Nerve-wracking

On New Year's Eve, my older brother, Casper Shaw, attempted to expose me as a fraud and announced that Jenny Ford was the real heiress to the family. He pulled out a paternity test result and threw it in my face. "Open your eyes and take a look! Jenny is the Shaw family's real daughter. You're just a fake who has taken Jenny's place for so many years, yet you still have the nerve to sit here and eat New Year's Eve dinner with us!" Then, he pushed Jenny in front of us, revealing a face that looked exactly like my mom, Theresa. Everyone froze. I lunged for the report, but suddenly, a stream of floating comments rolled past above Jenny's head. [Is the female lead finally going back to her rich family and starting a sweet romance with her fake older brother?] [Not yet. Right now, they still think they're siblings. They only get together later, once the misunderstandings are cleared up.] [Am I the only one who feels bad for the female supporting character? She's the biggest victim in the whole book. She takes all the female lead's hatred that should have gone to her fake brother, and she gets treated as the fake heiress and sent to the Ford family to suffer on top of that.] I looked at Jenny's face and compared it to my own—we almost looked like twins. I checked our ID cards again, confirming that our dates of birth were exactly the same. "Seriously? Ever think that you might be the real impostor here who was switched at birth?"

Book 2 of The Shadow Alpha Series *** Bulky arms encircled my waist, successfully cutting off any movement from my upper body. “Why are you following me?” The husky whisper send my body into a second frenzy and it was only when the fog cleared from my brain that I registered that my back was up against a tree. Every nerve ending in my body was on fire as I stared into the cobalt blue eyes of my captor. Jasper Queen stared down at me with stern expectation and though his hand was no longer covering my mouth, I couldn't speak. “Speak up!” He spat making me flinch and swallow the ball in my . “I- I wasn't following you…” I croaked hoping he believed me despite the unconvincing tone. “So you were just conveniently wandering the forest in the same direction I was walking?” His question was obviously rhetorical but my eyebrows furrowed and I nodded slowly, looking at my surroundings, something about it seemed familiar. Jasper's hand slamming against the tree beside me made me jump and our eyes met suddenly, but what I saw staring back at me was a picture come to life, from the curves to the creases at the corners of his eyes, the pencil sketch that laid in my book at home both captured every detail and did no justice. “Don't lie to me!” his pressing against mine vibrated with each word and it was all I could do not to shiver with pleasure. “I'm not, I swear.” I could feel the tears gathering in my eyes, “I would never lie to my mate.” and just like that, any softness in his eyes evaporated. “I'm not your mate.” *** Join Sophia and Jasper as they battle age-old demons, secrets and their innermost fears

I was engineered to kill men with a kiss. When my pleasure‑kill protocol glitches on a Bratva king and binds my system to his, he gives me a choice: become his contract wife… or be handed back to the monsters who built me I was trained to destroy men without leaving a mark. The Siren Protocol turned my body into a weapon—every nerve engineered to dismantle loyalty, erase secrets, and turn power into submission. One kiss, and I can crash a neural implant like a virus. Hidden behind a luxury cover identity, I’m waiting for my next directive when my door explodes inward and Kael Petrov walks in—Bratva heir, tech billionaire, and the most controlled man in the city. He thinks he’s here to extract a traitor using his accounts to leak Siren data. He doesn’t know the “escort” in front of him is the Siren asset he’s hunting. So, I do what I was built for. I kiss him. My pleasure‑kill protocol should drop him in eight seconds. Instead, his high‑grade implant bites back. My signal loops through his system and straight into mine, fusing us in a feedback circuit of raw, addictive sensation that neither of us can control. Instead of killing him, I bind myself to him. Now I’m collared in his tower, my systems synced to his, and he’s staring at me like I’m the most interesting problem he’s ever seen. To keep me out of Bratva torture cells but still under his eye, Kael gives me a brutal ultimatum: Marry him and live as his contract wife, or be handed to the men who will take me apart for parts. I was meant to end him. Falling for him was never part of the directive.

During the holiday, I took my whole family on a trip. Just as we were about to head back, more than ten police cars surrounded us at the guesthouse. The police showed a video. In it, under surveillance cameras, I drove to a forest near a popular tourist town the day before and dumped a corpse. Even more frightening, there was a strange woman sitting in the car. After throwing away the body, the two of us immediately engaged in intimate acts inside the car. Hannah Walker slapped me hard across the face. "No wonder you insisted on going to that tourist town to buy snacks for us—you were using it as an excuse to go on a date! "After doing something so inhumane, you still had the nerve to do such filthy things in the car?" However, yesterday, I had clearly gone to the town alone to buy snacks and returned. There was no such horrifying experience at all. Without another word, the police opened the trunk. When the searchlight swept across it, it was filled with bloodstains from the victim's body. In the corner, they also found the murder weapon with my fingerprints on it. I had no way to defend myself. I fell from being a rocket engineer, a hero in the country's aerospace field, to a death row prisoner. Due to the severity of the case, I was sent to the execution ground in less than a month. My parents and child, who had been on the trip with me, were blocked at the guesthouse by the victim's family and beaten to death. However, even as reality dawned on me, I still did not understand what had happened that day. When I opened my eyes again, I was back at the moment I was about to leave to buy snacks.

When I took a bullet for Theo Moretti, the bullet grazed my temple, compressing the optic nerve and causing blindness in both my eyes. He kneeled by my hospital bed, pressed the family crest to his chest, and swore: “Sophie, I will be your eyes for life. If I break this oath, may I die a horrendous death.” I believed him. However, the day my sight returned, I saw Theo through the bedroom door, naked on our marital bed with the maid, Isabella. He gripped her waist and thrust violently, his voice hoarse in a way I had never heard, growling, “Bella… you really are the most seductive woman in all of Sicily…” “Theo, who else besides me could satisfy you like this in bed? Divorce that blind woman already!” Isabella nibbled his earlobe. “After all, I’m the one who truly understands you.” “Wait a little longer,” Theo panted. “I need time… Don Lucas just handed me control of the docks. If I divorce now, I’ll be left with nothing.” Rare snowflakes rained down outside. I walked barefoot out of the estate in a thin nightgown and sent an encrypted message to my father. “Father, send someone to pick me up in three days. I’m coming home.” Don Lucas, my father, never expected that the boss he had personally promoted would dare betray his daughter. He replied with a single sentence: “For daring to betray you, Theo’s dead.” What I did not know was that this message would ignite a storm that would sweep across all of Sicily. In three days, Theo Moretti, the man I had risked my life for and I had personally helped rise to power, would lose everything he held dear, including me.

“You’ve come to kill me detective?” He whispered against her skin as he gently grasped her arm and turned her to him. Jude swallowed a gulp and looked up at him. His eyes were a cobalt shade of blue behind the mask, daring, cold and terrifying. “And you’ve come to me to be killed?” She replied in a hushed tone, gathering a lot of nerve and taking a step closer to him. Detective Jude Laurent should arrest Cassien, the deadly Maestro who now controls The Black Rose syndicate. Instead, she finds herself drawn into a dangerous game of cat and mouse, risking everything to uncover the truth about the organization that has haunted her since childhood. The same organization she believes holds the answers to her parents’ death in what everyone called a tragic house fire. But Jude has no idea she’s been walking straight into a trap years in the making. The real mastermind behind The Black Rose has been watching her every move, orchestrating her pain from the shadows. Someone who shaped her into the perfect weapon for revenge. And they’ve been waiting for this moment since the night her world burned. Now, as Jude hunts the man who’s becoming her obsession, and Cassien finds himself equally captivated by the detective who should be his enemy, neither realizes they’re both pawns in a much deadlier game. Because the person who destroyed Jude’s world isn’t the criminal she’s chasing. It’s someone far closer than she could ever imagine. And their final move is about to destroy everything she’s ever believed about her past, her purpose, and the man she can’t stop wanting. Some obsessions are worth dying for. Others are designed to kill you.

It was just another morning commute—until he happened. Across the train aisle sat a man who looked like he’d stepped out of a high-end magazine and straight into a power struggle. His voice sliced through the air, sharp and commanding, as he chewed someone out over the phone like he ran the damn universe. Arrogant. Entitled. Dressed like a Wall Street god. Correction: he looked like a god. That’s where the charm ended—or so I thought. When the train screeched to a stop, he stood up in a hurry, stormed off… and left his phone behind. Did I pick it up? Yep. Did I snoop? Absolutely. Photos, contacts, a few mysterious texts—I couldn’t help myself. Did I keep it longer than I should’ve, building stories in my head about the man behind the voice? Yeah… I did that too. When I finally gathered enough nerve to return it, I marched into the glass-and-steel fortress he called an office. He wouldn’t even come out to meet me. So I dropped his phone on the desk outside his office door. And maybe—I left a photo on it first. Not exactly the professional kind. What I didn’t expect? A message. From him. What followed were late-night texts that burned hotter than anything I’d ever known. Words became whispers. Whispers turned into fantasies. I was falling—for someone I hadn’t even really met. He and I? Total opposites. Fire and ice. Chaos and control. But when we finally came face to face, it wasn’t just sparks. It was an inferno. What happened next? Let’s just say… falling for him was the easy part. Surviving what came after? That’s where the real story began.

I went skiing alone on Valentine’s Day to clear my head. I never expected that later that night, my younger brother, Mason Cases, would show up after running away from home following a fight with our family. The front desk stopped him and asked for additional registration. I explained, "He’s my brother. He ran out after an argument and didn’t bring his ID. He’s just staying one night. I’ll take him home tomorrow." After hearing that, the receptionist, Riley Rowe, gave us a suggestive once-over, winking at my brother with a look that said, "I get it." "Alright," she said with a flirty smile. "It’s Valentine’s Day. I understand. No need to be shy." Seeing how exhausted Mason looked, I forced myself to swallow the disgust and brought him upstairs. That night, I came across a local post online. "Girls these days have no shame. Bringing some random guy back to a hotel on Valentine’s Day. She got caught and still had the nerve to lie, saying he’s her brother. Like I can’t tell?" Some users questioned whether she might have mistaken them. "I’ve worked in this industry for over ten years. There’s no way I got it wrong! She didn’t dare register him. Obviously, she’s afraid her husband will find out she’s cheating! I’m going to go listen outside their door later and livestream how loud she gets!" I froze. It couldn’t be that much of a coincidence, right? Until I opened the photo she had secretly taken. My blood turned to ice. That was me. Wait. The "random guy" she was talking about… Did she mean the one lying on the floor? But he really was my biological younger brother.

Zesa Russo commands the boardroom with the same precision and confidence she brings to every aspect of her life. At 28, she’s the fierce CEO of Techya, a company she’s built from the ground up. Driven, unrelenting, and unapologetically bold, she’s never been one to wait for a prince charming to come sweep her off her feet—instead, she’s the force that shapes her own destiny. And her destiny has always involved him. The man who had once eluded her grasp, the one she had silently craved for years. But Zesa isn’t the kind to let love slip through her fingers. No. She's determined to make him hers, no matter what. Slowly, inevitably, she knows he’ll surrender his heart to her—just like everything else she’s ever set her sights on. ____ Levi’s mischievous gaze locks onto mine, daring, seductive, his lips curving into a slow smirk as he steps closer. “Should I stop?” His voice is velvet, deep and teasing, laced with danger. But I don’t flinch. “No,” I breathe, my pulse quickening, every nerve in my body on edge. His smirk deepens, a dark promise in his eyes as his fingers slowly trace the hem of my dress, lifting it with agonizing precision. The whisper of fabric against my skin sends shivers down my spine. His lips—warm, soft, and skilled—graze the sensitive skin of my inner thighs. Levi’s hand slips beneath the fabric, fingertips brushing against my desire, teasing, drawing out a soft gasp from me. The heat between us is suffocating, yet intoxicating. “Levi…” My voice trembles as he nips gently at my thigh, his breath hot against my skin. “You’ll be the one begging me to stop,” he murmurs, the promise in his words thick, dripping with need.

She’d built two years of walls and he dismantled them in one evening. He didn’t announce himself. He never had to. The last person she expected walked in like he was exactly where he was supposed to be. Halle hadn’t seen Adrian Vale in two years. Two years of carefully avoiding his name in conversations, his face on screens, and the memory of waking up in his bed, fully dressed, completely alone, and somehow disturbed by that, than if anything had actually happened. Then he showed up to her best friend’s wedding like he owned the place. He reached over her shoulder, lifted the glass of champagne from her hand without spilling a single drop, brought it slowly to his lips, held her gaze the entire time and had the absolute nerve to look good doing it. Adrian Vale didn’t do anything halfway. He never needed to raise his voice because the room already belonged to him. He never reached for things…things simply found their way into his hands. Including, apparently, her. On a moonlit dance floor, his hand slid warm and certain up her spine, his forehead dropped to hers in the dark, and he said the thing that short-circuits every rational thought in her head. “You’re the only thing I’d let ruin me.” He pulled her in for a kiss, close enough to feel his breath, close enough to lose her mind completely, and then he pulled away. Leaving her wanting. He calls her starlight like it’s a secret only he gets to keep. And Halle is so embarrassingly, helplessly gone for him. The ones who make you forget your own name? Those are the ones worth ruining yourself for.