All Chapters of Substitute Bride: The Billionaire's Hidden Twins: Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

The knife slipped and sliced open the pad of my thumb before I understood that my mother had just told me I was being sold.Blood welled fast, dripping onto the lemon I had been halving for her tea. I stared at the red bead on the yellow rind and felt nothing. My ears were still ringing with the sentence she had dropped into the kitchen like a dinner plate.You will be marrying Dante Caldwell tonight."Rosalie, you are bleeding on the counter," my mother sighed, as though the cut was the inconvenience in the room. She tossed a dish towel at me without looking up from her phone. "Wrap it. The stylist arrives in forty minutes."I could not move."Mama." My voice came out five years old. "What did you just say?"She set down her phone. She was wearing her good pearls. She had dressed up for this."I said what I said. The Caldwells agreed to buy out your father's debt. Fourteen million dollars. Do you know what that number sounds like when you have been praying the bank will not call?""B

A month in the east wing turned me into something smaller than a person.Six bedrooms. Three sitting rooms. A library full of books nobody read. The windows faced an interior courtyard with a fountain that did not run. I had one key, and it opened one door, and that door opened onto one corridor that ended at a locked set of double doors.The staff brought my meals on a tray. For the first week I ate alone at a little round table by the window. By the second week I was eating standing up at the counter, because sitting at a table set for one, three times a day, was starting to do something unspeakable to me.Vivienne had not left.She was staying in a guest suite in the main house. Our parents had sent an "emergency bag" with her. It had turned into two trunks. Then a shipment of her easel and canvases. Mrs. Caldwell adored her. She had taken her to the horse show. She had introduced her to a shipping magnate's wife at a luncheon as the lovely girl we had hoped would be our Dante's.I

"Amala, if you put one more sticker on your brother's forehead I am going to cry real tears, and you know I do not do that in public.""Mama, he likes it.""He does not like it.""Yes I do," Alexander said solemnly from his seat across the aisle, a gold foil star stuck between his eyebrows. "Tell her I like it, Uncle Lucien.""He likes it," Lucien said without looking up from his tablet. "You lost this round, Rose."I let my head fall back against the seat of the private jet and I laughed, really laughed, the way you can only laugh when the thing you are laughing at is the sweetest problem you have ever had.Seven years. Seven years and ninety-four days, if we were counting from the morning the delivery driver opened her passenger door for me on a road I had never driven down again.I had counted every day the first year. Then I had stopped counting and started building. There had been nothing else to do.The first apartment had been one room above Mrs. Ebele's bakery in Port Adenia.