Familial Bond Romance Short Stories & Mistress Marriage Novels

I went alone to my favorite singer’s concert. During the song selection segment, I was really excited and hoped that I would be lucky enough to be picked. But in the next second, I saw my husband, who was supposed to be on a business trip, appear on the screen. Next to him was Mia Louise, his first love. “I’d like to pick Back To The Past. I want to go back three years when I hadn’t broken up with Mia.” The entire stadium cheered and celebrated their love. I was the only one in tears. During the next song selection segment, I saw my teary face show up on the screen. “I’d like to pick Back To The Past as well. I want to return to the time when I never said yes to Samuel Gardner’s proposal.”

The tenth time one of my paintings appeared under my sister Rose's name, I handed Adrian the divorce papers. He raised an eyebrow and tossed the agreement aside without a second glance. "Don't be dramatic. Your hand is ruined -- where would you even go without me?" I said nothing. He smiled, his tone dripping with casual indifference. "You should be grateful. Rose was the one I was supposed to marry. A few paintings is a small price to pay. A little gratitude wouldn't kill you." He blew a ring of cigarette smoke directly into my face. I choked, and the sting brought tears to my eyes. Through the blur, I was transported back to the moment my tendons were severed for his sake -- a pain that had drilled straight to the bone. He thought I had no choice but to take it. What he didn't know was that I'd already accepted an offer from the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Soon, I would be free of him for good.

On the day of her daughter Nina’s funeral, before the pastor could finish the eulogy, Rosalind answered Samson’s phone call. “Change of plans. Let’s meet earlier. I’m on my way now.” Ethan held the small cremation urn in his arms. His knuckles turned white from gripping it too tightly. Nina had been critically ill with leukemia. Only Samson’s bone marrow matched hers. Driven to the brink, Ethan desperately begged Rosalind to go along with Samson’s request. She promised that she would only be playing pretend and would not fall for Samson. However, as time passed, she eventually fell for Samson and indulged him in every way. On the night when Nina needed the transplant the most, Ethan called her, frantic. However, she was unreachable because she was camping deep in the mountains. Ethan helplessly watched the three-year-old die in the emergency room. Later, Rosalind even protected Samson and let him stomp on Nina’s cross necklace. She even forcibly confined Ethan to a sanatorium and forced him to donate blood to Samson. It was not until Rosalind learned that Samson had deceived her from the very beginning that she felt piercing regret. She gave him fifty percent of her shares, knelt for hours at the cemetery, and tried to make amends wherever she could. However, no amount of regret could bring back the man she had deeply wounded.

At my best friend Naomi Dodson's Sip and See, my husband, Joe Walsh, gifts her a luxury villa. I think it's a mix-up, but he stays deadly calm. "Naomi's baby is mine. The villa is her reward." The world goes cold around me. Desperate, I push for answers. "When did this start?" He knit his brows, annoyed. "Does it matter? You're still Mrs. Walsh. You get the money, the freedom, and a kid without the birth pains. What's not to like?" What he doesn't know is that he has severe azoospermia. I am never the infertile one. He is.

Everyone said my wife, Zoey Harper, was an amazing wife and mom who'd do anything for me and our son, Leo. Leo's doctor warned us three times that he might not make it. Then he died. Zoey claimed she was overseas for work. She wasn't. She'd invited Peter Cole—the first love she'd never gotten over—and his family to our apartment for dinner. I came home carrying Leo's urn, ready to confront her. Instead, she tossed my luggage into the hall. "We have guests, and we're out of rooms. Go stay somewhere else for a few days."

After seven years of marriage, my husband, Marcus Doakes, gave every bit of his tenderness to his divorced first love and her daughter. From then on, I began teaching my own daughter to call him "Mister." When my daughter had an asthma attack and her little face turned blue from lack of air, one phone call from his first love saying, "Jacey is scared of the dark," was enough to make him leave. I covered my daughter's eyes and told her to whisper, "Goodbye, Mr. Doakes" At the parent-child piano competition my daughter had been looking forward to for ages, his first love cried that Jacey had no father to accompany her and was too afraid to go onstage. He turned and left without hesitation. I swallowed the ache in my chest and told my daughter, who had lost her chance to perform, to thank "Mr. Doakes" for coming to watch. Every time, my daughter could only wipe her tears silently in my arms. Later, he seemed to finally realize how much he owed us. For once, he canceled his business banquet and offered to take us to the amusement park for the weekend. But right at the amusement park entrance, his first love called again. "Marcus, the children at the amusement park are laughing at Jacey because she doesn't have a dad. Can you come pick her up...?" When I saw the pity and hesitation flash across his face, he had just crouched down to explain to our daughter. This time, before I could say anything to remind her, my daughter let go of his hand on her own. With tears still shining in her smile, she stepped back obediently. "It's okay, Mr. Doakes. Go protect that little sister. "I have the cotton candy Mommy bought me. That's enough."

I've gone to the church to pray for my son, Robert Scott. On the way home, my carriage is overturned because the horses suffer from a shock. When I wake up, I look at my family gathering around my bed. Then, I decide to pull a prank on them. "Sorry, but who are you?" I do my best to suppress the smile that threatens to appear on my face. I want to see how my family is going to comfort me now that I have "amnesia". Will Mom and my husband, Jeremy Scott, take my hands comfortingly? Or will Robert lunge at me while crying out to me? What I don't expect is to see my family breathing sighs of relief after their initial shock has faded away. Mom is the first one to speak up with a hint of relief coloring her tone. "Since you've already forgotten all about us, then it's fine. Maisie, you're actually the adopted daughter of the Liddell family. Amber is the actual heiress of the Liddell family." Jeremy points at me while telling Robert, "Robbie, you must address her as Aunt Maisie." Before I can recover from my shock, I see my own son, whom I'm willing to sacrifice my life to protect, running over to hug Amber Liddell, the fake heiress, happily. "Mom, I've spent the whole day playing outside! Oh, I miss you so much!" So, it turns out that my case of amnesia is exactly what this family wants. In that case, I might as well abandon this farce of a family.

My husband was like a broken record. His answer was always the same. "I can't leave." On our wedding anniversary, he said he couldn't leave because he had to take Natalie Rivers out and cheer her up. When I miscarried, he couldn't leave because he had to take Natalie to therapy. Even when my mother died, he still gave me the same answer. "I really can't leave. Natalie's depression has come back, and she can't be alone." Still weak after my miscarriage, I kept vigil alone for three days. That was when I finally understood. To him, neither our baby's life nor my mother's life mattered. My relatives were shocked to see me handling everything alone. "Josh really isn't coming?" After saying my final goodbye to my mother, I stood up and answered calmly. "No. He doesn't have that obligation anymore."

After my dad's first love moved into our house and became my tutor, my mom never raised her voice at her again. She just coughed worse and worse, until one day I found the lab report she'd thrown out. Stage IV lung cancer. That afternoon, Dad came home with his arm around her, and walked right into Mom sitting on the couch. There was a flicker of guilt on his face. "Helena, if you've got something to say, just say it. Don't make a scene in front of the kid." Mom was eerily calm. She pointed at the woman and said, "She gets on her knees and apologizes to me three times. And you sign over half the company. Then we're done." Dad thought she'd lost it. But in the end he signed the share transfer. After that, Mom's pills kept multiplying and her appetite kept shrinking. But she hired the best lawyer in town, and over and over she taught me how to manage those shares once I was old enough. Dad never figured out the one thing that mattered. Mom was already on her way out.

It's the third year since my wife, Joyce Sinclair, cheated on me. I spread her intimate photos with her male assistant, Bryan Long, on the internet. Then, I doused myself in gasoline and threatened to drag everyone down to hell with me. Bryan's so scared that he flees the city that very night. I think I've won. However, to settle my lawsuit and cover the damages, my older sister, Rachel Lovett, sells her house and takes out high-interest loans. In the end, the burden becomes too much for her, and she jumps from a high-rise building. Her voice is hoarse in the recording she leaves me. "That's enough, Ray. We've lost everything. Mom and Dad have aged overnight, and I can't take it anymore..." Mom clutches Rachel's belongings and cries until she passes out. Dad's emaciated hands clamp around my neck as he demands at the top of his lungs, "How many more lives do you have to destroy before you're satisfied?" Tears silently trail down my cheeks, and I finally come to my senses. I no longer neurotically look into every single man around Joyce, and I stop badgering her with questions about the scent of men's cologne on her. Even when I walk in on her staring at a photo of her and Bryan and reminiscing about the past, I take the initiative to bring him back. It all comes to a head when Bryan wishes to become Joyce's lawfully wedded husband on his birthday. Without the slightest hesitation, I print out the divorce agreement, sign and seal it, and deliver it to him. To my surprise, Joyce rips the agreement to shreds. She grips my chin and demands hysterically, "Raymond Lovett, what happened to the stubborn man who'd rather die than divorce me? Where is he now?"

On the night of our wedding, Simone Laurent did not inject the promised capital into the Holt family's company. Instead, she had someone carry in a crate of scratch-off tickets. She undid the top buttons of her blouse, her eyes lazy with amusement. "Here are 2,000,000 dollars' worth of scratch-offs. Whatever you scratch off, that is what you get. Be good, Spencer, and maybe next time I will give you something real." I knew what she was doing. She punished me because yesterday I had ruined her evening, and I had thrown a glass of red wine all over her assistant, the one in the see-through shirt. I did not cry this time. I did not make a scene. My fingers found an ultra-thin condom in her pocket that was not my size, and I simply wiped my hand clean and said nothing. The surprise in her eyes lasted half a second before it softened into a satisfied smile. She wrapped her arms around me from behind, warm breath spilling against my ear. "That is right. Now you are starting to act like a husband who knows his place." She pulled out an unlimited black card and pressed it to my chest, the plastic cold through my shirt. "Take it. This should be more than enough for your family's company." I managed a stiff smile, pulled the card free, and handed it back. "I do not need it." She did not know this. During the days she spent breaking me in, my father had already been cornered by debt collectors on a rooftop and forced past the edge. Dead men did not need money.

To save my daughter, I collected 50,000 plastic bottles. Day after day, I dug through trash, carried them home, and traded them for scraps of hope. However, when I finally hauled them all to the recycling center, I learned their selling price had dropped. The 50,000 bottles were worth only enough to buy my daughter a better urn. Desperate, I held my feverish daughter in my arms as she suffered a seizure. I called my actress wife for help. Her answer was ice-cold. “$5,000 for a fever? Do you think I’m some kind of charity?” The irony was that she had spent $50 million building a private hospital for her screen partner’s dog just hours earlier.