MARRIED TO MY TARGET: A Contract Marriage

She came into his world with a smile, a résumé, and a secret she couldn't afford to lose. Peonara Hayes is just a college girl desperate to save her mother or so everyone believes. When a contract marriage offer lands in her lap from the city's most powerful and untouchable CEO, Hanzel Preston, she tells herself the rules are clear no feelings, no complications, a clean exit when it's done. He is cold, arrogant, and dangerously hard to read. She tells herself she doesn't care about any of that. She just needs to get through this. "It's just a mission," she told herself. The word sat in the room like a third person. But the more time she spends in his world in his house, at his side, inside the empire he built from ice and ambition the more she realizes that nothing about this man is what it seems. No note. No explanation. Just coffee on her desk and his office light still on. He looks at her like he already knows every secret she's carrying. And slowly, without warning, the lines between the contract and something far more dangerous begin to blur. "It's not much," she said quietly. "It's enough," he said. The longer she stays, the harder it becomes to remember which version of herself is real the girl who signed the contract, or the girl who is slowly, terrifyingly, falling for the man she was never supposed to feel anything for. He says her name like it costs him something. He calls her Pea like it means everything. And on the day he slides a ring onto her finger and whispers "Welcome home, Pea" her breath catches. Just for a second. Just long enough to know she's already in trouble. She thought she was the one running the game. She had no idea the game had been running her all along.