SUBSTITUTE BRIDE

Elena Brooks never expected to become a substitute bride. When her beautiful half-sister Vanessa flees the arranged marriage to Damian Sterling—the cold, wheelchair-bound heir of a powerful empire—Elena is forced to take her place. The contract is simple and ruthless: one year of marriage, public perfection, and the immediate production of an heir. In exchange, her family’s crushing debts will be erased and her sister’s medical care will be secured. Damian Sterling is not the broken man the world believes him to be. Controlled, commanding, and haunted by the assassination attempt that left him paralyzed, he accepts the marriage as a strategic necessity. A wife makes him harder to kill. An heir makes him untouchable. Feelings were never part of the agreement. From the wedding night, the contract turns physical. What begins as obligation becomes something far more dangerous—possession, hunger, and a growing attachment neither of them can afford. But while Elena learns the weight of Damian’s silence and the heat of his carefully guarded desire, enemies move in the shadows. Someone still wants the Sterling heir removed. And the closer Elena gets to Damian’s heart, the more she becomes a target herself. As secrets about the accident, residual sensation Damian has hidden, and the true motives of his controlling father begin to surface, Elena must decide how much of herself she is willing to give—and whether love can survive a marriage built on lies, duty, and the demand for an heir. In a world where power is currency and vulnerability is a weapon, one year may not be long enough… or it may be long enough to ruin them both.