I Was the Perfect Mistress. Until I Stopped Needing His Money.
Lily · Completed · 5.7k Words
Introduction
I knew his coffee preferences, his pre-meeting anxieties, yet it wasn't until his arranged-marriage partner returned that I understood I was merely a replaceable 'item' in his life plan.
When my mother passed and the pressure of medical bills vanished, I realized for the first time — that contract with its monthly transfers had bought not just my time, but my very right to say 'no' to him.
And now, when I no longer need his money...
This transaction, forged in the name of bondage, will be terminated by me.
Chapter 1
I handed the printed resignation letter to Marcus, ready to end my five-year gilded cage existence.
"Did something happen? The company can't afford to lose you," Marcus said, flipping through the resignation letter.
"My mother passed away. I want to take my child abroad for a while," I replied. "We need a fresh start somewhere new."
Marcus nodded in understanding, recalling the night a week ago when my mother died. I had made over a dozen calls to Ethan from the hospital corridor. No one picked up.
Later, I saw on Victoria's social media that Ethan was busy showing Victoria, who had just returned from abroad, around the company.
My mother took her last breath at three in the morning.
"Emma, are you sure you want to leave?" Marcus's voice pulled me back to the present. "Mr. Blake needs..."
"He'll handle it. After all, he has Miss Rothwell now."
As I left the HR office, I encountered them in the corridor.
Victoria was holding his arm as they headed towards a conference room. Seeing me, Victoria gave a polite, professional smile and nod.
I returned the nod and prepared to leave.
"Wait," Ethan called out.
"Yes, Ethan?" I turned to face him, a flicker of hope stirring despite myself.
"Ms. Thompson, let me introduce you," he said, his tone distant and formal. "This is Victoria. She'll be taking over your secretarial duties."
Ms. Thompson.
I gave a bitter smile. For five years in the company, I was always Ms. Thompson.
At work, he always maintained this detached demeanor, as if we were merely superior and subordinate.
And I had silently played along.
"Understood," I nodded. "I wish you both a smooth transition."
Then Victoria took his arm and they walked away.
My phone vibrated. It was Lucas.
"Mommy, do you have my birthday present ready?"
Hearing his voice instantly calmed my heart.
"Of course. Anything special you want?"
"I want Mommy and Daddy to pick me up from school together."
I glanced over at Ethan, still talking with Victoria. They were discussing some work arrangement, Victoria nodding and smiling occasionally.
"Okay, sweetie. Mommy will come get you."
After hanging up, I hesitated, then sent Ethan a text: Free tonight? It's Lucas's birthday.
The moment I pressed send, I felt ridiculous. After five years, what was I still hoping for?
At four PM, I went alone to pick up Lucas from kindergarten.
Many parents had already gathered at the gate, most couples together.
I saw the parents of Amy, a girl in Lucas's class, discussing where to go for dinner. Her father suggested that new Italian place; her mother said they should ask Amy first.
Standing among them, my phone screen still showed no reply from Ethan.
"Mrs. Thompson!" Amy's mother approached me. "It's Lucas's birthday today, right? Any special plans?"
"Yes, we'll celebrate at home," I answered with a smile.
When Lucas saw me, he showed no disappointment, just quietly packed his little backpack.
"Mommy, look what I drew today—'My Family,'" he said, holding up a picture of the two of us in a park. In the distance was a tall building with a blurry figure inside. "Daddy's at work."
He was already used to his father's absence. The thought twisted my heart.
Back home, I prepared Lucas's birthday cake. While cutting fruit, I remembered the night five years ago when I signed that agreement. The A4 paper held cold, hard clauses: confidentiality, five-year term, fixed monthly transfers.
Ethan's signature was scrawled; mine was neat and precise. Back then, I thought it was the beginning of love. Now I understood it was just a comprehensive employment contract.
"Mommy, aren't we waiting for Daddy?" Lucas asked, wearing his birthday hat.
I checked my phone. Six o'clock. Still no reply.
"Daddy has important work today," I said, ruffling his hair. "Let's start without him."
Lucas nodded, asking no further. He never fussed over things he couldn't have, a trait he shared with Ethan.
Then my phone rang. My heart leapt—maybe Ethan finally remembered. Maybe we could still celebrate as a family.
But the message read: [Important last-minute meeting.]
Then my phone notified me of a Victoria's social media update. A candlelit dinner at a restaurant, captioned: "A perfect night with you."
And in the corner of the photo, a man's hand was visible, wearing a ring.
I zoomed in on that hand, a sense of foreboding rising within me.
Last Chapters
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CHASING GHOSTS
Letters to a Dark Prince
Thrown into Isteros Academy—a world of old money, blood money, and cruel social games—she's an outsider by birth and an afterthought by design. Her sister Solyn is the school's untouchable queen and Mara is her favorite target.
Everyone expects Atreus to treat his fiancée’s scholarship sister like everyone else does—as if she doesn’t matter.
Instead, his dorm room sits directly across from hers, close enough that she can see his light go out at night. Some nights, he climbs the old maintenance trellis just to check on her. He teaches her chess. He shows up exactly when something's gone wrong—and never once asks to be thanked for it.
"Don't fall in love with one piece," he warns her, over a board neither of them treats like a game anymore. "It punishes the person who only sees half of it."
Mara doesn't understand why the boy who's supposed to make her life harder keeps quietly making it easier—not until she realizes the anonymous stranger she's been writing to every week already has a name.
His.
He doesn't know he's writing to her, either.
By the time they find out, it's too late to stop what's already happening. Far too dangerous for anyone to find out.
In an empty studio, in the middle of a rainstorm, she asks him: 'Am I the kind of girl who kisses a boy engaged to my sister?'
He doesn't answer.
So she asks: 'What are we?’
He told her not to fall in love with one piece.
She fell anyway.
And he was never far behind.
Mission: Steal the Male Lead
But the more Morwenna changes the story, the stranger the world becomes. The heroine seems to know the future, unseen spectators begin commenting on her life, and the gods watching from above grow obsessed with the drama unfolding before them. Trapped in a story where fate has already decided the ending, Morwenna must choose whether to follow the script or rewrite it entirely. But if the world itself was never meant to belong to its characters, can she steal the male lead before fate steals her freedom first?
My Husband's Secretary Wore My Dress
Those words shattered Vivian's heart.
For three years, she endured her husband's coldness and his secretary's endless provocations.
She never knew that the woman he trusted most had stolen her identity.
Or that the man she loved had secretly loved her all along.
When the truth finally came out, it was already too late.
Vivian had divorced him.
She had disappeared with his unborn child.
And she had no intention of coming back.
Five years later, the former ballerina returned as the sole heiress of a powerful family.
Standing beside her was a little girl with eyes identical to Caden Lux's.
The billionaire who once ignored her had gone mad.
He blocked her in the dressing room, knelt before her, and even accepted the possibility that another man had taken his place.
Because losing his pride was nothing.
Losing Vivian had nearly killed him.
But after everything he had done…
Could she ever forgive the man who chose another woman over his own wife?
The Billionaire's Surrogate's Secret
“Who said that’s still fucking true? We stopped being just man and surrogate the first time our eyes met.” He walked towards me, boring into my eyes with those eyes of his. “I fucking want you, Vanessa.”
My heart stuttered.
This could not be real.
“But the rules—“
“I made them. I can destroy them. I already destroyed them when I kissed you.” He was dangerously close now, but all I kept getting was danger signals combined with the panic, alarm, lust and above all, the guilt.
It was killing me.
Vanessa Sterling who never liked men because of what her father did to her mother ended up having a drunken one night stand with a stranger and that might end up changing her life forever.
Rodri Darnell who doesn’t want to get married or have kids but is forced to give his father a grand child, decided to use a surrogate.
Vanessa Sterling was supposed to be an ordinary surrogate to Rodri Darnell of the Dolphin Emirates, but he fell in love with her.
Their only problem will be Vanessa's secret.
Tempted By The Enemy
She escapes to Preston Island to attend the wedding without informing him only to collide with Lucas’s hot, fiery and arrogant brother, the twenty-three-year-old, Nicholas Donnelly. Sparks immediately fly between them but Alyssa refuses to acknowledge them fearing her brother's wrath.
The wedding is over and Alyssa tries hard to forget the mysterious Nicholas Donnelly but can he forget her? Can he ignore the attraction he feels for her, feelings that have resurfaced after ten years?
What will Allyssa do when she is stalked by the man who has been invading her dreams since the day she met him? What will she do when she is whisked away to a deserted island by the unpredictable Nicholas Donnelly? Can she tame her heart or surrender to sinful temptations? Read to find out!
Part of the Temptation Series. Can be read as a standalone.
The Family Books 1-3 (A Mafia romance)
The saint to my sinner. with her innocent eyes and devilish curves.
A Madonna that was meant to be admired but never touched.
Until someone took that innocence from her.
She left.
The darkness in my heart was finally complete.
I avenged her, I killed for her, but she never came back.
Until I saw her again. An angel dancing around a pole for money.
She didn’t know I owned that club. She didn’t know I was watching.
This time I won’t let her escape.
I will make her back into the girl I knew.
Whether she likes it or not.
2/ Judge and Jury- I can’t stop watching her.
I’m not even sure I want to.
Taylor Lawson, blonde, beautiful, and totally oblivious to how much dangers she’s in.
She’s also the one juror in my upcoming murder trial that hasn’t been bought.
The one who can put me behind bars for a very long time.
I know I should execute her.
After all that’s what I do.
I am the Judge.
I eliminate threats to The Family.
And Taylor is a threat.
But I don’t want to kill her.
Possessing her, making her love me seems like a much better plan for this particular Juror.
3/ Rags and Ritches-
MOONLIT CHASE
But no, I had to walk through the park at midnight like an idiot. Now I've seen something I can't unsee—a massive black wolf tearing apart three men, then shifting into the hottest guy I've ever laid eyes on.
Kieran Vaughn. Wealthy lawyer, werewolf, and apparently, he thinks I'm his mate.
Here's the problem: I don't do relationships. I definitely don't do supernatural things. I absolutely don't do rich guys who think they can control my life just because their inner wolf has decided I smell like home.
When hunters start targeting me to get to him, Kieran drags me into his pristine penthouse for "protection." Now I'm living with a man who looks at me like I'm his last meal, whose touch sets my skin on fire, and who's barely holding onto his control.
He says everyone he loves dies. I say that's not my problem except it is because I'm falling for this broken, dangerous man and his beast.
And in his world? Love will get you killed.
Bloodright
Ashveil University is not what it looks like in the photographs. The students here carry something that shifts their eyes at the edges of anger. The northwest trees hold an attention that trees should not be able to hold. And the empty chair at the council table, the one nobody sits in, the one nobody explains, has been waiting three hundred years for one specific person to arrive.
Nobody told Adaline she was that person. They classified her as Dormant. A blank space in a file. Nothing.
She is the opposite of nothing.
Beneath the campus, three ancient entities are waking up. Every house in the pack world wants to control what runs in her blood. The boy sent to assess her has stopped being able to do his job. And the woman who has been three steps ahead of everyone since before Adaline was born is not a villain. She is a warning. She is what Adaline would have become if nobody had found her.
The suppression field holding everything together is failing. The clock is running. And the only way to stop what is coming requires Adaline to give up the thing she can least afford to lose.
She already knows her answer. She decided before anyone told her the full price.
My Billionaire Husband's Secret
He was the CEO of the Blackwood Group — a man whose wealth and power eclipsed ninety-nine percent of the world.
He was gentle. Romantic. Attentive. I fell for him fast.
But a year into our marriage, I began to notice something — a pattern.
Lucas's sexual appetite was intense — he wanted me almost every night. Yet every single month, he arranged a solo trip to send me away. I told myself it was his way of spoiling me.
Then a message arrived from someone called Sweet An.
Do you really know your husband?
From that day on, my life filled with shadows.
I suspected my husband of having an affair.
When Lucas and I made love, something felt wrong — his body too large, too much, like something I couldn't explain.
I heard sounds during sex — animal sounds, like something feral had crawled into bed with us.
My best friend Mia said: "There are men sick enough to let dogs fuck their wives."
The family doctor, Daisy, told me: "You could never stay by Lucas's side forever. Your background doesn't make you worthy of being his wife. Do you understand?"
I went looking for whoever had been tearing my marriage apart. I fought to win my husband back.
But the deeper I searched, the larger the secret grew — something far darker hiding beneath this supposed betrayal.
Does Lucas truly love me?
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The MC Hacker’s Stolen Princess
She did not come to find out her father had promised her to another man.
As the only daughter of Shane “Rook” Rourke, president of the Lost Coast Renegades MC, Taryn has always known club business comes first. But when Rook signs a treaty with the dangerous president of Iron Mesa, he crosses a line even she never imagined.
Safe passage through Arizona territory comes with a price.
Her.
Kellan Stroud is thirty, powerful, ruthless, and already waiting at Sturgis to meet the woman he expects to marry.
Taryn wants no part of him, no part of the agreement, and definitely no part of a future chosen for her by two men who think a signature is enough to decide where she belongs.
Then she meets Bobby Fuentes.
At twenty, Bobby is one of the youngest fully patched members of the Sons of Doom MC. He is quiet until he has something to say, dangerous when he needs to be, and smart enough to get into places no one else can. Hacking is what he does best.
Until Taryn gives him a new problem to solve.
One reckless connection at Sturgis becomes something neither of them can ignore, and when Bobby realizes exactly what Rook has promised away, walking away stops being an option.
But stealing another president’s future wife is not a misunderstanding.
It is an insult.
A betrayal.
And in the MC world, it can mean war.
Taryn refuses to be anyone’s property.
Bobby has never been good at following rules.
And Kellan Stroud does not forgive what he believes belongs to him.
The road out of Sturgis may cost them everything first.
Reborn and Unleashed: The Boss Lady Takes No Prisoners
Now reborn, Vivian refuses to hide her strength. She's revealing her true identity, claiming her power, and rewriting her fate. No more submission, no more misunderstandings—this time, she'll take control of her life and her love.
As regretful brothers beg for forgiveness and powerful enemies fall at her feet, Vivian has one goal: to rise without mercy and make the man she once loved fall for her all over again—on her terms.
