Anniversary 9 Month

Layne needs to pay off the hunter who is threatening to sell her dad off to the highest bidder. One year, one million dollars. How does she plan to do it? By working as a for-hire mate at her auntie's high-end mate (escort) service. Easy enough to spend a little less than one month each with a man who she doesn't have to sleep with if she doesn't want to, right? With never-ending love for her dad and writing off love with anyone else, this beautiful bombshell plans to throw caution to the wind and sign up for the ride of a lifetime for the next year. Get in, make money to save dad, get out. Keep her head in the game and her heart out of it. That's the game plan. How hard can it be to stick to it?

Our family is planning a ski trip at a luxury resort. However, my mother gives my snow-view room to my adoptive sister and makes me, her biological daughter, stay in the storage room. I'm about to protest when my father and brother accuse me of being selfish. "We've always given Madie the best of everything; she won't be able to sleep in any other room." "Madie is our family—she's the one who's lived with us this whole time. We're a family, so we have to stay together." I'm the one who shares their blood, yet they consider me an outsider. If that's the case, they can go on vacation without me. I board a cruise and travel the world for a month without ever going home. That's when they panic.

John Garnett's secretary fed me to the dogs on my own birthday. I called his number endlessly to call for help, only for him to block my number immediately, as he fooled around with his secretary at the presidential suite in broad daylight. All I felt was agony as I was ripped into countless little pieces, still holding on to the black rose seeds he had given me when we were younger. That was not thrilling enough for the secretary, however, she buried me in the backyard of John' villa, intent on making my perished soul watch their bedroom activities. It was not until rain poured a month later, and a cluster of black roses suddenly grew in the backyard. "Where's Claire? I was just scaring her with the dogs—did she run away just to spite me?"

After another one of Winifred Clayton's dramatic suicide threats, Edgar Snider secretly starts a relationship with her behind my back under one condition—I can never find out about it. He says, "I can be with you, but Wanda is everything to me. Whatever happens between us, she can never know." Winifred pretends to agree. Then, she sends me a video of her and Edgar living together, my son included. "No matter what happens, Edgar will never leave me. So stop deluding yourself—you were never a match for me." What she doesn't know is that I never plan to compete. In just one month, I'll be on a flight to Avernia, gone from Edgar's life for good.

After my cold, distant husband returned from overseas, his personality completely changed. Every night, he kept me up until dawn. The man who had been too busy to even touch me during our three years of marriage suddenly became obsessed with my body. I thought it was just that absence made the heart grow fonder, but then strange pop-up comments appeared in front of me. [I can't wait to see the male lead, Trevor Blackwell, lose his mind when he gets back in a month and finds out someone is sleeping with his wife.] My blood ran cold. Trevor was my husband. If he had not come back yet, then who was this man in front of me who looked exactly like him?

It was my first time going to my boyfriend’s home for the New Year. In the middle of dinner, his childhood friend suddenly slammed her spoon on the table. “Cole, how could you bring a bar girl to our New Year’s Eve dinner?” The room fell silent. Everyone thought she simply had too much to drink. But she spoke with complete confidence. “One of my friends works on the vice squad. He arrested her himself. There’s no way he got the wrong person.” She threw a police penalty notice onto the table. My name was clearly printed on it. I was stunned. Last month, the city’s vice squad had arrested dozens of people. I was the one who approved and signed those cases. I had just taken office as bureau chief.

As I was cleaning up the house, I noticed something had fallen out of the cabinet my wife always kept locked tight. I remembered Megan's constant warnings. "That cabinet holds all our family's important records. If anything gets lost, there's no getting it back. Just leave it alone and don't touch it." Worried something valuable might have fallen out, I rushed to pick it up. But what I found was a thick stack of remittance slips. From forty years ago to now, every month, my wife had been sending money to the same account. And that's when it hit me. My wife had been lying to me. The money I'd been pouring into this family had been flowing right out, into the hands of someone else.

Zane and I were together for ten years. When he had no one, I stayed by his side, supporting his hockey career while believing at the end of all our struggles, I'll be his wife and the only one at his side. But after six years of dating, and four years of being his fiancée, not only did he leave me, but seven months later I receive an invitation... to his wedding! If that isn't bad enough, the month long wedding cruise is for couples only and requires a plus one. If Zane thinks breaking my heart left me too miserable to move on, he thought wrong! Not only did it make me stronger.. it made me strong enough to move on with his favourite bad boy hockey player, Liam Calloway.

After my father’s death, I decided to divorce my husband, Captain Marcus Hale, and stay in Pine Ridge Village forever. On the first day, I tricked Marcus into signing the divorce papers. On the fifth day, I handed in my resignation to my old unit at Fort Haven. On the seventh day, I cooked a full table of food and said farewell to all my friends. Frowning, Marcus accused me of making the very meal his childhood sweetheart, Julia Summers, hated. I stood up and raised my glass to toast her. From this day on, Marcus and I would have nothing more to do with each other. Half a month later, I saw Marcus returning from a mission in Pine Ridge Village. Only this time, the country evening breeze brought tears to his eyes.

How does it feel, then, to be kissed by an unlovable brute?——I find it amusing that I didn't even have to track down my runaway bride. She simply climbed into my car, completely oblivious to the fact that I am the man she was running away from. I could catch her. Hunting women down is the last thing I want to be doing, truly. I mean Ruby no harm, even though she unknowingly said some awful, untrue things about me in the car. In time, she’ll learn that those things aren’t true. I’m not like my parents. Still, I have no choice but to marry this girl. She’s barely eighteen, three years younger than me, but it’s fate. All of this mess started about a month ago.