as an eagle, but I felt something change in his eyes. Not tenderness, but perhaps relief?
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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?