LOVE ME OR HATE ME
"I am not my sister. And you can LOVE ME OR HATE ME for that, but you don't get to punish me for her sins."
Daniel breaks. The wall doesn't just come down. It collapses.
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Aria Blackwood didn't plan to fall in love with her boss. She planned to keep her head down, do her job, and ignore the way Daniel Cole's presence rearranged every room he entered, including the room inside her chest.
Daniel Cole didn't plan to feel anything ever again. Not after Vivienne. Not after the betrayal that stripped him of $50,000, a fake pregnancy that never existed, and every reason to trust a woman's smile.
He swore on her name. On her bloodline. On every person who carried her last name.
He just didn't know he'd already fallen for one.
When the truth surfaces at the worst possible moment, mid-engagement, mid-happiness, mid-finally, Daniel must choose between the wound that shaped him and the woman who healed him without even knowing he was bleeding.
Love was never supposed to find him again.
It sent the wrong sister anyway.
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Chapter: PATIENT MANAria's POVThe break room at noon was the one place on the 34th floor where the building's carefully maintained professionalism loosened slightly around the edges. Conversations got louder. Shoulders dropped. People remembered they were human beings and not just extensions of their job titles for approximately forty five minutes before everything tightened back up again.I usually loved this part of the day.Today I carried my lunch to the corner table by the window and sat down with the specific intention of eating quietly and thinking about absolutely nothing and giving my overworked mind the kind of rest it had been refusing since yesterday morning when Daniel Cole set a cup of coffee on my desk and said same as yours like it was a simple unremarkable thing.It was not a simple unremarkable thing.I had thought about it through the rest of yesterday. Through the drive home. Through the ceiling staring that had replaced actual sleep. Through this morning's commute and the elevator r
Last Updated: 2026-02-27
Chapter: THE MORNING AFTERAria's POVI did not sleep well.I had told myself I would. I had gone through the whole routine deliberately. Tea. Book. Lights off at ten. All the things a sensible woman does when she needs to reset her mind and approach the next morning like a professional with her feelings completely under control.I stared at my ceiling until past midnight instead.The problem was not the two minutes in his office. The problem was not the question he had asked or the answer I had given. The problem was what happened after. The way he had said *it's okay Aria* like those three words were carrying something heavier than their surface. Like a man lifting something carefully because he knows it might break if he puts it down wrong.I had replayed those three words approximately forty seven times before I finally fell asleep.....I arrived at Cole Enterprises at eight fifteen the next morning with my portfolio pressed against my chest and a very firm internal speech already prepared about profession
Last Updated: 2026-02-27
Chapter: HE HAD ALREADY DECIDESDaniel's POVShe had been gone for exactly four minutes when I stopped pretending to read the Meridian file.I pushed it aside and stood and walked to the window the way I always did when something needed thinking through that my desk could not contain. The city stretched below me in its usual indifferent vastness. Glass buildings catching afternoon light. Traffic moving in patterns that made sense from up here even when they felt like chaos from the middle of them. I had stood at this window a hundred times and found the view clarifying.Today it gave me nothing.Because the thing I was thinking about had nothing to do with the city or the contracts or the forty seven unread emails sitting in my inbox demanding the kind of focused attention that I was completely incapable of giving right now.I was thinking about Aria Blackwood walking out of my office.The way she had stood there and asked me quietly if everything was okay with a voice that carried something underneath the professio
Last Updated: 2026-02-22
Chapter: THAT WAS NOT ENOUGHDaniel's POVThe question left my mouth before I had fully decided to ask it.I was not a man who spoke before thinking. Every word I had ever used in a boardroom, in a negotiation, in any room that mattered had been measured and deliberate and chosen with the precision of someone who understood that words were not just sounds. They were commitments. They were revelations. They were the kind of thing that once released could not be recalled no matter how badly you needed them back.And yet I had just asked Blackwood if she loved another man.In my own office.With the door closed.I stood behind my desk and kept my face completely still the way I had trained myself to do in every situation that threatened to show me for what I actually was underneath all of this. Composed. Unreachable. The man who had rebuilt himself from nothing and made sure the foundation this time was concrete instead of trust.But my heart was not behaving like concrete right now.My heart was doing something I h
Last Updated: 2026-02-22
Chapter: NOT IN FRONT OF EVERYONEAria's POVThe break room at noon was always the loudest part of the day.Laughter spilling over lunch containers. Conversations overlapping. The smell of heated food mixing with fresh coffee and the particular energy of people who had been holding their professional faces in place since morning and were finally allowed to exhale. I usually loved this part of the day. The few minutes where the 34th floor stopped being a machine and remembered it was made of human beings.Today I walked into that noise and felt nothing but the dull familiar ache that had been sitting in my chest since morning.I had thought about what happened at my desk all day. The way I had stood in front of Daniel Cole and forgotten every word in the English language. The way he had looked at me in that moment with those dark focused eyes that missed absolutely nothing and I had felt completely and terrifyingly exposed. Like every feeling I had spent eight months carefully folding and hiding behind professionalism
Last Updated: 2026-02-22
Chapter: THE CRIME OF BEING HANDSOMEDaniel's POVI arrived at Cole Enterprises at exactly 10AM.Not because I was late. I was never late. The CEO. But because I had spent the first two hours of my morning in a meeting across town that could have been an email and I had sat through every unnecessary minute of it with the particular patience of a man who had learned that controlling his expression was sometimes the most powerful thing in the room.I stepped off the elevator onto the 34th floor and the floor responded the way it always did. Backs straightened. Conversations dropped to appropriate volumes. Eyes found suddenly urgent things to focus on. I had grown used to this. The way a room rearranged itself around my arrival. The way people became their most professional selves the moment they heard my footsteps in the hallway.I did not find it flattering anymore.I found it efficient.I walked toward my office with my jacket folded over one arm and my phone in my hand, scanning the overnight messages from the Singapore
Last Updated: 2026-02-22
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