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 3
Cora stepped out of the hotel lobby. She was wearing a cheap, fast-fashion floral dress Callum had ordered from a delivery service. The fabric scratched against her skin.
A massive, midnight-black Rolls Royce Cullinan glided to a stop right in front of her.
The tinted window rolled down. Callum was in the driver's seat, wearing a plain black t-shirt. He nodded toward the passenger side. "Get in."
Cora froze on the pavement. She stared at the chrome grille of the luxury SUV. "Are you kidding me?" she asked. "You're broke."
Callum let out a frustrated sigh and slapped the leather steering wheel. "It's a prop car. We rented it yesterday to shoot a music video. They charge by the hour, and I still have it until noon." He scowled at the dashboard. "The gas mileage on this tank is literally bankrupting me."
Cora hesitated, but the irritation in his voice sounded genuine. She opened the heavy door and climbed in. The smell of rich, untouched leather and expensive cologne filled her senses. She felt entirely out of place.
Callum shifted gears, and the massive car merged smoothly into the chaotic Manhattan traffic.
The cabin was dead silent. Cora turned her head, staring out the thick glass window. The city blurred as they drove. Her reflection in the glass looked pale and exhausted.
Her mind violently yanked her back to last night. The Hodges Group annual gala.
She remembered standing in the corner of the grand ballroom, wearing a rented dress she couldn't afford. She had watched Bennett standing by the champagne tower, surrounded by wealthy heirs and socialites.
She remembered Bennett's younger sister, Seraphina, laughing loudly. "Look at her standing there like a lost puppy," Seraphina had sneered to her friends. "She's just the dead butler's baggage. She actually thinks she belongs here."
Cora had held her breath, waiting for Bennett to defend her. He had been standing two feet away.
Instead, Bennett had taken a sip of his drink, his face completely bored. "Leave her alone, Sera. She knows her place."
Her place.
The words had sliced through Cora's chest like a rusty blade. Twelve years. Twelve years of organizing his life, anticipating his moods, loving him in pathetic, silent agony. And to him, she was just a piece of furniture that knew its place.
A sharp pain radiated from her palms. Cora looked down. She was gripping the seatbelt so hard her fingernails had broken the skin of her palms.
The car stopped at a red light. Callum didn't say a word. He reached out and turned the dial on the climate control, blasting warm air into the cabin.
He opened the center console, pulled out a bottle of Evian water, twisted the cap off, and handed it to her.
Cora took the bottle. Her cold fingers brushed against the warm, rough skin of his knuckles. The sudden heat jolted her out of her dark thoughts.
"Thank you," she whispered. She took a sip, forcing the lump in her throat down.
Callum kept his eyes on the road. "Whoever made you feel like you aren't worth anything," he said, his voice casual but laced with a hard edge, "is a complete and utter idiot."
The words hit Cora right in the center of her chest. Her throat tightened painfully. Tears flooded her eyes, hot and fast.
She didn't argue. She just turned her head back to the window. A single tear escaped, sliding down her cheek and dropping onto her hand. It felt like a physical release of twelve years of poison.
The Rolls Royce turned a corner. The grand, classical columns of the New York City Hall came into view.
Callum pulled the SUV into a temporary parking spot and killed the engine. He turned to her. "Ready?"
Cora took a deep breath. She reached into her cheap purse, pulled out a compact mirror, and quickly applied a layer of red lipstick. It was war paint.
She snapped the mirror shut. Her eyes were hard. "I have never been more awake in my entire life."
They pushed the doors open and stepped out onto the sidewalk. They walked side-by-side toward the massive stone steps.
Cora's phone vibrated violently in her purse. She pulled it out.
The screen flashed with the name: Bennett Hodges.
Yesterday, seeing that name would have made her heart race with hope. Today, it just made her stomach churn with nausea.
Cora didn't break her stride. Right in front of Callum, she pressed the red button, rejecting the call. Then she held the power button down and watched the screen go completely black.
She shoved the dead phone back into her purse and walked up the steps.
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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."