The CEO's Contract Bride: Marriage On Paper
She lost her job, her love, and her home until the man who fired her offered her a lifeline... in the form of a contract marriage.When loyal secretary Natasha Hills is wrongly accused of corporate betrayal, she's cast out by billionaire CEO Bruce Stamford and left broken by the sudden disappearance of her scheming boyfriend. But everything changes when Bruce, desperate to fulfill his dying grandmother's last wish, proposes a marriage of convenience.Their deal is strictly business... until emotions blur, secrets unravel, and enemies close in. In a world of power, lies, and betrayal, can fake vows turn into real love before everything crashes down?
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Chapter 2
Bruce
Kenzie was the one who brought lunch to my office today. Seeing her reminded me of Natasha, my secretary for two years.
She had been loyal since and I wondered how she could have changed so terribly.
Kenzie was usually pleasant but today, she looked different. No doubt, everyone must have heard what happened with Natasha.
"Were you close with Natasha?" I asked her as I picked the cup of coffee. I could see Kenzie look nervous all of a sudden.
"No. No, sir," She replied frantically.
I looked at her and laughed. Of course, everyone wouldn't want to be associated with Natasha as it could cause them to lose their job.
"I checked the CCTV today. Both of you communicated nicely so I thought you might know her well..." I muttered, dropping the cup.
I stared at my fingernails, admiring how beautiful it looked. Such a meticulous being, I was.
"We only talk about work, boss. May I leave?" Kenzie asked.
I nodded and she seemed reluctant to leave. Later, she turned towards me.
"I think you should confirm if she really leaked those documents. She isn't the kind of person to do such a thing."
"Just act like you don't know her, Kenzie," I said calmly. "I might look calm on the outside but my blood boils on the inside. Now isn't the time to support the traitor."
"Yes, boss," Kenzie walked out as quickly as possible.
I picked my phone and called Kelvin, the one who took care of dirty matters.
He was my childhood friend. We attended the same school but the irony was that he was a scholarship student because his parents were so poor that they couldn't afford the expensive school fees.
My own family were the ones who funded the scholarship initiative.
While I went to study business administration in the university, I lost contact with Kelvin. Later, I found out he had joined the military.
Fate brought us together again after he was wrongfully dismissed from the military as a lieutenant. From then, he became my shadow. He was good at his job.
"About Natasha... Did you find out anything weird afterwards?" I asked over the phone.
"One of my men tailed her," Kelvin responded. "He watched her enter the head office of Mac Group." My heart sank.
"Now I know!" I exclaimed. "Baldwin must have offered her a better salary at his company. That's why she betrayed me. She went there to claim her new job."
"But..." Kelvin tried urgently.
"I have no reason to hear it!" I cut the call.
Out of anger, I slammed the phone against the wall as I paced back and forth. My fists were clenched and I was thinking about what I had to do to rid this humiliation and betrayal.
Baldwin McAllen was the CEO of Mac Group. His company was the fiercest rival of my company, Stamford Group. The competition was unhealthy and every time, Baldwin ends up using dirty means to get what he wanted.
I had always taken his jabs but this time, it had to be different.
I heard a knock on the door and before I could acknowledge, the door opened and Kenzie ran in. She was panting and she looked scared.
"There is urgent news from your grandmother, boss!" Kenzie said urgently.
"And why would my grandma call the receptionist's phone rather than me?"
I had barely finished this when I cast a look on my phone in pieces right before me. Right, I had slammed the phone by myself.
"Your grandma has collapsed!" Kenzie broke the news. I felt my heart skip a beat as well.
**How I managed to get to the hospital without an accident needed to be researched. I couldn't concentrate and the thought that my grandma, my last surving family, had collapsed got me so scared.
On arriving at the hospital, her condition had stabilized and I could breathe properly.
"Let me see you privately, Mr. Bruce," The doctor told me.
I followed him to his office and he had water served for me and my nerves cooled before he told me.
"It appears your grandmother might be dying soon."
"What!" I exclaimed.
"She has been treating cancer for a few years now. She wanted it kept from you before but I'm afraid it is at its terminal stage right now," The doctor said faintly.
"How long does she have left?" I managed to ask. I felt sick inside of me but I had to be a man.
"Three months," His voice sounded like a murmur. It felt as if my whole world had collapsed. I had difficulty breathing again.
"Are you okay?" The doctor was saying. "Mr. Bruce!"
"I'm fine," I managed to reply.
"Is there no other solution? I have money, you know that. Can't you do something? I'll pay for it no matter how expensive it is."
"I'm sorry, Mr. Bruce," The doctor added.
"I can only advise that you spend the next three months with her, fulfill her wishes, and help her leave this world in peace."
When they told me grandma was conscious, I went in to see her. I didn't cry like the six year old who usually held onto her whenever he bruised his knee.
"Are you dying?" I asked.
"I'm sorry," She replied. "Come here."
I hugged her frail body and now, I couldn't hold those tears. She teared up too and she held me in her arms like I was a baby.
"Would you do me a favor before I die?" She asked me.
"Anything!" I shrugged. She was the most precious person to me and if I couldn't save her life, I would at least honor her wishes.
"Then, I want you to get married and live happily. That's the only way I will be able to rest in peace. Can you do that for grandma?" She asked carefully.
I held her hands now and looked into her eyes.
"Your wish is my command!" I nodded with tear filled eyes.
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9.8
I married an S-class Alpha to save my family's bankrupt company.
But my husband, Braydon, treated me worse than a stray dog.
When my heat cycle triggered early, the fever was agonizing. I crawled to our master bedroom, crying and begging him for just one temporary bite to save my life.
Instead, he locked the door from the inside.
"Go back to your room. I told you I didn't want to deal with you this weekend."
Through the crack under the door, I smelled the cheap perfume of his mistress. While I was dying in the hallway, forced to inject a toxic black-market suppressant that made me vomit blood, he was sleeping with her in our bed.
Days later, a drunk Braydon pinned me to the floor, trying to violently force a permanent mark on my neck just to assert his dominance.
When I fought him off, he blamed me for provoking him and casually tossed a credit card at me to buy my silence.
"Go buy whatever you want. Just tell the clinic you slipped in the shower."
Staring at the man who was supposed to protect me, my heart went completely cold. Why did I ever think this monster would change? This wasn't a marriage anymore; it was a cage, and the animal inside it was trying to kill me.
I quietly pressed the record button on my phone, capturing every single word of his twisted bribe.
Then, I pulled out a matte black business card and called the terrifying Enigma CEO who had been waiting for me in the shadows.
7.0
On her wedding night, Liora Vale expected passion from her wealthy husband. Instead, she got rejection and humiliation.
When his dangerously seductive best friend, Kael Draven, corners her on the balcony and claims her virgin body with raw, unprotected fury, Liora discovers a pleasure she never knew existed.
Now addicted to Kael's brutal touch and filthy promises, the once-innocent bride becomes his secret slut, sneaking creampies in limos, riding him at galas, and begging to be bred while her husband sleeps nearby.
Kael won't stop until he destroys Silas and fills Liora's womb with his child.
She was supposed to be the perfect wife... now she's the shameless breeding whore who belongs only to him.
7.2
After a one night stand with the woman whose house Jason broke into, his life has never been the same. Like a siren's call, he can't get the nymphomaniac woman off his mind. Weeks later, while getting intel for the crew's next heist, Jason lays eyes upon the woman and follows her into a secret strip club. She appears to lead a double life. One where she's the CEO of a multimillion company and her father's golden child. The other side of her life is that she owns a strip club and is extremely erotic. Can Jason learn to live with her as she is? Will he put his pride aside to be with the woman? ... especially when his crew is hired to kidnap a woman who turns out to be the love of his life.
8.0
My abusive step-family isolated me completely, holding my mother's medical funds hostage to control my every move.
Yesterday, they finalized my sale.
"You will marry Rudy Petrov next month. He is fifty, wealthy, and willing to overlook your lack of pedigree."
Pushed to the absolute edge, I did the insane. I posted an ad online offering my life savings of $50,000 for a contract husband. A stranger named Brennan agreed.
But my family wouldn't let me go. They forced me back for a dinner by threatening my mother's life-saving prescriptions.
At the table, they relentlessly mocked my new "poor IT guy" husband and intentionally burned my hand with boiling tea.
Worse, the housekeeper locked me in a guest room and forced drugs down my throat so Rudy could come in and assault me.
I lay there paralyzed on the floor, bleeding from Rudy's slap, utterly terrified. I couldn't understand why my own family would throw me to the wolves, and I felt a crushing guilt for dragging an innocent, ordinary guy into my nightmare.
Until a pitch-black Maybach smashed through the estate's wrought-iron gates at eighty miles an hour.
My "poor" husband kicked the solid oak doors off their hinges, beat Rudy half to death, and carried me out into the rain.
I didn't know it yet, but the ordinary man I hired to save me was a ruthless billionaire, and he was about to erase my family's entire empire by morning.
7.8
Andrea was trapped in a suffocating marriage with billionaire Gregory Morse, forced to live as the pathetic substitute for his dead fiancée.
When armed intruders broke into their estate in the dead of night, she called her husband in pure terror.
"Stop playing these cheap, attention-seeking games," Gregory sneered with disgust, and hung up the phone.
She barely escaped with her life, but the cruelty only escalated. At the family mansion, his dead fiancée's sister deliberately scalded Andrea's hand with boiling tea. Instead of defending his wife, Gregory publicly humiliated her, ordering her to clean up the mess while calling her a stray dog.
That night, hiding in the dark wine cellar, Andrea overheard a chilling confession.
Gregory admitted to his brother that he knew Andrea was completely innocent of the car crash that killed his fiancée. He knew she had been framed.
Why did he marry her? Just to use her as a psychological punching bag to vent his twisted grief. He watched her suffer every single day, treating her like disposable trash, while violently threatening anyone who showed her an ounce of kindness.
He thought she was just a useless, helpless shadow who would quietly endure his torment forever.
He had no idea that behind her submissive facade, she was secretly Madame Lan, the apex predator of the global fashion world. And now, she was ready to burn his empire to the ground.
8.3
I arrived at the mansion with nothing but the clothes on my back, expecting to work off my debt, but I quickly realized I was just inventory.
The air in the hallway was kept at a freezing temperature, a deliberate choice to preserve the art and remind girls like me that we were nothing more than furniture.
Inside the room, the sounds of a Hollywood starlet and a powerful man echoed through the walls, followed by the sight of discarded silk and cold, hard cash scattered across the marble floor.
When I accidentally stood in the way, I was tripped, mocked as trash, and left to bleed on the cold floor while the security guards watched with dead eyes.
Even when I begged for my passport, Chadwich Carey didn't see a human being; he saw a stain on his pristine, expensive reality that needed to be erased.
He crushed my fingers in the door, dragged me into the dark, and eventually used me to satisfy a drug-fueled hunger that no one else could touch, only to discard me back into the rain like garbage.
I sat in the freezing Bronx alley, shivering in his oversized shirt, realizing that he never intended to give me my freedom.
He thought he had broken me, that I was just another nameless girl to be silenced, but he was wrong.
I am not a box to be packed away or a hand to be severed.
He taught me that in this world, money and violence are the only languages that matter.
I will learn them both, and when I return, I won't be begging for my passport; I’ll be taking everything he owns.