One Year as Mrs.Carusso
Megan Valtz has spent her whole life paying for a debt that isn't even hers -one tied to her father's death. One that never seems to shrink no matter how much she and her mother sacrifice. When debt collectors show up at their small shop threatening arrest, and the shock sends her mother collapsing to the floor, a cold, a powerful stranger is the only reason it doesn't end in tragedy.
She doesn't even catch his name, just his credit card, left behind in the chaos - and when her mother needs emergency surgery she can't afford, Megan makes a decision she can't take back.
The card belongs to Arian Carussa, billionaire CEO of Z Corporation, and using it without permission is fraud. He has every right to destroy her for it.
Instead, he makes her an offer: marry him for one year, and the debt, the fraud and the mess her life has become all disappear. In exchange, she becomes the wife the board needs to see, before he is forced out of the company.
It's supposed to be paper work, nothing more.
But a shared roof, a rushed wedding, and secrets neither of them saw coming have a way of turning "fake" into something neither of them can walk away from - especially when they discover the people who ruined Megan's family were never who they thought they were.
Basahin
Chapter: CHAPTER FIVEMegan's POVI had two days to prepare for a wedding, which meant I had no time to process that I was getting married.The two days passed in a strange, quick and slow manner both. Arian's assistant, a brisk, unreadable woman called Priya, handled everything. The venue, a small private hall attached to one of the Carusso family's properties. The dress, handed to us at the shop the morning it arrived, still in its garment bag, my mother running her hands over the fabric like she was barely believing it was real. The guest list, which Priya informed me would be "immediate family and essential witnesses only," which I learned meant precisely six people.I spent most of those two days lying awake at night, staring at my ceiling, going through everything that had happened since the morning those men walked into our shop — my mother collapsing, the ambulance, the credit card, the confrontation, the contract, and now this. It didn't feel real. None of it felt real, not even now, with the dres
Huling Na-update: 2026-09-07
Chapter: CHAPTER FOURArian's POVShe arrived at precisely nine in the morning the following day, which I acknowledged with an unusual degree of satisfaction. Whatever else Megan Valtz was, she wasn't a waste of time.I heard her story before I saw her. Killian gave me a call from the floor below, his voice a mixture of amusement and caution."There's a young woman at the reception requesting to meet with you," he said. "The security was not going to let it pass through the front desk — she did not look like she belonged there, for starters, and she did not give up the company's name or reference an appointment.""Let her up," I said. "Now."There was a pause on the other end of the phone, as if he wanted to ask something and then changed his mind. "Understood."A few minutes later, my office door opened, and I watched Megan Valtz stroll in, dismissing a visibly confused assistant who hadn't been told more than to let her pass. She didn't look the part of a successful businesswoman — jeans and a jacket tha
Huling Na-update: 2026-09-07
Chapter: CHAPTER 3Megan's POVThe hospital wasted no time informing us of the news that we already feared. My mother needed surgery; her heart, the doctors said, had a blockage that had been building for years, waiting for precisely the type of shock that she had been put through that morning to finally announce itself.I sat in the hallway outside her room for a long while after they told me, staring at nothing, running the math in my head over and over again, no matter how many times it came out the same. We didn't have it. Not close to it. Every last coin we had ever managed to find was swallowed up by a debt that seemed to never shrink no matter how much we fed it.I don't remember deciding to reach into my bag. I remember only that my fingers found the card first — the one I'd shoved in there absentmindedly, still meaning to return it to whoever it belonged to once things had settled down.Mr. Arian Carusso.I turned it over twice, reading his name printed there in neat, embossed letters, feeling
Huling Na-update: 2026-09-07
Chapter: CHAPTER TWOArian's POVI was ten minutes late by the time I returned to my car.The chaos of the shop — the screams, the woman on the floor, the two men who regarded me as if I'd just wandered into an intimate conversation — lingered long enough in my mind that I almost expected to see them waiting when I returned. I didn't know why I'd stopped. My car had been caught in the commotion, true, but I could have waited it out from the back seat. It was what I'd done countless times before for other inconveniences of the city. Instead, I had gotten out.I told myself it was efficiency. A blocked street wasted time, and I hated wasting time. It was the only explanation I could think of, one I repeated to myself over and over again on the drive to the office until I almost believed it. And yet, somehow, the image of her, on her knees, shaking, refusing to give in to the two burly men towering over her, haunted the recesses of my mind every time the road ahead required me to slow down.By the time I wal
Huling Na-update: 2026-09-07
Chapter: CHAPTER 1Megan's POVThe shop was my mother's dream long before it became our only chance of surviving. Three plastic tables, a counter that had seen better days, and a sign hanging above the door still reading Vanessa's Kitchen in peeling paint made for the perfect setup. We made sandwiches, coffee, whatever the people needed to get them through their journey to work — being right on the road leading up to Z Corporation ensured that we never ran out of customers. Suits came by every morning like clockwork, phones to their ears, not even looking up as they ordered and dropped exact change onto the counter, and it wasn't much, but it was ours, and most mornings, it was enough.I was behind the counter that morning, wiping a mug clean, somewhat listening to my mother hum as she flipped bread onto the small grill it had been set up on, when the bell above the door rang, harder than it should have.Two men walked in like they owned the place, and I recognized one of them immediately — the taller o
Huling Na-update: 2026-09-07
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