Regret

In the ten years I was with Chase Holloway, I got used to him "forgetting" things.

The night he proposed, he showed up empty-handed and said the ring was still at the jeweler's. The day we went to City Hall for our marriage license, he dug through every pocket of his coat and said he'd left his paperwork at home. On our wedding day, he didn't show up at all.

I found out later he'd been in the ba...

The day we moved into the new estate on the hill, every bedroom had a name next to it. The master suite for my parents. The east wing for my brother, Luca. And the best room in the house, the south suite overlooking the Hudson, was labeled Sofia's Room. My name wasn't anywhere. Out in the hallway, a workman was screwing brass nameplates onto every bedroom door. None of them said Chiara. Ten years ...

The day Eamon got promoted to Associate Attending, I received an anonymous AirDrop.
It was a Live Photo.
Inside the physical therapy clinic, the same hands that slipped a wedding ring on my finger were gripping his ex-girlfriend’s waist.
He gave her a deep, lingering look before pressing his body weight against her.
In the brief loop of motion, her fingers were tangled in his hair, and her eyes fl...

When I was seven weeks pregnant, my husband, Jacob, seated his mistress and their secret son at the head table of our anniversary dinner.
In front of everyone, he said, "Ella hasn't given me a child in four years. Why should I keep waiting?" His mistress was already tired of waiting to take my place.
So I gave them what they wanted. I faked my death in the car crash his mistress had planned and wa...

I had been Lucan Ferretti's wife for five years. I had also been the woman who took a bullet meant for him.
Four years of fertility treatments. Four years of empty rooms where a nursery should have been. Then, the day I finally get a positive test, I find something else: two secret sons, funded by my husband's money, waiting in a house I was never supposed to find.
Their names? The ones Lucan and ...

On the day of my final interview for the Yale scholarship, my childhood best friend, Carter, handed me a carton of chocolate milk.
I drank every drop, touched that he’d remembered. When I woke up, the hair I’d been growing for ten years was scattered all over the floor.
The prettiest girl in school twirled her scissors and smiled at him. “Your mom’s sleeping pills work great. I practically shaved ...

Whenever my husband, a Mafia don, needs me to back down, out come the divorce papers. When my parents, practically Mafia royalty, want the same thing, they threaten to cut me out of the family.

The demand never changes. Whatever I have, my twin sister should get it.

There was a time when I argued. When I cried and asked why I was always the one who had to give something up.

Then a doctor pushes...

I didn’t come from money, so Julian’s friends decided I was a gold digger.

His best friend, Sloane, was the worst. She liked to say she used to be a gold digger herself, so she knew my type.

To prove her wrong, I spent three years with Julian without accepting a single expensive gift.

Sloane had an answer for that, too: “She says she doesn’t want anything, but she’s really waiting for him to of...

Typically, brides swap bouquets for good luck when wedding motorcades cross paths.
But in Liam’s Southern hometown, they had a twisted tradition: they swapped brides.

When our limousines met bumper-to-bumper, Kinsley leaned right past me. She pressed a lingering kiss to my fiancé’s cheek.
"Hope you don't mind, Rachel," she purred with innocent malice. "I’m stealing your groom."
The groomsmen ho...

Ten years into my marriage, I'd traded my paintbrush for a spatula and turned into Mrs. Holloway.

Ever since my sister Brooke moved in, my husband Bennett and my daughter Lucy had picked up a habit. Anytime Brooke and I disagreed, they put it to a vote.

On my birthday I wanted steak. Two hands went up for the salad bar Brooke liked. When I hadn't slept in weeks and wanted to see a therapist, the...

For eighteen years, Ethan Caldwell was the person I trusted most. Then, on the night meant to celebrate my future, he handed me another woman's hotel key and asked me to protect her reputation.

I gave him one final chance: meet me at the airport and choose our promised trip. Instead, he lied about a car accident while I watched him wrap a matching scarf around Vanessa Reed's neck.

By the time Et...

To celebrate his startup's funding, my boyfriend Liam forced me to eat a cake baked by his female best friend, Mia.

I immediately smelled peanuts. He knew I was deathly allergic, but he pressured me to take a bite anyway.

When the reaction hit—my throat closing, hives burning my skin—I reached for my EpiPen.

Mia snatched it first.

She turned my only lifeline into a party trick, tossing it in t...

I dropped out of Harvard and took on massive debt to save my dying brother.
For five years, I starved. I worked five jobs a day. I let debt collectors break my ribs just so I could afford his "life-saving" meds.
Until I saw him at a VIP club.
No wheelchair. No illness. Just a bespoke suit and a glass of expensive whiskey.
"You've faked this terminal illness for five years," his friend laughed. ...

The morning of our wedding, Dante Russo led the hit that wiped out my family.
Branded a traitor, stripped of my name, I spent three years scrubbing blood from dog kennels at the docks. I lost my hands, my music, and three babies I never got to hold.
Then I learned the truth: there was no hit. My parents and the man I loved staged it all—to teach me a lesson, because my adopted sister Isabella crie...

Only after I lost the promotion did I find out that my broke boyfriend secretly owned the company I worked for.

He'd voted against me.

One of his friends asked him, “Aren't you worried Nora Bennett will find out you've been lying to her and raise hell?”

Blake Whitmore gave a casual laugh.

“Why would I be? It doesn't take much to make her happy again.”

“Chloe's different. She's been a princess...

I was dead, and the whole world was celebrating for my sister.

For twenty-two years, I had been the hardest-working but most invisible daughter in the Sterling family, forever living in the shadow of my gymnastics prodigy sister.

Running a high fever, I begged my family to take me to the hospital, only to hear: "Don't you DARE ruin Bella's award ceremony!"

When I was tricked into the abandoned ...

The day I get diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, I can finally stop selling plasma.

For five years, I thought I was paying for the fire that killed my parents and son, left my brother disabled. Selling plasma, joining drug trials, doing the worst jobs imaginable, all to pay back a debt that wasn't even real.

The doctor says I have a few weeks left. I clutch the diagnosis report and head home...

My ex-boyfriend wrote a hit song about me. He told the whole world I dumped him for being poor, painting me as the heartless ex who took nothing but his dog when I left.
I let him believe it. It was easier for him to hate me than to watch me decay.
A year later, he was on national television, his arm wrapped around a beautiful new starlet. When the host brought up our sudden breakup, Evan laughe...

“Xavier.” She moaned softly.
That gentle whisper broke me and reformed me all at the same time.
“Yes, blondie?” I panted heavily, my dick rock hard against her belly.
She shook her head, her hands dropping from my suit.
“I can't do this again.”
I grabbed her face between my palms, searching desperately, needing to find the truth within her expression but all I could see were remorse, guilt and reg...

"I hate you, Thunder. I will never forgive you."

Living a life as a wife and husband, how long would Jewel handle the pain caused by Thunder? Will it take her a long time to stay? Or will she choose to stay away from him and continue her life without the presence of her husband?
A question that keeps lingering in her mind and trying to find answers, but she'll end up setting it aside and continui...