Sold for Gold Bells
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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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Digging for Gold
His mother looked up from the table where she was cutting out pie crust, and asked in surprise, “What do you mean, Grant? Why is to-day any different from ordinary days?”
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SOLD FOR TEN MILLION DOLLARS
This is a story about a lady who caught her fiance cheating, a day to their wedding with her step sister, betty. She revealed their secret affair to everyone but instead of her family to reproach Betty they criticized her. As an unwanted child, she was sold to a wealthy man who was known to be men
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Sold For Cruel Mafia's Obsession
"She's my weakness, she's all the light's for the full darkness on myself. I love her so deeply-deeper than she can ever understand." - Carlos Robert Stewart. *** On the night of Graciel's kidnapping, her world changed after she knew her dad sold her to Carlos-the most dangerous ruthless mafi
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Wedding Bells, Death Knells
Seven years of my life were stolen, locked away for a crime I didn't commit. Now, out of that concrete cage, the California sun feels alien against my skin, and the only thing I crave is peace. Not salvation, not forgiveness, just a final resting place: my ashes scattered among the ancient Redwoods
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Gold Digger
KATHY GARCIA, the woman used to hardship. Forced to do something he never dreamed of doing. And it's to go into the club and attract older men, for short-term money. He only wants one thing, to get out of trouble. He thought that it would be so easy to achieve the comfort he sought, but he was wrong
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Flowing Gold
Room service at the Ajax is of a quality befitting the newest, the largest, and the most expensive hotel in Dallas. While the standard of excellence is uniformly high, nevertheless some extra care usually attaches to a breakfast ordered from the Governor's suite - most elegant and most expensive of
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Getting Gold
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. It is one of the world's largest research libraries holding over 150 million items in all known languages and formats: books, journals, newspapers, sound recordings, patents, maps, stamps, prints and much more. Its collection
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When Love Bells Ring
Lucy is a popular actress who happened to get entangled in a crime scene that changed her fate, in order to gain her dignity, she gets caught up with a billionaire in disguise!. Emilia is a girl of 10 and the daughter of Lucy, she had always wished to be loved at home, what happens when she wishes a
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Sold for $1 To The Hawthorne Brothers
Three women, three brothers, a single, crumpled dollar bill. Alina's world shatters the moment she's auctioned off-and claimed by the powerful Hawthorne brothers. Thrown into Adrian Hawthorne's cold, dangerous world, she becomes his to control... his to protect... and, terrifyingly, his to desire
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Sold.
The world has changed, vampires are a thing now, you can belong to one, to have a giant amount of money, the money would go to your family or people of your choice. Andreas is desperate, having no family, having no one behind him, he was truly desperate. His final choice was to belong to vampires,
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The Ring I Sold For Freedom
On the first anniversary of my daughter Maya's death, I went to her grave, feeling the chilling Chicago wind but nothing else. My husband, Ethan, was supposed to be with me, but he texted that "something urgent" came up. When I returned to our penthouse, the sound of a child' s laughter filled ou
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Sold For A Night, Bound For A Lifetime
One desperate night. One ruthless billionaire. One life changing mistake... At just twenty one years old, Kayla Williams has nothing left to lose. After losing her job and learning that her mother has only forty eight hours to receive a life saving surgery, she's forced to make an impossible choice.
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Sold For Millions to the Mafia
After witnessing her father's death and being forcefully taken away from her family and sold into prostitution at a young age, Bella never had seen or hoped for a better life outside what she was, let alone find love, but fate had betrayed her once more, giving her an enemy in disguise of a lover
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Sold to Lycan King for Surrogacy
He is a 33-year-old Lycan King, I'm a high school graduate. It's rumored that he was cursed by his first love, a dark witch who betrayed him, rendering him unable to feel the presence of a mate and sire offspring. To break the curse, he needed to find an 18-year-old virgin in the human world to serv
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SOLD
Mackenzie is the daughter of one of the country's biggest businessmen, successful and a role model to the social cream, but what they don't tell you is that from the gates in, her father is a gambling addict and her mother is a compulsive shopper. Mack, affectionately nicknamed by his little five-ye
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Celebrities Gold Digging Princess
COMPLETED! "It was just a kind gesture, Evan," I tried to explain, understanding his concern but he didn't seem to be in a listening mood. "I don't care," he declared in a low tone, his eyes locked on mine. He continued dragging me until we reached the kitchen sink . He then washed my hands after dr
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The Valley of Gold
The east wind blew furiously, beating gray sheets down the streaming panes. Along the village street flowed a turbid torrent, the squalid wash of an "old-timer-three-days'-blow" from the Great Lakes. Threshing was hung up. Every wheel was stopped for a thousand miles across the prairies.
