Healing

My attempts to marry Ethan Ward had been derailed exactly seven times.
The first time, Peyton threw him a "surprise" party, and he was too hungover to make our City Hall appointment. 
The second time, she got into a minor fender bender and hysterically convinced him her neck was broken. He rode with her in the ambulance. 
The third time, right as we were signing the papers, she swallowed a bottle ...

In my family, there's a rule: any woman who reaches thirty without getting married must return to the family estate and have her marriage arranged by the Council of Elders.
When I told Dominic Moretti about this, he was sitting on my desk flipping through financial reports.
After hearing me out, he let out a derisive laugh.
"Is the Bennett family some medieval royal house? A bunch of old men get t...

All my life, my family said Lucia needed more because I was stronger.
My pony. My celebrations. My mother's time. Whenever my twin wanted something, I was expected to give it up.
Our Mafia Family induction was supposed to be different. We were both Don Romano's daughters. We were both supposed to receive a crown.
Instead, Lucia's custom crown held both our diamonds while mine sat tarnished and emp...

In the ten years I was with Chase Holloway, I got used to him "forgetting" things.

The night he proposed, he showed up empty-handed and said the ring was still at the jeweler's. The day we went to City Hall for our marriage license, he dug through every pocket of his coat and said he'd left his paperwork at home. On our wedding day, he didn't show up at all.

I found out later he'd been in the ba...

My water broke in the basement where my mafia husband had locked me up. Upstairs, doctors were waiting on his brother's widow.

I begged him over the guard's phone to let me go to a hospital. He heard me crying. Then he told the guard to keep the door shut until her baby was born.

I pressed a hand against my belly. Our daughter was still moving.

When footsteps stopped outside the cell, I called ...

My mother gave me her kidney. The price was my husband.
As the orderlies wheeled me toward surgery, Mom gripped my hand and begged through her tears: “Promise me you'll divorce Ansel. Your sister needs him.”
My husband had already signed the papers. “Give me one year,” he said. “Once Tam's back on her feet, we'll get remarried.”
I survived the operation. I signed away my marriage. Then I vanished ...

For five years, Reese was dead certain I couldn't survive without him. That arrogance was why he dared to strap me to a polygraph chair on my birthday. Why he looked me dead in the eye and said he regretted marrying me. Why he transferred the tickets for my birthday getaway to his first love, letting her lounge in my pajamas, sleep in my bed, and flaunt the heirloom my mother left me before she di...

He divorced me for a girl who reminded him of who I used to be.

For five years, I played the perfect wife.

I traded my motorcycle for a luxury car, my camera for boardroom meetings, and my freedom for the suffocating rules of his old-money world.

I changed everything about myself to make him happy.

But when he looked at me, all he saw was a cold, calculating socialite.

He told me he missed...

The day we moved into the new estate on the hill, every bedroom had a name next to it. The master suite for my parents. The east wing for my brother, Luca. And the best room in the house, the south suite overlooking the Hudson, was labeled Sofia's Room. My name wasn't anywhere. Out in the hallway, a workman was screwing brass nameplates onto every bedroom door. None of them said Chiara. Ten years ...

My daughter was running a fever. When I carried her downstairs, my sister-in-law was already waiting beside my husband Ethan Cole's car with her son in her arms.

Ethan hesitated. “Do you want me to take you?”

Before I could answer, Claire cut in.

“Ethan, it's Zack's preschool open house today. We're going to be late.”

“Besides…didn't we agree you weren't going to help her financially for a few...

When I was seven weeks pregnant, my husband, Jacob, seated his mistress and their secret son at the head table of our anniversary dinner.
In front of everyone, he said, "Ella hasn't given me a child in four years. Why should I keep waiting?" His mistress was already tired of waiting to take my place.
So I gave them what they wanted. I faked my death in the car crash his mistress had planned and wa...

On our wedding day, my fiancé died in a terrible car accident on his way to pick me up.

I was left a widow, carrying a child who would never know its father.

The shock left me severely depressed. I wanted to end my life more times than I could count. Everyone told me to keep going for the baby.

On the day of his funeral, his older brother returned from Africa with his wife to pay their respects...

My wolf was damaged the day I first shifted, when I was ten. I’ve healed slower than other wolves ever since, and a wolf like that can’t inherit a pack.

I grew up mocked and bullied for being the weak one.

My sister, Seraphina, shifted on the same day and came through it perfectly. She became the Alpha heir, the prodigy my parents poured everything into.

I thought they loved her more because sh...

When my fiancé lets his new assistant put my name on the family purge list, he tells me it was only a joke. He expects me to apologize, come home, and keep standing beside him while everyone watches another woman take my place. So I let the order go through. I leave his family, his city, and the future he thought I would never dare abandon.

I spent six years trying to warm an emotionally distant husband and raising a son who learned to copy his coldness. On the day my civil assault case went to trial, they flew to Switzerland to comfort my husband's ex-girlfriend. When my five-year-old admitted he had deleted the strongest video evidence because he didn't want Vanessa to cry, the last bit of love in me went quiet. By the time they re...

Typically, brides swap bouquets for good luck when wedding motorcades cross paths.
But in Liam’s Southern hometown, they had a twisted tradition: they swapped brides.

When our limousines met bumper-to-bumper, Kinsley leaned right past me. She pressed a lingering kiss to my fiancé’s cheek.
"Hope you don't mind, Rachel," she purred with innocent malice. "I’m stealing your groom."
The groomsmen ho...

My father is the youngest chief of cardiac surgery in the country, the ace of his field.
His hands were the best in the business. Yet on the day my mother had a sudden heart attack and needed an emergency transfer, he turned her away, claiming every operating room was full.
Later, someone photographed him on a sunlit lawn at a country club on the edge of town, showering another woman's daughter wi...

Ten years into my marriage, I'd traded my paintbrush for a spatula and turned into Mrs. Holloway.

Ever since my sister Brooke moved in, my husband Bennett and my daughter Lucy had picked up a habit. Anytime Brooke and I disagreed, they put it to a vote.

On my birthday I wanted steak. Two hands went up for the salad bar Brooke liked. When I hadn't slept in weeks and wanted to see a therapist, the...

For eighteen years, Ethan Caldwell was the person I trusted most. Then, on the night meant to celebrate my future, he handed me another woman's hotel key and asked me to protect her reputation.

I gave him one final chance: meet me at the airport and choose our promised trip. Instead, he lied about a car accident while I watched him wrap a matching scarf around Vanessa Reed's neck.

By the time Et...

To celebrate his startup's funding, my boyfriend Liam forced me to eat a cake baked by his female best friend, Mia.

I immediately smelled peanuts. He knew I was deathly allergic, but he pressured me to take a bite anyway.

When the reaction hit—my throat closing, hives burning my skin—I reached for my EpiPen.

Mia snatched it first.

She turned my only lifeline into a party trick, tossing it in t...