0°Celsius To thaw a frozen heart
While My Husband Cheated, I Married His Powerful Brother
To help her husband build his business empire, Veyra worked two jobs, skipped meals, and sacrificed everything she had. When her mother desperately needed life-saving treatment, she couldn't even scrape together the money. Then, on a New Year's Eve flight, fate seated her beside her husband's mistress. That's when she discovered the cruel truth. Her husband had secretly amassed millions long ago. The wedding ring that belonged to Veyra now glittered on another woman's finger. The $500,000 that could have saved her mother's life had been spent instead on luxury gifts and pocket money for his lover. She lost her baby. She lost her mother. And finally, she lost every illusion about the man she'd loved for years. After leaving the airport, Veyra walked into a bar, kissed the most dangerous-looking stranger she could find, and spent one reckless night in his arms. By sunrise, she disappeared without leaving so much as her name. She thought it was nothing more than a farewell to her broken past. She was wrong. The stranger was Dorian-the most powerful, mysterious billionaire in the business world. Meanwhile, her cheating husband finally realized what he had thrown away. He begged on his knees, signed a postnuptial agreement worth billions, and swore he would give up everything if she would come back. But just as Veyra began plotting to reclaim everything that had been stolen from her, a mysterious car accident brought Dorian back into her life. Only then did she learn the truth. He wasn't a stranger at all. He was her ex-husband's older stepbrother. Now two powerful men are fighting for the same woman-one consumed by regret, the other determined to make her his. Sorry, cheating ex... I choose your brother.
Chapter 1 First Class Betrayal
Caspian had been working overtime through the entire New Year holiday. Veyra Solenne decided she would surprise him. She'd fly out, knock on his hotel door, watch his tired face crack into a smile.
Only business class seats were left. Although she felt bad about the ticket price, she thought it was worth it.
She sat there for a full minute, unable to figure out how to lower the tray table.
The woman beside her - polished, bored, gorgeous in the particular way that costs money - let out a short laugh.
"Never flown business before?"
Veyra managed an awkward smile. "Sorry. You must run a company or something. You've got that air about you."
"Me? No." The woman waved a manicured hand. "But my benefactor does. If I'm not in business class, he sends a private jet."
"A benefactor," Veyra said. "Those must be hard to come by."
"Not really." The woman's mouth curved. "I'm his subordinate. I keep making expensive mistakes at work. He scolds me until I cry, and then-" she smiled, letting the sentence finish itself.
A small chill moved down Veyra's spine, though she couldn't have said why. "Funny," she said slowly. "My husband has a colleague like that too. Always making mistakes."
"You're married?" The woman's eyes swept over her, cataloguing. "His wife's about your age, actually."
She examined her nails.
"He says he got tired of her ages ago. Says touching her feels stale. Less interesting than watching me flip my hair."
Veyra's stomach turned, quietly, the way it does before you know why.
"I told him I wanted to see him over the holiday," the woman went on, pleased with herself. "So he told his wife he had to work."
That was when Veyra saw it. The ring on the woman's finger. A diamond, cut exactly like the wedding band she had lost two years ago.
She went still.
Caspian is an ordinary employee, she thought. So, calm down. Similar rings don't mean anything.
Her eyes fixed on the ring.
"That's a wedding band," Veyra said, her voice coming out strange to her own ears. "Did you marry him?"
"This?" The woman - Xiomara, she introduced herself, admiring the stone as it caught the cabin light - "I made him take it from his wife."
The air went out of Veyra's lungs.
"I wasn't trying to make trouble for her, honestly," Xiomara said. "But on my birthday she had a miscarriage and dragged him to the hospital. I spent it alone."
Veyra's hand drifted, without her permission, to her stomach.
The memory came back whole and freezing: black ice on the walk home from the market, a fall she hadn't seen coming, three months along, and then nothing but blood on frozen concrete. Caspian at her bedside for three days straight, not sleeping. Waking to find her ring gone along with the child.
It's okay, he'd said, voice breaking. We'll have another baby. I'll make you a new ring.
Don't, she'd told him. They're doing layoffs. Save the money. When you make it, get me one then.
She had believed, at the time, that this was a small and noble sacrifice. She had not known she was negotiating away her own ring to a woman she hadn't met yet.
"So he gave you his wife's ring," Veyra said carefully.
"He didn't want to, at first. Said he'd buy me something better." Xiomara tilted her hand, watching the light slide across the diamond. "But that old thing acts so superior just for being his wife. If I don't put her in her place, she'll think she owns the world."
"When a woman lets herself get that pathetic," Xiomara added, almost kindly, "there's really no saving her."
Veyra's fingers found the hem of her sleeve and held on. "If he spends this much on you, he must be paying her a fortune to keep quiet."
Xiomara laughed, bright and careless, and leaned in close enough that her perfume became a wall.
"Here's the funny part," she whispered. "That pathetic woman doesn't even know he runs a company."
---
"Why keep it from her?" Veyra asked. Something in her was still hoping - stupidly, stubbornly - that there was an explanation that didn't end where she thought it did.
"Because what's the point?" Xiomara turned her nails toward the window light. "She already spent her best years slaving beside him while he built everything. If you were a man and you finally made it, would you keep spending on a wife who's already worn out? Money doesn't buy back anyone's youth."
Veyra caught her own reflection in the cabin glass - hollow-cheeked, shadowed under the eyes, ten years of scraping by written into her skin. She used to look better than this. She used to look like Xiomara.
"You know, sis, you've still got some looks left," Xiomara said, studying her with the clinical warmth of someone appraising livestock. "A little cosmetic work wouldn't hurt. Your husband hasn't been that interested lately, has he?"
Veyra said nothing.
"My benefactor gives me half a million a month just for living expenses," Xiomara added, unprompted, unbothered. "Procedures are separate."
"How long," Veyra made herself ask, "has this been going on?"
"Since June twelfth, last year." Xiomara checked her nails again, already bored of the question.
Veyra's grip on her own sleeve went white-knuckled.
June twelfth. The day her mother had needed five hundred thousand dollars for surgery she never got. Caspian had begged everyone he knew and come back with three hundred fifty thousand - everything I have, he'd told her, weeping, and she had believed him, had scraped together eighty thousand more herself and still watched her mother die eighty thousand short of enough.
I'm sorry, he'd said into her hair. I'm worthless. I couldn't even save your mother.
She had wiped his tears instead of her own. You gave everything you had. That's enough. Just wait a little longer, she'd told him, and he'd gripped her hand like a man drowning and sworn they wouldn't suffer forever.
He'd had the other hundred and fifty thousand the whole time.
"Funny thing," Xiomara said, watching her now with real interest. "That woman's mother needed exactly five hundred thousand that same month."
Veyra looked at her and said nothing at all.
Xiomara winked. "He was going to pay it. Originally."
"You took it," Veyra said. "For an allowance."
"Please, he's got plenty more where that came from. I just told him - once her mother's dead, that woman has no family left. Nowhere to go. If he ever gets caught keeping me, she won't dare make a scene." Xiomara smiled, cat-content. "I wanted a Chanel piece that month. Five hundred thousand, as it happens."
"Aren't you afraid she'll find out?"
"I'm smarter than that." Xiomara stretched, satisfied. "It was my idea - tell his wife he'd scraped together everything, let her think he gave his all. She'd be too grateful, too guilty over the shortfall, to ever look for someone else in the picture."
Then, almost as an afterthought, she added the last piece.
"The annoying part is, the only reason he finally agreed to do it was so that if I ever got found out, his precious wife wouldn't leave him." She snorted. "Tch. Some women have all the luck."
The slap landed before Veyra had decided to throw it.
"What is wrong with you?" Xiomara shrieked, hand flying to her cheek.
Frozen heart
Princess Ayla is given to King Rhobart as a war prize, to be his personal slave. When she arrives in Nordmar, her new home, she is ready to do anything in order to survive. She will soon learn that King Rhobart is a man cold like the ice and haunted by demons. ********************** "I am going t
Frozen Heart, New Start
The last thing I remembered was freezing to death in my garage, alone. My fiancée, Jenny, had taken all our savings, not for us, but for her lover Mark Todd's son, Leo. She didn't even seem sad when she found me, just annoyed my death inconveniently interrupted Leo's birthday plans. I gasped, my
Shattered Heart, Frozen Soul
The accident took away his freedom, leaving wounds that not only changed him physically but also shattered his heart. Since then, he chose to lock himself away in his room, shutting the world out completely. As long as he remained trapped in his paralyzed body, he refused to interact with anyone. He
MELTED HIS FROZEN HEART
Cassidy Ford, the Young Billionaire and successor, was enamored of Diana Fletcher, and both parents were sworn enemies. Cassidy paid her an unplanned visit and heard her discussing with her father how she would kill him after their wedding and take over his company. Instantly, he called off the marr
Frozen Heart, Unfrozen Love
Olivia Hayes, an ambitious tech queen, was soaring, immersed in her glitzy wedding plans with COO Marcus Thorne. Unseen, her young ward, Ethan, battled a terminal leukemia diagnosis, his quiet love for Olivia his only anchor. Desperate, Ethan revealed his illness and a radical last hope: experiment
Melting The Billionaire's Frozen Heart
Celia West's entire life shatters when she has to dump her long time boyfriend and marry the billionaire psycho, Shane Reynolds to save her father's company. But the real chaos begins when Celia gets pregnant for Shane and loses his baby. His indifference towards her turns into full blown hatred a
To Capture A Heart
We have been best friends once childhood for so long but then she gets in the way. I have been in love with you since the day you held me when my parents died in a car accident. Can you ever feel the same way even though you seem to be in love with somebody else?
HIS FROZEN HEART: MY BILLIONAIRE HUSBAND
The Bensons and Turners had been long time rivals and enemies but when the Bensons gets themselves in a business deal that claims all their fortune, they had no other choice but to bend to the Turner's will. On the other hand, The First son and heir to the Turners loses his wife to a car accident a
A Touch Of Fancy
A drugged Clark enters her room and his last line of defense crumbles to bits as he lays eyes on Rachel's face. The night had been wonderful. However, neither of them could have expected the dangers that were to come: Rachel's sister, fuelled with jealousy for her, and a desire for Clark, will try
A DANCE TO MY HEART
Arianna dexson, a popular hip-pop singer and the youth beloved in California,who had lived all her life being in one show or the other, with her best friends or with her family.... Single all her life and gives no man room for long conversation due to all what she heard about heartbreak from many gi
Sinful Duty
Her stepmother treated her unfairly, her half-sister wanted everything she had, and even her father tried to sell her to an old lecher just for a contract. All of these didn’t take Sophia down. But when she caught her boyfriend cheating with her half-sister, she failed to swallow the blow this tim
Frozen Cargo, A Betrayed Wife
My husband made me ride in the freezing cargo hold because his mistress wanted peace and quiet. I died back there, clutching the "vitamins" she gave me, while they laughed in the front seat. It wasn't until my frozen body was found that Atlas realized he had just killed his own wife and unborn chi
Frozen Promises
Allison Palmer had just wrapped up her world tour when the media announced her pregnancy. Paparazzi snapped photos of her husband Braydon Saunders heading to the hospital for a prenatal checkup with some mysterious woman. Everyone assumed that woman was Allison. After all, Braydon's love fo
FROZEN VENGEANCE: MATED TO THE ROGUE ALPHA
Diana had always known she was different, able to scent emotions, hear heartbeats, and sense danger before it struck. Abandoned by her parents and sold to a rehab facility, her world was a lonely blur until she met Eric. Charming, intelligent, and kind... or so she thought.Eric offered love. Instead
From Frozen Betrayal To Fierce Love
The first sign I was going to die wasn't the blizzard. It wasn't the bone-deep cold. It was the look in my fiancé's eyes when he told me he had given my life's work-our only guarantee of survival-to another woman. "Kelsi was freezing," he said, as if I were being unreasonable. "You're the expert,
How to heal: A broken heart
Ashy took a chance on something risky. She made the decision to love, but she wasn't sure she was prepared to be hurt. Despite the knowledge that others would be hurt, she and Storm were thrilled. When the moment came for Storm to make a decision, Ashy assumed he would choose her. She was left
A Heart-Song of To-day
Annie Gregg Savigny wrote this popular book that continues to be widely read today despite its age.
The Frozen Deep
The date is between twenty and thirty years ago. The place is an English sea-port. The time is night. And the business of the moment is — dancing. The Mayor and Corporation of the town are giving a grand ball, in celebration of the departure of an Arctic expedition from their port. The ships
