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All Chapters of THE BILLIONAIRES 31-DAY CHRISTMAS CONTRACT : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

14 Chapters

CHAPTER 1 Terms and Conditions

❄ · ❄ · ❄At 9:42 on a Saturday night, in front of eight hundred people and a string quartet, Vittorio Marchetti sold his daughter, and he did it with a toast.Elodie Marchetti had been smiling for three hours, and her face had begun to file a complaint. Now it filed a second one.The ballroom of the Drake glittered around her like the inside of a jewelry box. Eight hundred guests moved between the ice sculptures, every one of them holding a glass and an opinion. The Marchetti Foundation Winter Gala had started thirty years ago as a folding table and forty guests, her mother's idea, paper snowflakes taped to a church-basement ceiling. Now men paid fifty thousand dollars for a seat, mostly to be photographed near a name that meant chocolate."Cara." Her father's voice came through the speakers, warm and rounded, the voice he used when he wanted a room to love him. Vittorio Marchetti stood at the head table with his glass raised and his silver hair catching the chandelier light. "A toas

Last Updated : 2026-11-06

CHAPTER 2 The Long Road North

❄ · ❄ · ❄Elodie Marchetti added one page to the contract, and it very nearly ended the deal before it began.She had read the first six pages three times at her kitchen island at two in the morning, with tea going cold beside her and the city asleep in the window. They were, annoyingly, very good. Clear, fair, a little cold at the edges, like the man. Section four covered public affection with the dry precision of a tax code. Section nine, titled Exit, made the end of the whole thing sound like a train schedule.She wrote her own page and called it Section Twelve. It said: Neither party will lie to the other about anything that is not in this contract.Julian's lawyer, a calm woman named Ms. Adeyemi, read it across a glass conference table at nine the next morning and raised one eyebrow so slightly it was almost an act of kindness. "Mr. Hale will want to discuss this."He came in four minutes later, in a charcoal coat with snow still melting on the shoulders, and read the page standi

Last Updated : 2026-11-06

CHAPTER 3 Odalys Does Not Believe in Coincidences

❄ · ❄ · ❄Odalys Hale looked at Elodie the way a customs officer looks at a suitcase with a false bottom."You are shorter than your photographs," she said.The old woman stood at the top of the stone steps with a cane in one hand and a cashmere shawl the color of smoke across her shoulders. Her hair was white and cut like a blade. Her eyes were the pale gray of the Atlantic in January."Grandmother," said Julian, "this is Elodie Marchetti.""I know who she is. I read about her in the Journal. She doubled her father's revenue in six years and was thanked for it by being passed over." Odalys's gaze did not move. "Do you cook, Miss Marchetti?""I bake," said Elodie, "and I burn the dinner roll every time I'm nervous."A pause. Then something in the old woman's face shifted by a single degree. "Honest, at least. Come in. You will freeze, and I won't have it said I let a Marchetti freeze on the first day."The inside of Hollin Hall smelled of woodsmoke, beeswax and cold stone. Portraits c

Last Updated : 2026-11-06

CHAPTER 4 The Woman in the Cream Coat

❄ · ❄ · ❄Cordelia Wyatt asked the question while stirring her tea, so lightly that no one else in the room noticed it was a knife.Elodie had been in rooms with dangerous people before. Her father's boardroom had held a few. But she had never been in a room where the danger arrived wearing cashmere and smiling like a gift."Cordelia Wyatt," said Odalys, with the satisfaction of a chess player setting down a bishop. "My goddaughter. She was good enough to come on short notice.""I wouldn't miss Christmas at Hollin," said Cordelia, and crossed the room with a grace that made the carpet seem lucky. Up close she was even more beautiful than from the doorway, with a wide mouth, green eyes, and a way of looking at a person as if she had already read their file. She kissed Julian's cheek. It was brief and soft and entirely proprietary. "Jules. You look thin.""Cordelia." His voice was level. Too level. It was the voice of a man walking across ice he had personally tested and still did not t

Last Updated : 2026-11-06

CHAPTER 5 What the Kitchen Knows

❄ · ❄ · ❄There was a man sitting in the dark kitchen at two in the morning, and Elodie, one foot on the bottom step, knew who it was by the set of his shoulders.She had come for flour. She could not sleep, and when she could not sleep she baked; it was the only prayer she had ever trusted. Hollin Hall's kitchen lay at the far end of the east wing, down steps worn smooth by two hundred years of servants, a huge, low-ceilinged room of copper pots and scrubbed wood, with a range the size of a small car. At that hour it was lit only by the glow of the banked fire, and the long table in the center looked like an island.Julian had taken off his jacket and his tie. His shirt sleeves were rolled to the elbows, and he sat with a mug of cold tea between his hands, looking at nothing. Admiral lay on his feet. Neither of them looked up when she came in, and for a long moment she stayed on the bottom step, listening to the fire tick and the dog sigh."You can't sleep either," said Julian."I ca

Last Updated : 2026-11-06

CHAPTER 6 Cousins Arrive with Opinions

❄ · ❄ · ❄ Cousin Tobias shook Elodie's hand, calculated her net worth with his eyes, and let go in under three seconds. By nine o'clock the next morning, Hollin Hall had been invaded. They came in three cars and a pickup truck. Tobias arrived first, a heavy, pink-faced young man in a very expensive coat, Winifred's son. Behind him came a pair of teenage twins, Marguerite and Anselm, who each carried a phone and one expression of weary contempt. Then a great-uncle in a wheelchair, who announced that he was deaf and therefore would not be answering any questions. Then a baby. Elodie never learned whose. The house, which had felt like a cold, quiet cathedral, became a market. "And what is it you do, Miss Marchetti?" Tobias asked at the foot of the stairs, thumbs in his waistcoat. "Besides marry?" "I run a company with three hundred and twelve shops and eleven thousand employees," said Elodie pleasantly. "It keeps me out of trouble." "Hm," said Tobias, who looked as though he had b

Last Updated : 2026-11-06

CHAPTER 8 Skating on Thin Ice

❄ · ❄ · ❄ "I cannot skate," said Elodie, for the fourth time. "So you've said." Julian knelt at her feet on the frozen edge of the pond and laced her second skate with the unhurried care of a man defusing something. "The first three times, I was inclined to believe you. This time I've lost faith in the claim." "I'm from Chicago. We're indoor people. We have a very good system for getting from the car to the building." "It's eight minutes of terror, followed by joy. The fall is the hard part." He tugged the lace tight, tested it, and looked up. "You will fall. I will not let it be a bad one." She looked down at him, kneeling in the snow with his dark head bent and his gloved hands at her ankle, and felt something that was not terror at all. She looked away quickly. It was the morning of the twenty-fourth, and the whole Hale clan had come down to the pond, a long oval of black ice set in a bowl of birches, the trees silver against a sky the color of pearl. Children raced in swoopi

Last Updated : 2026-11-06

CHAPTER 9 The Study Where Nobody Lies

❄ · ❄ · ❄ Nobody was ever summoned to Odalys Hale's study alone and came out the same. Julian had said so on the second day, as a joke. He had not been joking. The summons came on the stroke of noon, delivered by Mrs. Pruitt with a face of stone and a plate of shortbread. "Madam would like a word," she said. "In the study. Alone." Elodie's stomach dropped to her boots. She glanced across the hall. Julian was deep in conversation with his lawyers, his back to her, and she did not call out. This one, she understood, was hers to walk into. Odalys Hale's study was at the top of the east stair, a round room in the old tower, lined with books and maps and the brass instruments of a hundred sea voyages. A fire burned low. A great desk of black walnut stood in the window, and on it, set carefully in a silver frame, was a photograph that Elodie knew at once, though she had never seen it. A man and a woman on a ship's deck, laughing, windblown, her hand on his arm. The man had Julian's jaw

Last Updated : 2026-11-06

CHAPTER 7 A Voice from Chicago

❄ · ❄ · ❄ The phone rang as she was taking off her boots, and she knew who it was before she looked. Eleven missed calls. And now the twelfth. Her father's name on the screen, lit up in the cold light of the boot room. Julian was not there. He had gone to confer with the lawyers who had arrived by afternoon, and the corridor behind her was empty except for a rack of coats and the smell of wet wool. She stood there with the phone buzzing in her palm like a trapped bird. Then she answered it. "Elodie." His voice was calm. It was always calm. "Four days of silence from my daughter. I confess I was beginning to feel neglected." "Papa." Her own voice came out smaller than she wanted. "I told you in the email. I'm engaged. I'm with his family in Vermont." "Yes. I read the email. I have also read the Hale family trust, which is not difficult to find if one pays a good lawyer." A faint rustle of paper. "Very interesting. A young man with a clause and a deadline, and a girl with

Last Updated : 2026-11-06

CHAPTER 10 Two Men and a Staircase

❄ · ❄ · ❄Vittorio Marchetti did not enter a room. He took possession of it.He came into the Great Hall of Hollin Hall in a camel coat with a fur collar, his silver hair brushed back, his hands extended, as though he had been welcomed by a hundred people instead of one stunned footman. He looked at the portraits, the staircase, the roaring fireplace, and the twelve-foot tree glittering with Hale heirlooms, and he smiled with such open, radiant delight that Elodie, standing on the landing with her heart in her throat, almost believed it.“Cara!” He took the stairs two at a time, arms wide. “My Elodie. Let me look at you. You are thinner. They don’t feed you?”“Papa.” She let him embrace her. He smelled of vanilla and wool and the cologne he had worn since her childhood. For a moment, in spite of everything, her eyes stung.“And this must be the man.”Julian had come down the corridor in his dark suit. He walked with a calm, level stride that she now knew was armor, and he stopped on t

Last Updated : 2026-11-07

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