De Luca empire
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The Hockey Prince's Secret Ice Queen
All I wanted was to find a computer genius to process the non-linear dynamic equations for my ecological model. Instead, I found myself cornered by Julian Andrews, the university's hockey prince, trading a public, staged kiss for his academic support. To finalize our "deal," I was dragged to the campus ice rink. The cheerleaders and puck bunnies immediately swarmed him, mocking my plain clothes and treating me like a pathetic joke. Brooke, the head cheerleader, even set up a figure skating competition with a date with Julian as the grand prize. She performed a basic spin, blew him a kiss, and smugly waited for me to fall flat on my face and humiliate myself. His hockey teammates laughed from the sidelines, watching me try to support Julian as he stumbled around the ice like a newborn giraffe. But as I held his warm hand to keep him from falling, I couldn't help but feel something was terribly wrong. Why was a top-tier athlete faking such awful balance? And why did his ice-blue eyes stare at me with such knowing anticipation, as if he already knew about the professional figure skating past I had spent years trying to bury? "Just let go and skate." He whispered, slowly releasing my hand. I took a deep breath, glided to the center of the rink, and landed a flawless double Axel. As the entire rink fell into a dead, shocked silence, I realized I had just exposed not only my own hidden past, but also the biggest secret of the campus god.
Chapter 1 No.1
Sage POV:
"Let me kiss you."
The request was a low, hurried murmur—warm, quiet, and laced with the faintest edge of mortification.
Stunned, I snapped my head up toward the sound.
Julian Andrews filled my vision. He easily towered a head over me, his lean, athletic frame silhouetted against the bright morning glare, casting a long shadow across the cobblestones. Briar University's star forward. Team captain. The athletic department's untouchable golden boy.
Campus rumor had it that Julian was notoriously indifferent, never sparing anyone a second glance.
Behind him, a solid wall of navy-and-gold varsity jackets blocked the brick path. His teammates were whistling, shoving each other, and effectively cutting off my only exit.
The sudden commotion immediately bottlenecked the morning foot traffic. Whispers rippled through the crowd, and within seconds, a dozen students reached into their pockets out of sheer muscle memory, black camera lenses catching the light as they aimed squarely at us.
Julian's sharp eyes tracked the movement, his jaw tightening into a hard, irritated line.
Before I could take a single defensive step back, he closed the distance between us. Leaning down into my space, his broad shoulders shifted in a subtle, fluid maneuver—throwing up an impenetrable physical wall that completely shielded my face from the intrusive glare of the cameras.
His sharp, striking face hovered breathtakingly close. His deep baritone brushed against my ear, lost to the autumn wind, meant for me alone:
"Sorry to drop this on you," he whispered, his pale blue eyes disarmingly earnest, holding a quiet heat that sent a tremor straight down my spine. "The guys backed me into a locker-room dare... but I'm not here to use you as a joke. We can fake it. Angle it so it looks real—whatever you're comfortable with. Just help me get them off my back, and I owe you one."
It was only then that my brain finally rebooted.
What on earth? He's actually trying to kiss me?
A sharp flare of pure absurdity hit me, and my gaze dropped to my reflection in the dark glass door of the adjacent building: an oversized, faded gray hoodie that swallowed my frame whole, soft, thin jeans worn at the knees, bare-faced dark circles carved beneath my eyes from forty-eight hours of non-stop coding, my dark hair hastily twisted into a cheap plastic claw clip, and a pair of oversized, thick black-rimmed glasses sitting heavy on the bridge of my nose, completely hiding my face.
I looked like a refugee from an all-night disaster. How had Briar's golden prince ended up in front of me?
When I looked back up, my breath trapped in my throat anyway. He was too close, his clean scent of winter mint and cedar wrapping around my senses. Having those pale blue eyes staring straight down at me made my chest tighten in a way I really didn't want to acknowledge.
"Clock's ticking, Cap!" Landon howled from the sidelines, hands cupped around his mouth as the rest of the players lost their minds laughing. "Plant one on her, or enjoy the five-AM bag skate!"
A raucous chorus of barks and chest-thumping went up from the team.
A few yards away, two girls heading toward the dining hall froze in their tracks, pointing their phones.
"Wait, who the hell is that?" one of them laughed loudly, zooming her camera in on my face. "She looks like she just crawled out of a dumpster. There's no way Julian's actually kissing her. Post it on Sidechat right now—this is going straight to number one."
The cruel words hit like a splash of ice water, snapping me out of my daze and instantly killing the stupid flutter in my chest.
I hated the attention.
Four years ago, after my family and my former training partner framed me and destroyed my competitive skating career, I swore I would never be public entertainment again. I buried my name, switched majors, and hid behind oversized fleece and thick glasses just to live an invisible life. If I ended up on the campus forums with Julian Andrews, the internet vultures would dox me before noon—and drag up the toxic scandal I had bled to walk away from.
My research was already on the verge of falling apart. I didn't have time for this circus.
I locked my grip around my heavy binders, my knuckles straining white.
"Find someone else for your dare, Andrews," I said coldly, taking a step back to put distance between us, my voice tight with adrenaline. "I'm not interested in being part of your game. Move."
I kept my head down, attempting to brush past him.
"You're Sage Kelley, right?"
The sound of my name brought my boots to an immediate halt.
I blinked up at him, caught completely off guard.
"Professor Beaumont's senior research student," Julian straightened up slightly, his cadence measured and even, carrying an intellectual sharpness that seemed impossible beneath a varsity jacket. "I saw your Havenwood Creek senior capstone proposal sitting on his desk over Sunday dinner."
My heart gave a hard, hollow thud. Professor Beaumont was my academic advisor—and the guardian of the final research endowment my late father had left behind.
Julian leaned in slightly, his voice dropping to a near-whisper against the whistle of the wind. "I spent an hour going over your codebase."
My lips parted. "You... read my proposal?"
"Your simulation keeps crashing because your core fluid algorithm strategy is flawed," Julian murmured, his pale blue eyes deadly sharp. "And Uncle Des mentioned that if you don't deliver a working version by this Friday, the department is pulling your grant—which means you don't clear your senior thesis, and you don't graduate in May."
The hair on the back of my neck stood on end.
Friday was the deadline. If the funding was pulled, the project died, my senior capstone failed, and I would be forced to stay another semester without my degree. Worse, my father's final ecological legacy would be reduced to scrap paper.
I had been panicking over that exact deadline for two days straight, and Julian had just laid it out like it was nothing.
Worse, I couldn't even brush him off. I had heard the rumors about Beaumont's nephew—the CS prodigy everyone in the department talked about. I just had never realized it was him.
"I know how to fix your algorithm," Julian stated plainly, laying his cards on the table, his gaze locking onto mine with an unshakeable, quiet certainty. "Help me get through this bet. In return, I'll rewrite your boundary calculations tonight. Deal?"
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De Luca empire
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Wife of Alessandro de luca
She became his wife to repay a debt. He planned to destroy her to avenge a blood-soaked past. At fifteen, Rose life was quietly sold off by the man she trusted most-her father. At twenty two, she's forced to stand at the altar beside Alessandro De Luca, a ruthless Italian mafia boss with a reputatio
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The raising of De Luca family
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BOUND BY THE HEARTLESS DE LUCA
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"Shadows of Allegiance: The Luca Moretti Chronicles."
The compelling mafia story "Shadows of Allegiance: The Luca Moretti Chronicles" chronicles Luca Moretti's ascent inside the infamous Valenti Family. Luca, thrust into a world of power, treachery, and allegiance, makes his way through the perilous waters of the underworld and establishes his value wi
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CEO EMPIRE
Nights with the CEO Guto One Night Forever A Baby for Italo Russo An Heir for CEO Otto Millani My Carnival with the Cowboy A Second Chance The Desert Falcon The Fisherman The Mutt Playboy The Carnival Ball Weekend with the Boss Pleasures of One Night The First CEO we never forget The First CEO is fo
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Eternal Empire
In a world full of several hundreds of empires, large and small, when it came to military force on land, the Ning Empire was said to be unequalled. With strong elite troops from all four borders and depositories sweeping across the land in all directions, they were able to stick their flag in the gr
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The empire of Darkness
The Empire of Darkness In the shadows of the city, Gabriel Moretti reigns over one of Europe's most feared criminal empires. Cold, ruthless, and dangerously intelligent, he controls everything-until he meets Alba Ricci, a woman with a fiery gaze and a past shrouded in secrets. Once a brilliant sur
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Daughter of the empire
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His Betrayal, Her Empire
For seven years, I poured my passion, my dreams, and every spare cent into our future, believing Jackson and I were building something real. Then, his engagement party to socialite Blair Kennedy became front-page news, exposing the truth about the "sentimental" cubic zirconia ring he’d given me. The
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Reclaiming the Empire
At the family banquet welcoming the return of the true daughter, my wealthy adoptive parents publicly announced that I should transfer the shares in my name to the "wronged" true daughter. All the guests praised my parents for their fairness and congratulated the true daughter on her hardships fi
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Shattered Compass, Broken Empire
I, Ethan Thorne, had quietly ensured my fiancée Seraphina Vance's family wealth for years. It was a sacred pact, tied to my ancient Thorne Providence, a legacy of power I cherished. At the grand ballroom, I sought Seraphina, only to find her locked in a passionate kiss with Marcus Blackwood. She br
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The Husband's Hidden Empire
Our tenth anniversary was supposed to be a romantic surprise, a special night at a chic downtown hotel. Instead, I found Ethan there, shirtless on the edge of the bed, with Chloe, a young woman barely out of college, looking flustered in a hotel robe. My world shattered as his gaze flickered, murm
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Her Empire, His Ruin
My thumb hovered over the screen, then I tapped the little heart. It was a beautiful, honest architecture project from an old friend, the kind I used to dream of doing. Then the comment popped up from another classmate: "Ethan Miller! Good to see you' re still keeping up with real architecture. Th
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The Shadow Empire
When Elena Russo, a driven and brilliant mastermind, stumbles into the life of enigmatic billionaire Alexander Voss, she becomes entangled in a web of secrets and power. With her future on the line and her heart caught in a haul- of- war between passion and fear, Elena must navigate a world of high
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The Empire of Sin
Alessia Romano has lived in the long shadow cast by a receding father's failures since the day she was born. But his last, most unspeakable error was neither a bad investment nor a failure to save her mother from an increased dosage of suicide pills: It was a something rather darker-a debt to the de
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Heart of the Empire
"I don't need your money... I never have... And, I never will..." Jenifar stated firmly. Alexander smiled ruefully, his eyes glinting with a mix of amusement and challenge. "What you feel for me is irrelevant... I've never asked for your love. And you always seem to forget that what we have here..."
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TO KEEP AN EMPIRE
In the heart of a city ruled by power and fear, the De-Rossi family stands as an unshakable force. Led by Vince De-Rossi , they've weathered countless storms, but nothing could prepare them for the arrival of a shadowy assassin known only as The Ghost. Hired by their sworn enemies, the Giovannis, Th
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The Empire of Thetia
We often hear that love makes us blind, but when we add jealousy, we lose all beneficial notions, and we are ready to do anything so that the person at the origin of these evils, suffer. This is what will happen to Thetia Kestle, the youngest of the Kestle family. It is her older sister Jane who wil
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The Empire of Love
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
