All Chapters of THE BILLIONAIRE'S CONTRACT MARRIAGE : Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

Ella’s phone buzzed against the desk before she’d even taken off her coat.Ella, where are you? Daniel’s asking for the file. Her thumb hovered over the screen. Twenty minutes ago, she’d been holding her father’s hand, cold in that hospital bed, listening to the sound of his heartbeat like it might stop between one beep and the next. Now she was supposed to sit here, in this chair, and act as if none of that happened. She texted back with trembling fingers. On it. Sorry, family matters. Family matters… as if these two words were enough to explain everything.She placed the phone down, pressed her hands flat on the desk until they stopped shaking. Around her, the office sounded the same as usual. Printers running, someone typing too fast, a phone ringing over and over again before someone picked it up. None of it slowed down for her. None of it knew.She sat at her desk and started making a contact list of the people she would call.Mom’s sister. Aunt Carol.She hadn’t spoken to her

The dress was borrowed. That was the first thing Ella noticed in the mirror at city hall… pale white fabric hanging off her shoulders, belonging to some stranger from a rental shop two blocks away. It felt about right. Nothing about today belonged to her either.“He has all the money in the world, yet he couldn’t even buy me a decent dress?” Ella muttered under her breath.Her father sat in a wheelchair by the window, three days out of surgery, and he was thinner than she’d ever seen him. His color was back in his cheeks for the first time in weeks.She had asked the doctor for permission to bring her father to the wedding. She owed him that much… to let him be part of her big day. Even if it didn’t feel like her big day, at least to him it did. The doctor had granted it on the condition that a nurse must be with him throughout, just in case.“You look beautiful,” he said, his voice had that fragile, careful sound. “Your mother would be so proud of you.”“I might cry,” Ella admitted,