The Billionaire's Bought Bride and Instant Mom

Aveline

I should stop. I knew I should stop.

The man beneath me was barely conscious, dark eyes fluttering closed every few seconds like he was fighting to stay awake. His breathing was deep and slow, heavy with alcohol, and his responses to my touch were sluggish at best. He reeked of expensive whiskey.

Someone had drugged me—I could feel the fire coursing through my veins, making every nerve ending hypersensitive.

But I couldn't stop.

My hands braced against his chest as I moved above him, feeling the heat of his skin through the thin hotel robe that had somehow fallen open. He was beautiful in the dim light—sharp cheekbones, perfect jawline, nothing like the sickly invalid I'd imagined my husband to be.

Husband. What a fucking joke.

"You're Mrs. Sterling now," the lawyer had said six years ago, pushing the marriage certificate across the cold conference table. "Congratulations." He'd paused, consulting his notes with theatrical importance. "Oh, and Mr. Sterling is far too ill to see you before the wedding. He's dying, you understand. Practically on his deathbed."

Congratulations on marrying a corpse. As if being sold like livestock wasn't humiliating enough—I wasn't even worth meeting by a man with one foot in the grave. How pathetic was I that even the dying could reject me?

I'd come back to Manhattan for one reason: divorce papers. Dead or alive, I was done being Mrs. Sterling. But then Grandmother Eleanor had dropped a bombshell.

"He's still alive," she'd said, her voice weak but determined. "Your husband. He'll be at the Grandview Hotel, room 1205. It's time you two finally had that conversation."

Still alive. After six years of expecting widow's papers, the bastard had the audacity to keep breathing.

six years too late, but who was counting?

I tried to pull away, tried to be rational. I was Dr. Aveline Reeves now—a child psychologist, for God's sake. My entire career was built on understanding and taming irrational impulses, not surrendering to them. I was an independent woman who'd clawed her way back from nothing. I didn't let my body override my mind.

But the drug was winning, and the memories were flooding back.

The Hartwell mansion had been my kingdom once. Crystal chandeliers, marble floors, a pink princess bedroom that looked like something from a fairy tale. Mercedes picking me up from elite private school while classmates watched with envy.

"Our Aveline is the smartest, most beautiful girl in the world," Grandmother Eleanor would say, stroking my hair in her rose garden.

I'd believed her. Why wouldn't I? I was the princess of the Hartwell family, beloved and untouchable.

The man below me stirred, his hands weakly gripping my thighs. Even semi-conscious, even drugged, his touch sent electricity through me. I gasped, grinding down against him despite every rational thought screaming at me to stop.

Until my eighteenth birthday, when everything shattered.

"This is Vivian Hartwell," Father had said, his voice devoid of warmth. "Our biological daughter."

The DNA results had been spread across the coffee table like accusations. I wasn't their blood. I was just a hospital mix-up, eighteen years of stolen life that needed to be corrected.

The real daughter—mousy, timid Vivian—had been found in some rural village. She was everything I wasn't: grateful, quiet, content with scraps. Within days, she was sleeping in my bed while I was relocated to a converted storage room.

"As for you," Father had continued, his tone growing more cruel with each word, "I only know your surname is Reeves. Don't even know if your real parents are dead or alive. Not that it matters now."

"Fuck," I whispered, my body moving of its own accord. My fingers, clumsy from the drug but fueled by a desperate need, fumbled with the button and zipper of his jeans. I pulled his thick, hot cock free from his briefs. It was already slick with pre-cum, his body’s mindless response to my friction. He remained unconscious, his breathing deep and steady, eyelids fluttering but never opening.

The Hartwell family fell apart just as quickly as my identity had. Bad investments, bankruptcy, assets seized. And then Grandmother's heart attack.

"Two hundred thousand for the surgery," the doctor had said. "Immediately."

We didn't have two hundred thousand. We barely had two hundred.

That's when the man in the expensive suit appeared. The solution to all our problems.

"six hundred thousand," he'd offered. "For a bride."

I should have run then. Should have let Grandmother die rather than sell myself. But I was eighteen and desperate and stupid enough to believe their lies about becoming a wealthy widow within the year.

The drug made everything dreamlike. With a shaking hand, I guided the blunt tip of his cock to my entrance. I sank down onto him, a choked cry escaping my lips as my wet, tight pussy stretched to take every inch of him. The perfect, painful fullness was exactly what I needed.

The wedding had been a masterpiece of humiliation. No white dress, no flowers, no celebration. Just papers to sign in a sterile hotel conference room while lawyers watched like vultures.

"Welcome to the Sterling family," the lawyer had said with all the warmth of a tax auditor.

But then came the pièce de résistance—the phone call that arrived just as the ink dried on my signature.

"Slight change of plans," the intermediary had announced, not even bothering to look apologetic. "Mr. Sterling won't be requiring your... physical presence. The marriage is purely legal. For spiritual protection, you understand."

Spiritual protection. I was a fucking good luck charm, not a wife.

"You can go home now," he'd continued with casual cruelty. "Or wherever peasants like you go. You'll never meet Mr. Sterling—he finds the whole concept rather... beneath him."

I was grinding against him now, chasing the friction I needed, the release that would quiet the memories. His hands moved to my hips, fingers digging in with surprising strength for someone so far gone.

I'd wanted to scream. To tear up the contracts. To demand my money back.

Instead, I'd run.

Used my last few hundred dollars for a plane ticket out of Manhattan. Spent six years abroad, working my way through graduate school, building myself into someone stronger. Someone who couldn't be bought and sold.

Dr. Aveline Reeves. Not the broken eighteen-year-old who'd been traded like cattle.

But here I was, six years later, about to fuck the man who'd bought me like a commodity. The man who'd been too good to even meet me.

Something was wrong. This man—unconscious, drunk, vulnerable—wasn't acting like someone who thought he was above me. He was just... there. Lost in whatever alcoholic haze had claimed him.

And yet, his cock was impossibly hard, a solid presence my body gripped tight. It brought a wave of profound satisfaction, a feeling so complete it felt almost unprecedented.

The intermediary's words echoed: "You'll never meet Mr. Sterling."

But if that was true, then who the fuck was this?

I fucked him. I rode his hot body with a desperate, frantic rhythm, chasing the release that would silence the ghosts in my head. His hands slid to my hips, his fingers tracing the curve of my waist in a clumsy, mindless caress. He was mumbling something incoherent, words slurred beyond recognition, completely lost in drink and sensation. My pussy clenched around his cock with every downward thrust.

The orgasm hit me like a freight train, pleasure and confusion mixing into something overwhelming. I collapsed against his chest, feeling him pulse inside me as he followed me over the edge, nothing but wordless groans escaping his lips.

When I could finally breathe again, I rolled off him and reached for the nightstand, looking for something to ground myself in reality.

That's when I saw it. The hotel welcome card in elegant script.

"Welcome, Mr. Blackwell."

Not Sterling. Blackwell.