Novel & Cerita Lakeview Library Hours

When I first caught Miles cheating on me, I pinned him down at the entrance whenever he came home every day. I would pull down his pants and spray high-concentration alcohol all over his nether regions. He always went along with it with teary eyes because he knew he had been in the wrong. He would only look at me with a pitiful gaze and coax me to stop. One day, he came home two hours late. I became mad when I smelled the perfume on him. I started taking off his belt forcefully and yelled, “Last time, when you had your fun with one woman, you came home half an hour late. “Now you’re two hours late. Talk! Did you sleep with four?” Even though he apologized to me for the twenty-ninth time, I pushed him away repeatedly. He finally raised his hand to show me the IV mark on the back of it. He snapped and screamed at me, “Enough! I was dying with a high fever, yet you haven’t even asked how I’m doing. You just fly off the handle every single day. When are you going to stop? “Fine, I got drunk and slept with someone once. Big deal. You’re not so innocent yourself. “It’s no wonder you got dragged into an alley at sixteen, stripped, and assaulted. Jenna, you’re a paranoid wreck. You may have even deserved it.” The spray bottle shattered at my feet, and the smell of alcohol caught in my throat. I was speechless. I felt exhausted when I saw his disgusted expression. I did not want this broken relationship any longer.

Yselle Morel is watching her family's glassworks collapse—unpaid wages, angry suppliers, a bank ready to shut the gates. When Renaud Valois, a feared billionaire financier, offers a rescue, it comes with a cruel condition: marriage. He says it’s business. His eyes say it’s revenge. In Valois’s riverside estate outside Paris, Yselle plays the obedient wife—smiling, thanking staff, acting harmless. She calls it "wife camouflage." Then she finds a locked room behind the library wall: a war room filled with files, photos, and timelines about her father’s life… and a folder stamped with Yselle’s name. Renaud didn’t choose her. He planned her. As “accidents” start closing in—tampered brakes, poisoned tea, a near fall on a dark stairwell—Yselle realizes the marriage isn’t only punishment. It’s protection. Someone wants her silent before the Day 30 board vote that will decide her family’s future. And the closer she gets to the truth, the more she fears the man who raised her. On the eve of the vote, Yselle opens the last drawer in the war room and finds an envelope addressed to her—in her mother’s handwriting. The ink looks fresh. Then the lights go out, and a voice behind her whispers, “Don’t trust your husband.”

#DarkRomance #Steamy #CEO #Possessive #ContractMarriage #Revenge #Betrayal #ContractMarriage #FamilySecrets #Dominant Twenty-four hours. That's how long Grace Vance has before her father's empire collapses. With bankruptcy looming and scandal threatening to destroy everything her family built, she has only one option: sign a marriage contract with Elias Thorne—the ruthless billionaire who owns half the city. The terms are simple. Two years of marriage. Perfect devotion in public. Separate lives behind closed doors. And one rule she must never break: Never enter the East Wing library after midnight. But when Grace discovers a hidden wall filled with photographs of herself taken long before they ever met, she realizes her husband isn't the man he claims to be. Because Elias Thorne didn't choose her by accident. He's been watching her for years. And the deeper Grace digs into the secrets surrounding her mother's death, the more she begins to suspect that the man she married isn't her savior. He's the reason she was trapped in the first place. Now she's bound to a billionaire who will do anything to keep his secrets hidden—even if it means destroying the woman he can't let go.

Three hours after burying her gay husband, Sophia is given an ultimatum: move into her father-in-law's bed or watch her mother die and be raped by the entire mafia. Desperate, she calls the one man dangerous enough to protect her; Cassian Devine, her dead husband's enemy. Cassian offers help with strings attached. He'll give her protection, and money for her mother's care. In exchange, she becomes his completely. His submissive, his pet, his weapon against the man who ruined Cassian’s own family What starts as a transaction becomes something neither expected. But loving a man who believes he's unworthy of love while fighting a crime lord who wants her dead might cost Sophia everything, including her heart.

I came home a day early from my business trip and hid in the closet to surprise Eric Carter. At seven, he told the housekeeper to cook several dishes. At nine, he told me hoarsely that he had taken a bath and changed the bedsheets in my room. He was sure that I would love it. I did not believe him because I had heard him moaning in bed with Willow Summers for three hours from the closet. Willow Summers was his childhood sweetheart and my sister. I clicked on a webpage from my cell without hesitation. "Miss Summers, your appointment for creating a fake death has been confirmed. Time of Death: One week later Location of Death: The wedding hall on the top floor of the Century Building Cause of Death: Suicide from jumping off a building!"

It happened in Paris, year 2015 when Aemee Harlene Santiago visited there to get some space and to breath some fresh air after her break up with Josiah – her ex-boyfriend. On her last day in Paris she decided to go to club to get some drinks, but someone she didn’t know approached her, it’s Clifford Samonte. In an hours of talking they get along pretty well. Because of so much drinks they had, Aemee had one-night stand with him. After that night she left him, thinking that it’ll be there 1st and last meeting, but Aemee got pregnant, she hid the child from him and doesn’t have any plan to introduce it to Clifford. After how many years, their path crosses again. That starts their roller coaster love story.

I could see the countdown above a person’s head when they had already decided to leave their partner. The day my father’s countdown hit zero, he slapped a lawyer’s letter on the breakfast table and walked out on my mother and me. The day my best friend’s countdown hit zero, she finally threw her parasite of a boyfriend out of her apartment and changed the locks before sunset. That was why I’d always been terrified of seeing a countdown above my fiancé, Lucian Bellandi. Luckily, for seven years by his side, the space above his head had stayed clean. Lucian was the youngest Don the Bellandi family had ever seen. He owned the docks, the casinos, and half the South Side’s dirty money, yet he saved every soft part of himself for me. Until last month, when he picked me up after a family auction. I looked up and saw blood-red numbers stabbing into my eyes. [702 days, 14 hours, 22 minutes.] Less than two years. My heart tightened like a cold hand had closed around it. I started searching for an answer like a woman losing her mind. Had I done something wrong? Then, during a blizzard by the lake, we ran into Mia Crane at the back entrance of the Bellandi Hotel. Lucian had just brought her into his charity foundation as a new assistant. Snow clung to her hair and lashes. She was shivering from head to toe, but her smile was bright and painfully innocent. Lucian pulled a black silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and handed it to her. His face was calm. There was nothing openly improper in the gesture. But in that exact second, the countdown above his head jumped. [327 days, 4 hours, 47 minutes.] More than three hundred days, gone. And I knew I had found the reason.

At twenty-eight, I held the dubious honor of being the last unmarried socialite on New York's Upper East Side. Everyone around me was growing increasingly anxious about my single status. In my previous life, my mother arranged a matchmaking cocktail party, where I was told to choose a husband from ten handpicked elite bachelors. I bribed the event planner to place Mark West's profile at the very top—and as I had hoped, I chose him. After we married, Mark treated me with what seemed like tender affection. He even bought me an oceanfront villa in the Hamptons, making me believe I had finally found true love. But that illusion shattered the day I was nine months pregnant, just hours away from giving birth. Mark drove a scalpel straight into my abdomen—then, right in front of me, hurled our newborn onto the floor. "If you hadn't forced me into this marriage with your family's power, Sofia wouldn't have been heartbroken enough to go drinking and get drugged and assaulted. This… this is what you owe her!" He tossed the scalpel aside, then calmly let his private doctor pin down my blood-soaked body. I fought through excruciating pain for six agonizing hours, until I finally bled to death. Afterward, Mark dumped my corpse into the Hudson River. But for Sofia, he hosted a grand funeral—funded with my money, under my name—and paraded himself to the world as a grieving, devoted widower. Given a second chance at life, I refused to step foot in that cursed matchmaking event. Instead, I went straight to my mother with a demand: marry me to Robert Black—the most ruthless, cold-blooded titan of Wall Street, whose scarred face was feared by all. In the end, stripped of my financial backing, Mark's hedge fund collapsed. He became a disgraced fraudster, spat on by everyone on Wall Street.

For our graduation trip, the three of us traveled to Iceland to watch the aurora borealis. During the trek, my best friend Chloe Bennett’s scarf was swept away by the howling wind. Without a second thought, my boyfriend Valen Vance stripped off his own heavy scarf and wrapped her up tight in it. Turning to me, he said, “Hurry up and help Chloe fetch it. You know that’s her favorite scarf.” I braved the biting, freezing wind alone, chasing it for a long time. By the time I finally retrieved the scarf and turned around, the northern lights had already vanished from the sky—and Valen and Chloe were no longer where I left them. My phone buzzed with a text from him: “You were taking too long. Chloe is afraid of the cold, so I brought her back to the hotel first.” Stranded in a foreign country, I stood at the crossroad for six grueling hours, waving down over twenty passing cars. Finally, someone took pity on me and gave me a ride. When I stumbled back into the hotel well past midnight, shivering and entirely frozen to the bone, I found them curled up under a thick blanket, huddled close together as they looked over the photos they had taken that day. They were laughing and chatting about photography and the northern lights—a conversation I was permanently locked out of. Noticing me, Valen merely frowned. “What took you so long? I made a mug of hot tea for you over there. Go warm yourself up.” I wrapped my numb fingers around the mug. The tea inside had gone ice-cold hours ago. At that moment, an overwhelming wave of exhaustion settled deep into my chest. Fine, then. I booked the earliest flight out, canceled the rest of our hotel reservations, and decided right then to leave. The northern lights I spent a lifetime chasing were never meant for me. There was no need to chase them anymore.

“Say my name,” he said. A shiver ran down my spine. “Jeremy…” I breathed, my voice barely steady. “Good girl.” The words sent a sharp wave through me, my knees weakening slightly as I grabbed onto the bed for support. My fingers curled against the sheets, my body arching without thinking. Stepbrothers who cross every line, best friends’ dads who take what they want, professors and students burning after hours, fake dates that turn dangerously real, rivals who hate-fuck their tension away, and strangers trapped together until control snaps. Slow-burn tension, raw power play, and irresistible cravings that refuse to stay hidden. If you love the thrill of breaking rules and giving in to what you shouldn’t, this collection will leave you wet and breathless.