LOGINFelix Laurent had one dream: art school in Paris. Then his family's bankruptcy turned him into a bargaining chip. When his brother refuses to marry billionaire CEO Damien Cross, Felix becomes the replacement. Six days to learn a new identity. Six days before he walks down the aisle as someone else. Three years trapped in a contract marriage before he can reclaim his life. Damien Cross doesn't do love. He does business. This marriage is just another merger, another deal. He barely remembers the arrogant heir he's marrying. But the man standing at the altar isn't who Damien expected. Gentle where he should be bold. Artistic where he should be cunning. And far too innocent for someone who's supposed to be a Playboy. When the truth shatters everything, Damien faces an impossible choice: destroy the man who deceived him, or fight for the love he never saw coming. Some lies are worth forgiving. Some deceptions lead to truth.
View MoreI don't remember the last ten feet.I remember the concrete, cold and gritty under my palms. I remember the iron frame of the chair scraping behind me, the awful dry rattle of it, and the hot sting of the plastic tie that still bound my right wrist to a bent length of steel. I remember voices shouting. Boots drumming. A flashlight beam swinging across the floor and across my hands and across a long dark smear of red that I kept crawling through without letting myself understand what it was.I remember his face.That was all. For the whole length of that terrible journey, there was only his face, floating at the end of a tunnel of smoke and light, pale and streaked with soot and so impossibly *there* that I thought if I looked away he might vanish."Felix," he said.His lips barely moved.I reached him.Someone cut the tie around my wrist. I felt a tug, and a snap, and a sudden strange lightness, as though a weight I'd carried for years had been taken off my arm. I didn't look to see w
It didn't hurt.That was the first strange thing. I'd always imagined that being shot would feel like something. A burn. A blow. A flash of agony that announced itself to the whole body. Instead there was only a vast, hollow, ringing quiet, and a sensation of warmth spreading down my right arm like water from a tipped glass.I looked down.My shirt was red.It had been white a moment ago. I was almost sure of it. I remembered buttoning it, in a bedroom, in a life that felt like a very long time ago, for a gala at which a thousand people had applauded a speech about trust. Now the front of it was soaked from the shoulder to the ribs, a dark, wet, spreading stain, and something warm was running over my fingers and dripping from my knuckles onto the floor.*Huh,* I thought.My knees weren't working.I noticed that with polite interest. A kind of astonished courtesy, as if the legs had been consulted and had declined to cooperate. The concrete tilted. The smoke swung up on one side like t
*Take me instead.*The words hung in the smoke.I heard them. I heard every one of them, as though they were being spoken very slowly in a vast empty church. *Take me instead, Sebastian. Leave him out of this.* The voice was so calm, so level, so terrifyingly quiet that for a second I didn't recognize it.Then I did.*No.*I'd said it with my lips. I'd said it with my eyes. I'd poured every ounce of what I had into that one silent syllable and flung it across ten feet of smoke at the man standing there in the ruined light with his hands open at his sides.*No. No. Please. Don't.*He looked at me.For a heartbeat, his eyes softened. Something moved in them, a small, helpless tenderness, a smile that wasn't a smile. It was the look of a man who has heard a plea and understood it and has no intention of obeying.*Damien.**You idiot. You beautiful, stubborn, impossible idiot.*Behind me, Sebastian was breathing.I could feel it. The hard, ragged heave of his chest against my back. The ar
Everything stopped.That was what I noticed first. Not the silence, though there was silence, vast and ringing, the kind that comes after a bell. It was something deeper. As though the building itself had drawn a breath and was holding it. The smoke hung motionless in the flashlight beams. The last pigeons had settled. Even the water, lapping at the pilings beyond the walls, seemed to wait.Ten feet.That was the distance between my pistol and the man's head.It wasn't a head. It was a head and a head. Sebastian Moreau crouched behind the steel chair like a man behind a barricade, one arm hooked around Felix's throat, one knee braced against the frame, so that a thin pale slice of his face showed over Felix's shoulder and nothing else. A cheekbone. A gray eye. A temple, dewed with sweat.And a barrel, black and enormous, pressed into the soft hollow behind Felix's ear.I had the angle.I'd have called it three inches. Four. A fraction of a second, if my hand held. I'd practiced on a r
The city looked like a circuit board from up here.I stood at the window of my office on the sixty-second floor of Cross Tower, watching the lights blink and pulse in the darkness below. Ten PM. Most people had gone home hours ago.I preferred it this way. Quiet. Empty. No one asking questions I di
The shouting started while I was sketching.I was in my room, halfway through drawing the view from my window, when my father's voice exploded through the house.I grabbed my sketchbook and the acceptance letter I'd been using as a bookmark. My hands were still black with charcoal. I didn't think.
The shouting woke me at dawn.I'd barely slept. Spent most of the night staring at that marriage contract, at my photo paper-clipped where it didn't belong. When I finally passed out around four AM, my dreams were full of men in suits dragging me down endless hallways.Now my father's voice was sha
The hairdresser arrived at eight AM on day two.I sat in the chair my father had set up in the bathroom while a woman named Rita mixed chemicals in a bowl. The smell made my nose burn."Darker," my father said from the doorway. "His hair is too light. Marcus's is almost black."Rita nodded and adde






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