CONTRACT MARRIAGE TO MY BILLIONAIRE BESTFRIEND

The kiss had gone on eleven seconds too long, and Sophia Bennett was the only person in the ballroom counting.Liam Kingston's hand had started at her jaw, steady and practised, exactly where marketing wanted it for the charity gala rehearsal. Somewhere around second four it had slid to the curve of her neck instead, and his fingers had curled there like he'd forgotten there was a call sheet at all, like he'd forgotten there was a camera crew testing angles twenty feet away.Sophia had kissed this man forty-three times in six years of friendship. Every single one lasted three seconds. Camera-ready. Rehearsed. The kind of kiss two best friends performed when the press needed a photo and Liam needed to look like a man who wasn't married to his company.This one didn't feel rehearsed.His mouth was patient at first. Then it wasn't. Sophia felt his control slip somewhere around second seven, felt it in the way his breath changed against her lips, in the way his other hand found her waist

Sophia had imagined her wedding exactly once in her adult life, in the vague, embarrassed way most people did, and it had never once involved a courthouse anteroom with marble floors and a dress fitted for her by strangers eleven days ago.She stood behind the closed doors with her mother fussing over a loose pin in her hair, and her heart was doing something violent and unfamiliar beneath the borrowed pearls at her throat."You don't have to do this," her mother whispered, misreading the panic on her face entirely. "It's not too late to—""I want to," Sophia said, and was startled by how true it felt leaving her mouth.Three years of loving Liam Kingston in complete silence had trained her to expect exactly this feeling and nothing more, a permanent, private ache she carried everywhere and showed no one. She had prepared herself for a courthouse ceremony that would feel like theatre, a legal formality dressed up as romance for the sake of a will's cruel timeline. She had not prepared

"Nothing," Liam said again, and this time he actually crossed the room to prove it, reaching for her hand like physical distance was the problem rather than the six-word answer he refused to expand on. "Ethan sends cryptic messages when he's stressed about the company. It doesn't mean anything.""It means something to you. I watched your face.""Sophia, I need you to trust me on this one.""You're asking me to trust a man who won't tell me the truth." She pulled her hand back, more hurt than angry, though the two had started blurring together somewhere around midnight. "That's not how trust works."He didn't have an answer for that or chose not to give her one, and the silence that followed carried them both to bed on opposite sides of the pillow wall; neither of them had bothered rebuilding since the wedding night.By the time their flight landed in New York the following afternoon, the story had already broken.Sophia's phone lit up with forty-three notifications before the wheels f