A Fake Scheme Tale Of Schemes 1
/1/124235/coverbig.jpg?v=f3ebc666ede0f2ce73fe362a2a25fc71)
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.
/0/23923/coverbig.jpg?v=1ac7f91f1ec1da15ee0312e9465ac4e0)
A Fake Scheme #1
Three people who are best friends from childhood end up in a deadly triangle and everyone has their scheme to break that triangle but never expected the turn of events in their lives. Join the journey of their schemes and the result which was never expected by any of them. Prathap, a 28-year-old w
/0/17582/coverbig.jpg?v=847551df4cc1ea9235287124b481379e)
Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy--Volume 1
John Richardson was a British Army officer and the first Canadian-born novelist to achieve international recognition.
/0/20556/coverbig.jpg?v=eed83247d984529d92e6b0b8ea35bbc0)
A tale of chase and love- historical/urban series 1
A wild, teenage heiress tricks her parents into letting her fly to S-Korea for a concert. But who could tell that half-way the plane would crash, that she'd be summoned to another dimension? Who can explain the new system that she has to host? Who could tell she'd fall in love with a demon and chase
/0/54869/coverbig.jpg?v=20240417010156)
Tale Of A Rejected Hybrid
"Do you think you are worthy of being mated to the Alpha's son? Huh?" Emily said to me as she looked down at me, with disgust. My mate's arm wound around her waist, showing his decision. I was rejected cruelly while my mate succumbed to Emily's charms. I was hurt and slowly dying, inwardly. I was
/0/11992/coverbig.jpg?v=ded065b1080d6750cd004ff42f0bcc45)
/0/9463/coverbig.jpg?v=e8d83bdd3ce8d0d8877fe004ec55c855)
Corleone: A Tale of Sicily
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preservin
/0/74/coverbig.jpg?v=20171219150231)
A Tale of Two Cities
A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is a novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. With well over 200 million copies sold, it is among the most famous works of fiction. The novel depicts the plight of the French peasantry demoralized by the French aristocrac
/0/11991/coverbig.jpg?v=ec8ef4243fc650a16692203e1845210c)
/0/67135/coverbig.jpg?v=d0b8e111e594dc4dd4835a13a6a0a1fd)
A Tale of Two Hearts
Ivy Taylor is unique in the lavish world of London's high society, where scandals and old money rule supreme. As the daughter of a self-made millionaire who loves poetry and painting, she is accustomed to feeling alienated from the elite. But one fateful night at a grand gala changes everything when
/0/47434/coverbig.jpg?v=dac7bfc47e19eb87dae095b4d01a12e6)
A Tale Of Dark Lust
"If you will not let me go then I will free myself from this painful life. If leaving the palace is not an option then there is always an option of death and I have chosen it". - Isabelle "Till now you have seen my love but now you will see the wrath of King Eric Leonor. I tried to be good to you b
/0/2934/coverbig.jpg?v=10c0a0347c73eec15ea06ac3fcc0b955)
/0/38236/coverbig.jpg?v=49e110ee5ed0c8a78ebaa51658bcdd64)
President's Scheme
At the first meeting, Bella Hatly's high heels got stuck on the manhole cover, and Thomas Hodder helped her pull them out. On the second meeting, Bella was drunk at a bar and was taken to the police station by taxi drivers. Thomas picks her up. The third time they met, Thomas was invited to attend
/0/1190/coverbig.jpg?v=d9b07ec16796a5b2b9b0a8295be845e4)
Ben-Hur; a tale of the Christ
This is a saga of a reverent journey by Judah Ben-Hur through reprisal, torment, affliction, and devout illumination to the revelation of Christianity. Ben-Hur grew up in a Roman-occupied Palestine as a wealthy young Jew whose family is respected of the citizenry but whose friend, Massala, a Roman w
/0/6130/coverbig.jpg?v=8c05c6ee5fe45043b7467483adfade8e)
Stella Fregelius: A Tale of Three Destinies
H. Rider Haggard was an English author known for adventure novels set in exotic locations. Haggard is considered to be one of the first writers of the Lost World genre. Haggard's novel She: A History of Adventure is a first-person narrative of 2 men in a lost kingdom.
/0/7043/coverbig.jpg?v=992b41b3db29b54c8f0639d3f82dcaef)
The Point Of Honor: A Military Tale
According to Wikipedia: "Joseph Conrad (1857 – 1924) was a Polish-born English novelist. Many critics regard him as one of the greatest novelists in the English language—a fact that is remarkable, as he did not learn to speak English fluently until he was in his twenties (and always with
/0/8791/coverbig.jpg?v=9d4cc02bad19616419a022fc50aa4f80)
Black Rock: A Tale of the Selkirks
I think I have met Ralph Conner. Indeed, I am sure I have - once in a canoe on the Red River, once on the Assinaboine, and twice or thrice on the prairies to the West. That was not the name he gave me, but, if I am right, it covers one of the most honest and genial of the strong characters that ar
/0/65457/coverbig.jpg?v=7992e278397c6d780d1e0b20d57b8146)
Forbidden Love-A Tale of Romance
Emily came back from Canada to America after years being graduate.She hates her father as he never looked after her and send her away from himself. Coming back she forced herself to meet him once and ask some questions which were eating up her mind all these years.There she meet Rigel her step Broth
/0/1150/coverbig.jpg?v=20171121145445)
Nostromo: a Tale of the Seaboard
“NOSTROMO” is the most anxiously meditated of the longer novels which belong to the period following upon the publication of the “Typhoon” volume of short stories. I don’t mean to say that I became then conscious of any impending change in my mentality and in my atti
/0/9541/coverbig.jpg?v=90c3be49291f16aa9968b96bcf2be547)
Terry / A Tale of the Hill People
This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not
/0/6519/coverbig.jpg?v=cefa660e5c2991b060d944cac4b916cd)
Forty-one Thieves / A Tale of California
Angelo Hall wrote this popular book that continues to be widely read today despite its age.
