Betrayed Bride, Ruthless Tycoon, Real Love

Betrayed Bride, Ruthless Tycoon, Real Love

Kattie Eaton

5.0
Comment(s)
7.6K
View
10
Chapters

Tonight was my engagement party, the beginning of the perfect life my fiancé, Mark, had promised me. The ballroom glittered, filled with white roses and the smiling faces of our friends and family. But just before my grand entrance, I overheard him talking to his sister, Isabella. "She's so ridiculously naive," he laughed. "Swallowed every lie. This sham of an engagement secured it all. Her family's company is ours now." I threw the door open, only to find them locked in a passionate, desperate kiss. He just smirked at me, his eyes cold. "The act is over," he said. "Did you really think I could ever love someone as pathetic as you?" When I ran to my father for help, he called me hysterical and sided with Mark, the man who had just destroyed my life. A text message confirmed the nightmare: Mark had frozen all my accounts. He'd taken everything. My only hope was a desperate one: Julian Thorne. A ruthless corporate predator and Mark's biggest rival. I went to him to beg for help. He looked at me with cold, calculating eyes and revealed a shocking secret. My family's company had already belonged to him for weeks. Then he made his offer. He would give me my revenge. In return, I had to sign a marriage contract and become his wife.

Betrayed Bride, Ruthless Tycoon, Real Love Chapter 1

Tonight was my engagement party, the beginning of the perfect life my fiancé, Mark, had promised me. The ballroom glittered, filled with white roses and the smiling faces of our friends and family.

But just before my grand entrance, I overheard him talking to his sister, Isabella.

"She's so ridiculously naive," he laughed. "Swallowed every lie. This sham of an engagement secured it all. Her family's company is ours now."

I threw the door open, only to find them locked in a passionate, desperate kiss.

He just smirked at me, his eyes cold.

"The act is over," he said. "Did you really think I could ever love someone as pathetic as you?"

When I ran to my father for help, he called me hysterical and sided with Mark, the man who had just destroyed my life. A text message confirmed the nightmare: Mark had frozen all my accounts. He'd taken everything.

My only hope was a desperate one: Julian Thorne. A ruthless corporate predator and Mark's biggest rival.

I went to him to beg for help. He looked at me with cold, calculating eyes and revealed a shocking secret. My family's company had already belonged to him for weeks.

Then he made his offer. He would give me my revenge. In return, I had to sign a marriage contract and become his wife.

Chapter 1

The champagne flute felt impossibly cold in my hand, a stark contrast to the warmth blooming in my chest. Tonight was supposed to be the beginning of forever. Our engagement party.

The grand ballroom of The Veridia Hotel was a sea of glittering chandeliers and smiling faces. The air was thick with the scent of expensive perfume and white roses, my favorite. Every detail was perfect, a testament to the perfect life Mark had promised me.

I paused just outside the arched doorway to the main hall, taking a moment to smooth down the silk of my gown. It was a custom piece, the color of a summer sky at dusk, and it had cost a fortune. Mark had insisted. "Nothing is too good for my future wife," he'd murmured, his lips brushing my temple. The memory sent another wave of affection through me. How had I gotten so lucky?

A low murmur of voices drifted from a small, private study to my left, the door slightly ajar. I recognized the smooth, confident cadence of my fiancé, Mark Sterling, and the lighter, sharper tones of his sister, Isabella. I smiled, thinking to catch them for a quick moment before making my grand entrance.

I took a step closer, my hand reaching for the heavy oak door, when Mark's words stopped me cold.

"She's so ridiculously naive, isn't she? Swallowed every lie, hook, line, and sinker." His voice was laced with a cruel amusement I had never heard before. It was a chilling, ugly sound.

My heart stuttered. *He can't be talking about me.* It had to be a joke, some business rival he was discussing.

Isabella laughed, a sound like shattering glass. "Honestly, Mark, I'm almost impressed. The devoted fiancé act? The endless talk about your 'perfect Clara'? You deserve an award. Did you see her face when you gave her that ridiculous heirloom ring? She looked like she was going to cry."

The blood drained from my face, leaving my skin clammy. The heirloom ring on my finger suddenly felt like a lead weight.

I pressed my back against the cool, textured wallpaper of the corridor, my breath catching in my throat. The scent of roses from the ballroom now seemed cloying, suffocating.

"It was all worth it," Mark said, his voice dropping lower. "The final papers are signed. Her father's company, all its assets, everything her family built... it's ours now. The merger is complete. And this sham of an engagement secured it all."

The champagne flute slipped from my numb fingers, shattering on the marble floor. The sound was deafening in the sudden silence of my world. The warmth in my chest had turned to a shard of ice, piercing me through.

*No. No, this isn't happening.*

Rage, white-hot and blinding, surged through me, overriding the shock. I shoved the study door open with a force that made it slam against the wall. "What did you just say?"

The scene inside was a thousand times worse than the words I'd overheard. Mark wasn't just standing with his sister. He had Isabella pressed against a large mahogany desk, his hands tangled in her hair, their mouths locked in a passionate, desperate kiss that had nothing to do with sibling affection.

They sprang apart, but it was too late. The image was burned into my mind. The sight of them, the truth of them, was a physical blow.

Mark recovered first. He straightened his tie, his expression shifting from momentary shock to a cold, reptilian smirk. There was no remorse in his eyes, no shame. Only a chilling finality.

"The act is over," he said, his voice flat and devoid of the warmth I had cherished for two years. He looked at me, his gaze sweeping over my carefully chosen gown, my tear-filled eyes, my trembling hands, as if I were something distasteful he'd found on the bottom of his shoe. "Did you really think I could ever love someone as pathetic as you, Clara?"

Each word was a hammer blow, shattering the beautiful illusion of my life into a million pieces. Pathetic. Naive. A tool to be used and discarded. The man I loved, the man I was going to marry, didn't exist. He had never existed.

I couldn't breathe. I couldn't think. My body moved on pure instinct, a primal need to escape. I turned and fled. I ran from the study, past the blurred, questioning faces at the ballroom entrance, past the glittering lights and the mocking scent of roses. I pushed through the heavy glass doors of the hotel and out into the night.

Veridia was weeping with me. A torrential downpour had begun, the rain cold and merciless, plastering my silk gown to my skin in seconds. The carefully styled curls in my hair collapsed, sending streams of water and mascara down my face. I didn't care. I just ran, blindly, my bare feet slapping against the slick pavement, the sound lost in the roar of the storm and the frantic, broken sobs tearing from my throat.

Tears and rain blinded me. I stumbled off the curb and directly into the path of a sleek, black car that materialized out of the deluge. Tires screeched against the wet asphalt, the sound a raw scream of metal and rubber. The car stopped, its formidable chrome grille inches from my body.

I was frozen, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. My entire body trembled, not from the cold, but from the utter devastation that had hollowed me out.

The back window, tinted to an impenetrable black, slid down with a silent, electric hum. A man sat in the leather-scented interior, bathed in the soft glow of a dashboard light. His face was all sharp angles and shadows, his jaw tight, his eyes a piercing, glacial blue. It was Julian Thorne. The Julian Thorne. A man known in Veridia as a corporate titan, a ruthless predator who devoured companies whole. His reputation was as dark and imposing as the storm raging around us.

He looked at me, huddled and dripping on the street like a drowned rat. His expression was one of pure, unadulterated disdain.

"Get out of my way," he said, his voice a low, chilling rumble that cut through the noise of the rain.

I flinched, ready to stumble back, to disappear. But then his eyes, those cold, calculating eyes, flickered down. They snagged on the antique silver locket resting against my collarbone, a final gift from my late mother. For a split second, the disdain in his gaze was replaced by something else. A flicker of intense, unreadable emotion that was gone as quickly as it appeared.

Then the mask was back in place. The window began to slide up, sealing him away in his world of power and wealth, leaving me alone in mine of ruin and rain.

Continue Reading

Other books by Kattie Eaton

More
My Roommate, My Nightmare

My Roommate, My Nightmare

Modern

5.0

I was just a normal college sophomore, studying journalism, living with my roommate, Britt. She was a self-proclaimed social justice warrior online, constantly posting, but sometimes her "activism" felt more like twisting things to make people feel small. This Thanksgiving, I posted a simple, sweet photo of my dad and me, saying how thankful I was for my hero firefighter father. A few hours later, a friend sent a screenshot from CampusWhisper, our anonymous gossip app. It was my photo, my dad, with a vile caption calling me a "pick-me" celebrating "patriarchal figures." My stomach dropped when I saw the edge of my phone in the background. Only Britt could have taken that screenshot from my phone. When I confronted her, she sneered, defending herself as "speaking truth to power," even calling my dad an "oppressive machine." Campus security ordered her to apologize, but Britt retaliated, mocking me on TikTok, painting me as a sensitive, "triggered conservative." Then came the rumors, and a guy, clearly put up to it by Britt, made a disgusting comment implying she' d shown them fabricated, explicit images of me and my dad. My blood ran cold imagining what she created. I charged her, demanding to see her phone, and she screamed, faking an assault. Me, assaulting her? The humiliation was unbearable. I couldn't understand why her hatred was so personal, so extreme. What kind of person creates something like that about someone's father? What was wrong with her? That' s when I called my Uncle Dave, a no-nonsense lawyer. He told me to start gathering every piece of evidence. This wasn't just online drama anymore; this was a war, and I was going to fight back. I had no idea then, how far she would be willing to go, or what I would have to do to stop her before she destroyed my life – and potentially ended it.

Too Late For Regret: The Mafia King's Despair

Too Late For Regret: The Mafia King's Despair

Mafia

5.0

My twin sister Haleigh returned with a fake diagnosis of Stage 4 Pancreatic Cancer and a "dying wish" to marry my fiancé, Jameson Blair. Without a second thought, Jameson, the most feared Underboss in New York, took the three-carat diamond meant for me and slid it onto her finger. I became the spare. The obstacle standing in the way of a tragedy's happy ending. When Haleigh planted a brown recluse spider in my room, I was the one bitten and poisoned. Yet, my brothers kicked me while I was delirious with fever, accusing me of trying to terrorize their "dying" angel. On her birthday yacht party, a grill tipped over during a storm. My synthetic dress caught fire instantly. As flames seared the skin off my legs, I screamed for help. But Jameson and my brothers formed a human shield around Haleigh, frantically checking her hand for a single speck of ash while I burned alive just ten feet away. The final straw came at the cliffs. Haleigh staged a suicide attempt to frame me for bullying her. To teach me a lesson, Jameson bound my wrists and hung me over the edge of the abyss on a rope, leaving me dangling helplessly over the churning ocean. They thought they were punishing a monster. They didn't know I had a jagged rock in my hand. As they drove away to comfort the liar, I didn't wait for them to come back. I sawed through the rope myself and let the ocean take me. Three years later, after discovering Haleigh never had cancer, my brothers and Jameson found me alive in Florence. They knelt on the cobblestones, weeping, begging for a second chance. I looked at the men who had watched me burn. "You aren't sorry you hurt me," I said, turning to walk away with another man. "You're just sorry you bet on the wrong sister."

You'll also like

The Mute Bride Is The Secret Mastermind

The Mute Bride Is The Secret Mastermind

Jin Yi
5.0

I was the titan of Wall Street until an indictment and an ankle monitor turned my penthouse into a gilded cage. To save face, I was forced into a marriage with Elza, a "mute" girl from the Schmidt family whom I treated as nothing more than a silent piece of furniture while my empire crumbled. The night I was poisoned at a high-society gala, a mysterious server in an oversized uniform saved my life with terrifying, clinical precision. They disappeared into the night, leaving me with a silver cufflink and a burning obsession to find the shadow who held my life in their hands. Back home, I took my frustration out on Elza, telling her she was "exhausting to look at" and "smelled like sickness" after her charity visits. Her own family treated her like a stray dog, trying to humiliate her at the next gala by dressing her in what they claimed was a cheap knockoff while whispering to the press that she was nothing but a high-end escort. "Stay out of my way," I would growl at her, never noticing the steel in her eyes. I sat at my table, watching my rivals' stocks plummet and wondering who "The Zero"—the legendary financial ghost—really was. I never suspected that the woman I ignored was the same one solving the equations that were currently burning Manhattan to the ground. The injustice peaked when Elza stood before the city's elite, not as a victim, but as a queen. She dropped over a hundred million dollars to buy back her family’s legacy, revealing a secret fortune that made my own empire look like pocket change. As I grabbed her wrist and saw the small red mole hidden beneath her watch, the truth hit me like a physical blow. The silent wife I had despised was the savior I had been hunting, and she was finally done playing the victim. "We have a lot to talk about, wife," I whispered, realizing I had been sleeping next to the most dangerous woman in the world.

The Billionaire's Secret Triplets: Mom's Revenge

The Billionaire's Secret Triplets: Mom's Revenge

HONEY MULLINS
5.0

Six years ago, I was a naive girl sold by my father to the powerful Sanders estate, only to be tossed onto the streets after a brutal assault they labeled "marital infidelity." I fled the country pregnant and broken, hiding from the shadow of a husband I had never even met. Now, I’ve returned to New York with my triplets to sign the final divorce papers and disappear forever. But Archibald Sanders—the man I was told was a crippled recluse—intercepted us with the cold precision of a predator. He didn't see the woman his family destroyed; he saw a gold-digger who had shamed his name. His security team hunted us to a grimy motel, using tactical force to snatch my children away and drag me to his glass-walled empire. In his office, he loomed over me, demanding a DNA test and threatening to throw me in prison while my babies were lost to the foster system. He was convinced I’d cheated, yet he stared at my sons with a haunting confusion, unable to ignore the stormy blue eyes that were a perfect mirror of his own. I stood there, paralyzed by his scent—the sharp tang of rain and expensive leather that triggered the icy dread of my worst nightmares. How could he accuse me of betrayal when he felt exactly like the monster who had shattered my life in that dark hotel room? "I'll sign anything," I sobbed, "just give me my kids." But the game changed when my five-year-old son hacked the tower’s security, holding the skyscraper hostage to save me. In the chaos, a fragile, silent boy—Archibald’s secret son—wandered into the room and reached for me as if I were his missing soul. Archibald’s face turned to stone as he tore up the agreement and locked the doors. "Until I find out why my son is looking at you like that," he growled, "you aren't going anywhere."

The Scars She Hid From The World

The Scars She Hid From The World

REGINA MCBRIDE
4.6

The heavy iron gates of the Wilderness Correction Camp groaned as they released me after three years of state-sponsored hell. I stood on the dirt road, clutching a plastic bag that held my entire life, waiting for the family that claimed they sent me there for "rehab." My brother, Brady, picked me up in a luxury SUV only to throw me out onto a deserted highway in the middle of a brewing storm. He told me I was a "public relations nightmare" and that the rain might finally wash the "stink" of the camp off me. He drove away, leaving me to limp miles through the mud on a snapped ankle. When I finally dragged myself to our family estate, my mother didn't offer a hug; she gasped in horror because my muddy clothes were ruining her Italian marble. They didn't give me my old room back. Instead, they banished me to a moldy gardener’s shack and hired a "babysitter" to make sure I didn't embarrass them further. My sister, Kaleigh, stood there in white cashmere, pretending to cry while clinging to her fiancé, Ambrose—the man who had once been mine. They all treated me like a volatile junkie, refusing to acknowledge that Kaleigh was the one who planted the drugs in my bag three years ago. They wanted to believe I was broken so they wouldn't have to feel guilty about the "wellness retreat" that was actually a torture chamber. I sat in the dark of that shed, feeling the cooling gel on the cigarette burns that covered my arms, and realized they had made a fatal mistake. They thought they had erased me, but I had returned with a roadmap of scars and a hidden satellite phone. At dinner, I didn't beg for their love. I simply rolled up my sleeves and showed them the price of their silence. As the wine spilled and the lies crumbled, I sent a single text to the only person I trusted: "I'm in. Let them simmer." The hunt was finally on.

Chapters
Read Now
Download Book
Betrayed Bride, Ruthless Tycoon, Real Love Betrayed Bride, Ruthless Tycoon, Real Love Kattie Eaton Romance
“Tonight was my engagement party, the beginning of the perfect life my fiancé, Mark, had promised me. The ballroom glittered, filled with white roses and the smiling faces of our friends and family. But just before my grand entrance, I overheard him talking to his sister, Isabella. "She's so ridiculously naive," he laughed. "Swallowed every lie. This sham of an engagement secured it all. Her family's company is ours now." I threw the door open, only to find them locked in a passionate, desperate kiss. He just smirked at me, his eyes cold. "The act is over," he said. "Did you really think I could ever love someone as pathetic as you?" When I ran to my father for help, he called me hysterical and sided with Mark, the man who had just destroyed my life. A text message confirmed the nightmare: Mark had frozen all my accounts. He'd taken everything. My only hope was a desperate one: Julian Thorne. A ruthless corporate predator and Mark's biggest rival. I went to him to beg for help. He looked at me with cold, calculating eyes and revealed a shocking secret. My family's company had already belonged to him for weeks. Then he made his offer. He would give me my revenge. In return, I had to sign a marriage contract and become his wife.”
1

Chapter 1

04/09/2025

2

Chapter 2

04/09/2025

3

Chapter 3

04/09/2025

4

Chapter 4

04/09/2025

5

Chapter 5

04/09/2025

6

Chapter 6

04/09/2025

7

Chapter 7

04/09/2025

8

Chapter 8

04/09/2025

9

Chapter 9

04/09/2025

10

Chapter 10

04/09/2025