Left At The Altar, She Became The Bride Of His Arch-Nemesis
Since returning to her family, Evelyn had never truly been accepted or treated as their own daughter.
On her wedding day, her parents chose her adopted sister over her, and the man she was supposed to marry abandoned her on the highway for his true love without even looking back once.
Heartbroken but resolute, she tore off her veil and stood before his rival. "I dare you to steal the bride."
Shane met her gaze. "Why wouldn't I?"
Their impulsive marriage shocked everyone. Her ex later begged, "Give me another chance."
Shane pulled her close, his voice cold. "Too late. She's my wife now."
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Chapter 4
The noise in the room died at once.
Everyone present understood what that meant. Only a few in Slomery ever set foot on the upper floors of the Gilded Spire, yet Evelyn was being taken there by one of the owner's men.
Attention shifted straight to her. No one knew who she was.
Kendra moved closer and held onto Cole's arm. "Cole, didn't he just call Ms. Fowler 'Mrs. Bennett'? Could he have gotten it wrong?"
That was when it clicked for Cole. Marc must have mistaken Evelyn for his wife, and that was why she was being treated this way.
As Marc started leading Evelyn upstairs, Cole and his friends tried to follow. They didn't get far. Bodyguards blocked them at the bottom of the stairs.
Panic showed on Cole's face. "That's my fiancée who just went up! Your boss must be expecting me as well."
The guards didn't react. "Sorry, but the boss only asked for Mrs. Bennett. You're not allowed upstairs."
Marc continued ahead and brought Evelyn to the third floor. "Sir, Mrs. Bennett is here."
Evelyn looked toward the table and saw two men playing. One of them had a scar across his face, and she guessed he was the owner of the Gilded Spire.
She walked over and stood beside Shane. He tilted his chin.
Standing nearby, Gavin Reed, Shane's assistant, spoke at once. "Mrs. Bennett, we've prepared a change of clothes for you. Please follow me."
"Alright," Evelyn responded, then followed him to the dressing room.
Even with the door shut behind her, their voices still carried inside.
Leland Barnett took out a cigarette and lit it. "Mr. Bennett, I won't make this hard. Beat me in one round here, and we'll talk about working together."
Shane raised his eyes and looked at him. "So you're trying something else since business didn't work for you."
Leland smirked. "What's wrong? Are you avoiding this because you think you'll lose?"
Silence settled outside for a brief moment.
The door opened, and Evelyn stepped out. A red dress rested on her shoulders, fitted at the waist and outlining her figure.
Tension still filled the space as she moved toward Shane.
At that exact moment, Leland placed his cards down and laughed. "6-7-8 straight. Looks like luck's on my side. If you want to win this, you'll need three of a kind."
His gaze shifted as he spoke, landing on Shane's face-down cards. "Something tells me those aren't big enough, am I right?"
Shane didn't respond. His eyes narrowed, and his finger stayed on the cards without turning them over.
Without warning, a hand reached in and pressed against the cards. After a short pause, it flipped them open.
Three Aces lay on the table.
Evelyn lifted her gaze and smiled at Leland. "Seems like luck's with me too."
Surprise showed in Shane's eyes as he looked at her. He knew these cards weren't Aces before.
Across from them, Leland's expression shifted. His attention stayed on Evelyn. "Let's raise the stakes. If you win, I'll sign the contract on the spot."
"Fine." Evelyn took a seat across from him. "What are we playing?"
With a tap on the table, Leland signaled someone over, and two dice cups were placed in front of them. "We'll keep it simple. Roll the dice. Highest number takes it."
"Let's start," Evelyn said.
"Hold on," Leland added. "We've only talked about what happens if you win. What do I get if you lose?"
Evelyn lowered her gaze, thinking. Before she could answer, Shane spoke beside her. "I'll hand over the development rights to the Eastbay District."
Leland brought his hands together with a clap, his mood lifting. "Now that's what I like to see. The bet's set."
Closing the distance, Evelyn leaned toward Shane until only a breath separated them. "You're not worried I might lose?"
His answer came without pause. "I believe in you."
He caught her scent, and something in his expression shifted. "Even if it happens, it's just one project. I can take that loss."
While they spoke, a mechanical sound rose around them as the glass panels on the third floor began to lower.
Below, the main hall broke into disorder.
The instant Leland confirmed the wager, a voice rang out across the space.
"The Sovereign Game has begun. Once the bet is placed, withdrawal means all winnings go to the other side."
Shock spread through the crowd.
Cole lifted his head, caught off guard. "The Sovereign Game hasn't been used in ten years. Why now?"
Kendra tightened her hold on his arm, confusion clear. "Cole, what is that?"
One of Cole's friends answered, "Every round involves stakes worth billions. Beat Mr. Barnett, and he'll agree to anything. But no one clears it. Over the past decade, only one person tried, and that ended in failure. Whoever started it now must be asking for trouble."
People stretched to see what was happening upstairs.
Moments later, the voice sounded again.
"Verification complete. The opposing stake is the Eastbay District development rights."
Cole stopped where he stood, and his face changed at once.
One of his friends glanced at him and spoke without thinking. "Eastbay District... isn't that tied to your father's illegitimate son?"
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7.3
Seven years ago, my fiancé, Don Dante Moretti, sent me to prison to take the fall for my adopted sister, Chiara. He called it a gift-a way to protect me from a worse fate.
Today, he picked me up from prison only to abandon me at my family's estate. His reason? Chiara was having another one of her "episodes."
My parents then informed me I'd be staying in the third-floor storage room, so as not to disturb the fragile girl who stole my life.
They celebrated her "recovery" with a lavish dinner party, while I was treated like a ghost. When I refused to join, my mother hissed that I was ungrateful, and my father called me jealous.
They assumed I couldn't understand their venomous whispers. But prison was my university. I learned Spanish. I understood every word.
It was then I realized I wasn't just a sacrifice; I was disposable. The love I once felt for all of them had turned to ash.
That night, in the dusty storage room, I logged onto an encrypted channel I'd set up years ago. A single message was waiting: "The offer stands. Do you accept?" My hands, scarred and steady, typed back, "I accept."
7.6
To pay for her father's life support, Haleigh sold herself into a marriage with Fabian Blackburn, a ruthless billionaire in a deep coma.
But on her wedding day, she caught her boyfriend cheating with her stepsister, laughing about how they would steal the inheritance the second Fabian stopped breathing. Cornered and desperate, Haleigh secretly underwent IVF using her comatose husband's frozen sperm to secure the family trust.
Weeks later, a miracle happened. Fabian woke up.
But instead of gratitude, he treated her like trash. He threw annulment papers at her face, completely disgusted by the arranged marriage.
"If you try any dirty tricks to get pregnant, I will personally drag you to a clinic and have that bastard scraped out of you."
Terrified, Haleigh hid her positive pregnancy test and desperately tried to hack her way to enough cash to escape. But while using his computer, she accidentally opened a highly classified folder.
Inside was a medical file and a photo of a severely disabled girl who looked exactly like Fabian.
Before she could process it, Fabian walked in. Seeing the screen, his cold mask shattered into pure, unhinged madness. He lunged across the room, lifting her off the floor by her throat, completely ignoring her desperate gasps for air.
"Lock her in the basement," he roared to his guards. "No food. No water."
Curled on the freezing concrete, clutching her newly pregnant belly, Haleigh didn't understand what she had just seen that turned him into a murderous monster.
But she knew one thing: if she didn't escape this terrifying estate, both she and his unborn heir would die in the dark.
9.5
Xander Savage plays with footballs.
Freya Woods plays with hearts.
The other plays to win, one plays for fun.
Xander is the campus football champion, gentle, gorgeous, misunderstood. Everyone thinks he's a player, but he's actually the only good boy in school.
Freya is the campus play girl, bold, wild.
When fate throws them together, sparks fly...Neither knows their souls have met before...long ago, in another life, where they loved passionately and broke disastrously. But this time? They're destined to rewrite their ending...can they actually re write the stars?
LOVE ME LIKE A CHAMPION is a reincarnation campus romance about a boy who loves too deeply and a girl who's terrified to be loved.
9.5
Janet woke up gasping, the phantom fire of a deadly explosion still scorching her lungs. She had been reborn three years in the past, on the exact day her mother forced her into a marriage contract with Gaylord Bradford, a paralyzed and severely disfigured billionaire.
Before she could even process her second chance, her cousin Kandy kicked the bedroom door open, flaunting a massive diamond ring. Kandy, who had also been reborn, smugly announced she had stolen Janet's Wall Street golden boy fiancé, Jax Adler.
"You're going to marry that paralyzed monster," Kandy spat, gloating that she would build a billionaire dynasty with Jax while Janet wiped drool off a rotting corpse. Kandy expected Janet to have a complete mental collapse, completely unaware that Gaylord's own medical team was secretly injecting him with lethal neurotoxins to finish him off.
But Janet only felt a cold, clinical pity. Kandy's "prophetic" memories were a polluted lie. Jax was actually sterile and dying of irreversible kidney failure, while Gaylord wasn't a dying freak—he was a dormant god whose body was merely in a high-dimensional hibernation. Why would Janet mourn losing a doomed fraud?
Leaving her delusional cousin behind, Janet packed her bags and headed straight to Gaylord's maximum-security military cell. She physically tackled his corrupt doctor, drove three bio-electric silver needles into the crippled king's spine to awaken his deadened nerves, and looked him dead in his glacial blue eye.
"Sign the marriage contract," Janet whispered. "I will make you walk again, and we will take back everything."
9.0
Eileen woke up in a trashed hotel room, her head pounding with the pathetic memories of a despised Hollywood actress.
Outside the window, paparazzi were already screaming about her manufactured cheating scandal, but the real nightmare was waiting at her door.
Her paralyzed, billionaire husband, Carlisle Vinson, looked at her with pure disgust while his butler shoved a divorce settlement at her chest.
"Mr. Vinson is offering a severance package of fifty million dollars, provided you sign immediately and vacate the premises."
The original owner had left her an absolute mess.
Her trusted assistant had sold her room number to the press to frame her, and a playboy had scammed her out of her entire two million dollar life savings.
If she signed those papers and lost the Vinson family's protection, the breach of contract fees and her enemies in the industry would swallow her alive in days.
Eileen felt a cold fury override the original owner's lingering panic.
Why should she take the fall and be thrown out on the streets while the parasites who set her up lived out their wealthy fantasies?
She had died once, and she wasn't about to waste her second chance playing the victim.
Eileen slammed the heavy divorce folder shut right against the butler's chest.
"I'm not signing," she said with a terrifying, absolute calm.
She stepped behind her husband's wheelchair, ready to shield him from the cameras, secretly cure his dead legs, and make everyone who betrayed her bleed.
9.5
How far are you willing to go for your family's company?
Eloise Jane Lopez is the one true child of the Lopezes, and due to her sick father's wish, she needs to marry a man she doesn't know to keep the company her parents manage in order. And the man she will marry is none other than Cosmo Dominguez, a multi-billionaire, whose supposed fiancée was Eloise's step-sister but got pregnant, leaving Eloise with no choice but to be the substitute bride.
After the wedding, Cosmo laid out another agreement with Eloise, that the marriage would only be temporary, and that they would have to separate after two years.
Can they uphold the signed agreement until the end, or can they stop the feelings forming between them?