Familial Bond Web Novels & Protective Contract Marriage Stories

For three years, Zephyrine "Zephy" Vance has served as the indispensable executive assistant to Laurent Mercier, the cold, powerful CEO of London’s top corporate conglomerate. She knows every secret of his demanding life, keeping her own feelings deeply buried to support her brother Diggory's crippling medical debts. But their strictly professional world shatters after a single night of uninhibited passion—followed immediately by a life-altering shock: Zephyrine is pregnant. Before she can reveal the news, Laurent faces a corporate ultimatum. To inherit controlling shares of the Mercier Group, his tyrannical grandfather demands he marry for one full year. Seeking a partner he can trust over opportunistic socialites, Laurent offers Zephyrine a fake contract marriage with a multi-million-pound payout. Desperate to save Diggory, she accepts. When the secret pregnancy comes to light, Laurent’s protective instincts ignite. He insists on claiming the baby as the official Mercier heir to shield her from his predatory family. Forced into close quarters as husband and wife, fake intimacy burns into a genuine, explosive love. Yet, as corporate rivals attempt to destroy their union, a dark web of family secrets unspools. The master manipulator orchestrating Diggory’s debt traps, the pregnancy leaks, and the corporate sabotage is none other than Tabitha Vance—Zephyrine’s disarmingly gentle stepmother, a disgraced former Mercier officer seeking total control of the trust. Heartbroken that her life and unborn child were used as corporate weapons, Zephyrine walks away with her newborn. To win back the only woman he has ever loved, Laurent surrenders his multi-billion-pound empire, proving that true devotion cannot be bought with a contract.

He was her stepfather. He made her breakfast every Sunday while her mother was still alive. He was at her graduation. He kept a careful distance that Aurora noticed — and never examined. When her mother died, Aurora left and spent two years telling herself she had processed everything properly. She had not. Now her grandmother has handed her a red envelope with one name inside it. The same name. Aurora holds the note for a long time before she gets on the bus. Julian Oswald is forty years old. Cedar Falls knows him as a quiet widowed chef raising his daughter alone. What Cedar Falls does not know — what the entire culinary world has been trying to discover for years — is that Julian is the Ghost Chef. The anonymous billionaire behind the world's largest culinary empire. A face no one has ever photographed. His five-year-old daughter Lily has not spoken a full sentence since her mother died. She has not eaten voluntarily. Not for anyone. Until Aurora walks through the door. Lily says one word after two years of silence — a name she should not still remember — and Julian goes completely still on the porch. That is when Aurora understands she is not walking into a contract. She is walking back into the most dangerous kitchen she has ever been in. The one where everything between them has always been unspoken. The one where he still knows her breakfast order without asking. He was supposed to be off-limits. He was. He memorized her breakfast order anyway.

“Give me your hands,” he ordered, coldly. I froze, watching him loosen his tie as he walked closer. Something about him felt… off. Mean. Distant. My throat went dry, but I gave him my hands anyway. He gripped my wrists—tight enough for my pulse to throb under his fingers. He wrapped the tie around them and pulled, dragging me up the bed like an animal on a leash. My back hit the headboard. Before I could react, he tied the other end of the tie to the frame. Then he reached for the veil on the nightstand. “What are you doing?” I asked, heart racing. He didn’t answer….just placed the veil over my head like I was a doll. “Making sure I don’t see your face and wish it was hers,” he said, unbuttoning his shirt. I blinked. “Hers?” He leaned in. His jaw clenched. “Your twin sister,” he said. “I wanted her. Not you.” His words felt like someone yanked the floor right under me. “I should be with her,” he added cruelly. “Loving her. Worshiping her. Not stuck with a knockoff pretending to be my wife.” I couldn’t breathe. My hands fought the tie, but it was useless. I was trapped, veiled and bound. Lucian didn’t want me. He wanted ‘her’ instead. —------------- Losing her clinic was devastating. Facing eviction was worse. But accepting a mysterious nursing job? That was desperation at its finest. What Scarlett Ashford didn’t expect was that her patient would be her terminally ill twin, the same sister she’d cut ties with. And Lucian Montgomery, her sister’s cold billionaire husband, offered her a proposition far beyond medical care. He wanted her to be his surrogate. Scarlett wonders—what twisted melodrama has she gotten herself into?