Half of a year
/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.
/0/56180/coverbig.jpg?v=20260526081807)
Blood of a Half-Witch
For more than a millennium witches have been hunted for their blood by vampires. Lily Rivers is half werewolf half witch and has been keeping this secret for years. Her childhood best-friend and next in line alpha Jackson accidentally destroys the only thing she has left from her mother who is a wit
/0/1997/coverbig.jpg?v=3e95280e178b549bc757846b921f49e3)
/0/20810/coverbig.jpg?v=f530f34b776f1d2a21c6cc441c43b091)
Half of you, Vulcan!
The three ladies (his daughter, maid and lover) want a half of him, but seriously, who divides a half into three? * * * Athena has given her words to her father that Vulcan, the mortal is better than every god, Zeus, her father formed and proposed that she marry. Becaus
/0/3543/coverbig.jpg?v=d4fa65b9f25f09e72f0652d1e323c318)
/0/3544/coverbig.jpg?v=dd18575b902dee90aa0b25f972b81647)
/0/19550/coverbig.jpg?v=c041e25d622e9132ac3be0735c46b44c)
A Marriage and A Half
A marriage of convenience, Or is it? Business Mogul, Liam Edwards A sophisticated and quiet man, He loves his space and absolutely detest the limelight, Unfortunately for him he gets caught up in a scandal with the beautiful model, Zelda Stevens. Zelda's father Sir Rowland II leaves no stone unturn
/0/18383/coverbig.jpg?v=20231004224159)
Half Hope, Half Love
Hazel Scarlet could do much better in life than to gawk and fawn over her handsome, dashing and charming company's CEO, her only confidante and anchor in life — Health Evercrest; yet the best she decided to go for was to settle to be his friend. And the worse she decided to go for was to help him
/0/38249/coverbig.jpg?v=e0b4bccdea15bb25db65b6d3342ad91c)
A Seven-year Vacancy
Sophia Miller and Jim Brown were a loving couple that everyone envies in their high school. At that time, though they had different family backgrounds. They loved each other deeply. They had made a promise to enter the same university and get married after graduation. But things changed so fast. The
/0/51428/coverbig.jpg?v=beb1d5cc56b3616b07b3110d6fe3b621)
A YEAR WITH A BILLIONAIRE
Isabella needs a huge sum of money for her aged grandmother's surgery. She has nowhere to go for help and she decides to seek help from her Billionaire boss, Jayden. Jayden doesn't believe in marriages and happily ever after but he needs a wife so his mother would stop pestering him when he eventua
/0/1794/coverbig.jpg?v=20171116210533)
Half-A-Dozen Housekeepers
MARCH had come in like a lion, and showed no sign of going out like a lamb. The pussy willows knew that it was, or ought to be, spring, but although it takes a deal to discourage a New England pussy willow, they shivered in their brown skins and despaired of making their annual appearance even by Ap
/0/74398/coverbig.jpg?v=37f378f8939cec3221737a37b13c906a)
His for a year
She signed a contract. She didn't expect to sign away her heart. Zoe Monroe never wanted to set foot in Jameson Montague's world. A world of ruthless billionaires, backstabbing boardrooms, and cold, calculated marriages. But when life leaves her with no other choice, she agrees to a contract that w
/0/16923/coverbig.jpg?v=0055a4b8cb13108a78b2eee5e3fb879e)
/0/91470/coverbig.jpg?v=299fe318c39a5befd5cb4d1f24eaba7d)
A Five-Year Deception, A Lifetime of Payback
I was the long-lost Donovan heiress, finally brought home after a childhood in foster care. My parents adored me, my husband cherished me, and the woman who tried to ruin my life, Kiera Reese, was locked away in a mental facility. I was safe. I was loved. On my birthday, I decided to surprise my hu
/0/853/coverbig.jpg?v=20171121150504)
Half a Life-time Ago
Half a life-time ago, there lived in one of the Westmoreland dales a single woman, of the name of Susan Dixon. She was owner of the small farm-house where she resided, and of some thirty or forty acres of land by which it was surrounded. She had also an hereditary right to a sheep-walk, extending to
/0/24355/coverbig.jpg?v=65d19d6cc8fd19ff0990ac7a6a74b941)
HALF SISTERS
Born to the same father but different mothers; the story of two sisters. Miriam Parker and Gina Mills, enemies for unknown reasons. Fueled with the added unexpected love triangle which stormed their world with the appearance of Hades Edwards; a plot to kill Gina soon became the only devious solution
/0/2038/coverbig.jpg?v=ffc8987b5c5f49ee9c665e749648ce9f)
In the Year of Jubilee
George Robert Gissing was an English novelist who published 23 novels between 1880 and 1903. Gissing also worked as a teacher and tutor throughout his life. He published his first novel, Workers in the Dawn, in 1880. His best known novels, which are published in modern editions, include The Nether W
/0/32792/coverbig.jpg?v=a246daae402dc1c40e9fd4aa40609d70)
A YEAR WITH THE BILLIONAIRE
Isabella needs a huge sum of money for her aged grandmother's surgery. She has nowhere to go for help and she decides to seek help from her Billionaire boss, Jayden. Jayden doesn't believe in marriages and happily ever after but he needs a wife so his mother would stop pestering him when he eventua
/0/84109/coverbig.jpg?v=7c2ad6421b1e1e31b6721b6c5d54e6f1)
A Year To Find Forever
My husband, Ethan, had been by my side for ten years, treating me with unwavering devotion, a quiet chef supporting my empire. I was Jocelyn Anderson, COO of a hospitality giant, a Wharton graduate, and frankly, too busy to notice. I saw him as steady, uncomplicated-a strategic move to keep my fam
/0/8952/coverbig.jpg?v=d2d0d4d833cd7ce6eba7a962cd25117a)
Winning His W": A Story of Freshman Year at College"
A school has been very correctly termed a little world of itself. Within it the temptations and struggles and triumphs are as real as those in the larger world outside. They differ in form, not in character, and become for many a man the foundation upon which later success or failure has been built.
/0/13577/coverbig.jpg?v=b018cea3b98e22b76d7901727b4b8df9)
In The Fourth Year Anticipations of a World Peace (1918)
In The Fourth Year Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) by H.G. Wells
