The Secretary's Fake Rockstar Husband
For twelve years, Cora lived in silent agony, loving her boss Bennett Hodges while serving as his perfect, invisible secretary.
But after one night of drunken despair, she woke up in a stranger's penthouse. The man, an indie musician named Callum, showed her viral paparazzi photos of her ripping his shirt off and demanded a fake marriage to save his career.
Cora immediately agreed, desperately needing a legal shield. Bennett had just ordered her to attend a gala as the personal date of a billionaire known for sending women to the ER. When Cora refused and showed Bennett her marriage certificate, he thought it was a pathetic bluff. To force her submission, Bennett froze her entire savings, permanently denied her hard-earned department transfer, and watched with a smug smile as his sister humiliated Cora for being the "maid's daughter." He wanted to completely destroy her life until she crawled back begging.
Looking at her ruined design portfolio scattered on the floor, Cora felt her heart turn to ice. She had dedicated her entire youth to a man who saw her as nothing more than a piece of furniture that knew its place. How could she have blindly loved such a cruel, controlling monster for so long?
The violent shaking in her hands stopped, replaced by a terrifying calm.
"I have documented every single abusive directive from this office."
She flashed the massive diamond her new fake husband had given her, threatened to burn Bennett's pristine reputation to the ground, and finally walked away.
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Chapter 2
Cora stared at the phone. Then she snapped her head up to look at Callum.
"You're out of your mind," she said.
She threw the phone back onto the mattress and pulled his white shirt tighter around her thighs. "I am not marrying a stranger. We can issue a PR statement. We can say it was a misunderstanding."
Callum stood up slowly. He walked over to the minibar, turning his back to her. He poured a glass of ice water. "A statement doesn't fix a viral photo of you ripping my clothes off," he said, taking a sip. "My investors want a clean image. A secret, passionate romance is clean. A drunken hookup is a liability."
Before Cora could argue, the doorbell rang. It wasn't a polite chime. It was a frantic, aggressive pounding.
Callum sighed. He set the glass down and walked to the door, pulling it open.
A man burst into the room. He was sweating through a cheap, wrinkled grey suit. He pushed thick black glasses up his nose and waved a tablet in the air.
"The investors saw the photos, Cal!" the man yelled, his voice cracking with panic. "They just called me to invoke the morality clause! They are pulling the funding!"
This was Simon. He pointed a shaking finger at Cora on the bed. "Is this her? Is this the woman who just flushed our entire loan down the toilet?"
Cora flinched. The word 'loan' hit her like a physical blow. The guilt she had pushed down came rushing back, burning the back of her throat.
Callum ran a hand through his damp hair, looking stressed. "Back off, Simon. I'm handling it."
"Handling it?" Simon shouted, pacing the floor. "We borrowed money from dangerous people to fund this album! If the investors pull out because of this scandal, they will break our legs! The only way out is to tell the press you two have been secretly engaged."
"I am not participating in fraud," Cora interrupted, her voice shaking but firm.
Simon stopped pacing and glared at her. "Then I hope you have a spare hundred grand to pay off the loan sharks, lady."
Cora opened her mouth to reply, but her phone buzzed on the nightstand.
She reached for it. The caller ID read 'Brenda - Hodges Group'.
Cora hesitated, then swiped to answer. "Brenda?"
"Cora, thank God," Brenda whispered. Her voice was tight with anxiety. "Do not come to the office today. Bennett is on a warpath."
Cora's stomach dropped. "What happened?"
"He issued an internal directive this morning," Brenda said, her voice dropping lower. "He ordered that you are to accompany Caspian Thorne to the charity gala tonight. As his personal date."
The blood drained from Cora's face. Her fingers turned white as she gripped the phone. Caspian Thorne. The billionaire heir known in the New York social circles as a violent sadist. He had sent two of his previous dates to the emergency room.
"Bennett wouldn't do that," Cora whispered, though she knew it was a lie.
"Madam Justine signed off on it," Brenda added gently. "She told HR it was your duty as a ward of the Hodges estate to secure this networking opportunity."
Cora couldn't breathe. The walls of the penthouse felt like they were closing in. Bennett wasn't just rejecting her love. He was treating her like a piece of meat, trading her to a monster just to punish her for walking away last night.
"Okay. Thank you, Brenda," Cora said, her voice entirely devoid of emotion.
She hung up the phone. Her arms lost all their strength. The phone slipped from her fingers and bounced onto the carpet. She stared blankly at the wall.
Callum watched her. He walked over and dropped to one knee right in front of her. He was so close she could feel the heat radiating from his skin.
He didn't look like a panicked musician anymore. His eyes were steady, grounding. "What kind of trouble are you in, Cora?" he asked, his voice a low, hypnotic rumble.
Cora looked at him. He was a stranger. But he was a stranger offering a legally binding contract.
If she was a married woman, Bennett had zero legal or moral authority to force her into a matchmaking arrangement. Justine Hodges couldn't touch a married woman. It was the ultimate shield.
Cora dragged a breath of air into her lungs. Her eyes burned, but she refused to cry.
"How long?" Cora asked, her voice hard. "How long does this PR marriage need to last?"
Callum's pupils dilated slightly. He kept his face perfectly neutral. "One year."
Cora locked her jaw. She pressed her hands together, her knuckles white. She lowered her hands.
"Fine," Cora said.
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9.3
Chandler was the secret wife of Avery Osborn, a powerful media heir who kept their marriage hidden to avoid the scandal of her illegitimate birth.
After catching him openly flirting with a rival at a gala, Avery mocked her low status and told her she was nothing without his money.
Instead of crying, Chandler immediately signed a zero-payout divorce agreement, left her wedding ring on his glass table, and walked out.
To numb the pain of her shattered life, she went to a notorious underground club.
Drugged by a bartender, she lost her mind and ended up having a wild night with a handsome stranger she mistook for a high-end male escort.
Panicking the next morning, Chandler transferred her entire life savings of $50,000 to the man to buy his silence, then fled to her corporate job.
But at the afternoon executive meeting, her blood ran cold.
The man she had paid off was standing at the head of the boardroom table. He wasn't a gigolo. He was Brennan George, the ruthless new COO of her company.
Cornering her in the women's restroom, Brennan held up a printed copy of her $50,000 wire transfer.
"Wiring a massive sum of cash to your direct superior after a night together is classified as commercial bribery and solicitation," he whispered dangerously.
Chandler was terrified, realizing she had handed him the exact evidence needed to destroy her career and sue her into bankruptcy.
"Marry me," Brennan demanded coldly. "It's the only way to make this HR problem disappear."
8.8
I discovered I was pregnant with twins from my marriage to Ell Steele, the ruthless CEO of the Steele Group. But he saw me as a gold-digging nobody, unworthy of his heir.
He stormed into our penthouse with his lawyer, slamming down abortion consent forms and a divorce NDA, offering five million to terminate and vanish. "You're not fit to carry my child," he spat, gripping my jaw.
I refused the abortion, signed the zero-payout divorce to keep my company insurance for my dying mom's ICU bills, but stayed on as an admin assistant. Brittany, his mistress, spilled coffee on my reports, got me demoted to the dusty sub-basement sorting old files.
She framed me for attacking her, security dragged me out, slamming me into doorframes that cramped my belly. Trapped in a sabotaged freight elevator, I nearly miscarried in the dark, gasping for air while Ell rescued me—only to find my prenatal pills and rage.
At the gala, I warned Brittany the Angel's Tears necklace—Georgina's flawed design—was cracking. She accused me of theft; Ell ordered me stripped and searched publicly. It snapped anyway, shattering the diamond, but he blamed me, firing and blacklisting me on the spot.
Beaten down, humiliated, body aching from their cruelty—how could my husband, who I once loved, destroy me without a shred of doubt? What made him so blind to my pain?
Dragged from our home in the rain, a black Rolls-Royce Phantom pulled up. The butler bowed: "Madame Aura, your suite awaits." As Ell watched from his Maybach, I initiated the hostile takeover—time to bankrupt them all.
8.4
Kenzie, the former leader of the Aegis Alliance, opened her eyes to find herself reincarnated as a freezing, abandoned infant in a wet cardboard box.
She was rescued from the rain by Devin Ayers, a ruthless billionaire, and rushed to a private hospital, but a deadly threat was already waiting for her.
The ER doctor, Desiree Dillon, approached her with a syringe. Through a sudden burst of telepathy, Kenzie read the doctor's dark thoughts. Desiree wasn't trying to cure her fever. She deliberately ignored the safe dosage, drawing a lethal amount of Diazepam to permanently silence the crying baby and disguise it as sudden infant death.
"This will make it all go away," Desiree smiled gently, the needle glinting as it moved inches from Kenzie's arm.
Trapped in a weak, paralyzed three-month-old body, Kenzie couldn't run, fight, or even speak. She could only watch the poison inch closer.
How could she survive death only to be assassinated in a hospital bed by a corrupt doctor? She used to command armies. The sheer injustice and terror of dying completely helpless in this tiny body ignited a blinding rage inside her.
Refusing to be a victim again, Kenzie pushed her newborn brain to its absolute limit and unleashed a desperate telepathic scream directly into the billionaire's mind.
"Poison! She's trying to kill me!"
Devin, who had been looking away, suddenly froze, his icy gray eyes locking onto the doctor's wrist.
9.5
For twenty years, Krista lived as the perfect daughter of the wealthy Cain family.
But a single DNA report shattered her entire world. Her adoptive parents coldly declared she was just a mistake and immediately replaced her with the true bloodline.
Desperate, she ran through the freezing rain to find her fiancé, only to hear him laughing with his friends.
"Marry a fake? I don't collect the Cain family's second-hand trash."
She slapped him, threw her diamond ring at his chest, and stumbled into a jazz lounge to drown her pain.
Drunk and heartbroken, she accidentally crashed into a stranger, clinging to him like a lifeline, which ended in a wild night in a luxury penthouse.
When she woke up, she realized the man she had ravaged was Jasper Stone, the most ruthless, cold-blooded billionaire on Wall Street.
At the same time, her phone lit up with notifications. Her bank accounts were frozen, and the Cain family had just released a brutal public statement permanently cutting her off.
She was completely abandoned, stripped of her home, her family, and her dignity in a single night. Why was twenty years of loyalty erased so easily?
But instead of kicking her out, Jasper tossed a prenuptial agreement onto the bed.
"Pay off your debt with marriage. Stay, and you are the untouchable Mrs. Stone."
Looking at the contract, Krista wiped her tears, put on bold red lipstick, and signed her name.
7.1
For six years, I played the pathetic, wolfless Omega to honor the dying wish of the late Alpha who protected me.
But on our sixth anniversary, my fated mate, Alpha Kian, was photographed looking tenderly at his mistress.
When he finally stormed into our penthouse, he didn't apologize. Instead, he threw a fifty-million-dollar check onto the bed.
"Take the money and accept my rejection obediently, or I'll show you what happens when you defy an Alpha."
To force my compliance, he terminated all trade agreements with my best friend's pack, pushing them to the brink of bankruptcy. He accused me of blackmailing his grandfather into our marriage, entirely blind to the fact that his beloved mistress was actually a banished, feral Rogue.
I had spent six years swallowing my pride, drinking toxic herbs to suppress my true White Wolf scent, and enduring his absolute disgust just to keep his pack safe.
Why did I bleed for a man who despised my very existence?
I looked at the blood money, and the suffocating sorrow in my chest was instantly replaced by white-hot fury.
I didn't take a single cent. Instead, I submitted the rejection papers myself, dropped my pathetic disguise, and walked out into the freezing rain.
A towering warrior with a black umbrella dropped to one knee before me in the mud.
It was time to stop hiding and return home as the billionaire heir of the legendary Silvermoon Pack.
8.1
I skipped my final lab review in Geneva and endured a fourteen-hour flight to surprise my husband for our fourth wedding anniversary.
Instead, looking through the window of our beachfront estate, I saw him playing the perfect, loving father to a "tragic widow's" daughter, kissing the widow with practiced, casual intimacy.
Fleeing in pure panic, I got into a horrific car crash.
Waking up in the VIP hospital room, I kept my eyes shut and heard my husband talking to his best friend right beside my bed.
"She's just a party girl who knows how to swipe a black card. I only play the part because I need her father's proxy vote for the IPO."
"Every time I have to touch her in bed, it feels like a corporate obligation. It makes me sick."
Later, even my own father demanded I step down from my company role and publicly welcome the mistress, just to protect the family's investment in the upcoming ten-billion-dollar IPO.
Four years of marriage and quiet humiliations, all reduced to a calculated lie. They all thought I was just a brainless, hysterical socialite who could be easily manipulated and discarded.
They didn't know that the core anti-aging algorithm his entire empire relied on was secretly built by me.
I calmly pulled out my phone and texted my divorce lawyer.
"I want him bankrupt. On the day his company rings the bell, I am going to burn his entire life to the ground."