St-charles Library Hours Novels & Stories

Charlotte Whitmore never expected to be a bride. Certainly not his bride. When her sister Victoria vanishes hours before her highly publicized wedding to billionaire CEO Damien Blackwood, Charlotte is pushed down the aisle as a last minute replacement. No warning. No choice. No love. She enters the marriage expecting coldness, resentment, and a swift exit. What she finds instead is far more complicated. Damien is guarded, powerful, and hiding something serious. The closer Charlotte gets, the more she realizes that Blackwood Empire is sitting on secrets that go back decades and somehow, impossibly, some of those secrets have her name on them. She came as a substitute. But what if she was always meant to be there? What happens when the woman everyone overlooked turns out to be the one person powerful enough to save an empire and the man who runs it?

On my birthday, my eight-year-old stepson dumped the cake I spent twelve hours on straight into the trash. His face twisted. "Smells like cheap frosting." Then he turned and happily dug into the plain pasta my husband's secretary made. I was about to lose it when the familiar floating comments popped up again. [OMG Nico's doing this again. He literally LOVES Reyna's cake every year. Boy just too prideful to admit it LOL.] [Fr fr, he's just using his late mom to test Reyna. Kid's lowkey possessive and messy!] [Alex, HELLO? Your son's jealous af. You not gonna say anything? Oh wait... you jealous too huh? Watching Reyna dote on Nico got you pressed. lol.]

“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.

What happened when the Devil set his eyes on a beautiful innocent Angel? Alexander Grissham is known as the ruthless, cold, dark-soul, leader of the Red Blood gangster in the town. His family practically owned the entire country and he was the next successor of his father's underground business. Aria, is a kind-hearted, beautiful angel in everyone's eyes. But her unfortunate life leading her to lost her parents at such young age. She lives with her very sick grandma and work for hours only to provide her and her grandma’s daily need, and medication. Aria never thought that one day, she would be targeted by the Devil. This cold, heartless creature trapped her and made her his favorite doll. Will she succeed softening his heart? Or is she actually falling deeper into the Devil's trap?

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.

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.

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.

Lilith wakes in a river on land she doesn’t recognise. What was her name again? Where did she come from? She walks for hours, hoping to find help and salvation. She does find population, but she had never imagined discovering the secrets of a world she doesn’t remember. Alpha Theodore Moon is a wolf-shifter, and what’s more, he’s one of her fated mates who nurses her back to health and falls profoundly and irrevocably in love with her. But with the other comes sordid secrets that have been hidden. Lilith holds a power like no other werewolf, and she’s being hunted as we speak. Will she uncover her secrets and learn to wield the powers she was given at birth before she is enslaved for them? Come and read with us to find out.

（Alpha Trojan） "Just do it!"My wolf Lupus urged. "You're going to tell to everyone anyway, so just say it now. Tell everyone that Nikita is our Luna." I landed my eyes at Nikita's face. "Do it, Trojan!" My wolf kept prodding me, he couldn't wait to mark our mate. But no, I can't do that... I looked at Nikita's worried eyes. I made up my mind. I’m going to say that… "It’s my sad announcement to tell everyone of you that I haven't found my mate yet." *** (Nikita) A few hours ago, the first sight I saw Alpha Trojan I was sure we were mates. But now, he announced that he had not found mate in front of me...

My ex-husband was dead, and when his wife called me, it was not to inform me about the funeral. She wanted my six-year-old daughter to stand vigil for her father at the funeral parlor. “People will talk if his daughter does not do it.” I was away on a business trip, and I had to ask my ex-husband’s sister to look after my daughter. That lasted until two in the morning, when my daughter left voice messages on her smartwatch. “It’s cold, Mommy. There are so many drawers. It looks like someone is lying inside. The door is locked. I can’t get out.” She was locked inside the mortuary refrigerator at the funeral parlor. Her pediatrician had said that if a six-year-old remained in forty degrees Fahrenheit for more than four hours, their organs would start to fail.