The Tycoon's Contract Violinist
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"I'm giving you one month," he said. "To get used to this. To me. After that, I won't be asking."
I'm Eleanor Fitzgerald — or I was. The daughter they raised by accident, switched at birth, and erased the day the real one came home. For six years I've made myself small in my own house, and my violin is the only thing that was ever truly mine.
Then my father sold me. To Victor Sterling — the most feared man in Arcadia. A king of the underworld who put his own uncle in federal prison and built an empire on everyone who crossed him. The contract gives him my name for two years and ten million dollars. In return, I owe him everything a wife owes her husband — he made that clear before I signed. I was too shy, too reluctant, too proud to argue.
I braced myself for him to take what the contract says is his.
But he hasn't. He shows up when the room turns against me, and the room falls silent. He knows I can't eat tree nuts. He leaves his white shirt on my bed and tells me I'm Sterling now. And one night, with his mouth at my ear, he stops asking: I have one month to get used to him. After that, he won't ask again.
I told myself this was a transaction. Two years, a wire transfer, a clean exit. But nothing prepared me for the way he looks at me — or for the way my heart stops when he does.
One month. When it's over, will I still be his contract wife... or his?
I'm Eleanor Fitzgerald — or I was. The daughter they raised by accident, switched at birth, and erased the day the real one came home. For six years I've made myself small in my own house, and my violin is the only thing that was ever truly mine.
Then my father sold me. To Victor Sterling — the most feared man in Arcadia. A king of the underworld who put his own uncle in federal prison and built an empire on everyone who crossed him. The contract gives him my name for two years and ten million dollars. In return, I owe him everything a wife owes her husband — he made that clear before I signed. I was too shy, too reluctant, too proud to argue.
I braced myself for him to take what the contract says is his.
But he hasn't. He shows up when the room turns against me, and the room falls silent. He knows I can't eat tree nuts. He leaves his white shirt on my bed and tells me I'm Sterling now. And one night, with his mouth at my ear, he stops asking: I have one month to get used to him. After that, he won't ask again.
I told myself this was a transaction. Two years, a wire transfer, a clean exit. But nothing prepared me for the way he looks at me — or for the way my heart stops when he does.
One month. When it's over, will I still be his contract wife... or his?
