My Twin Sister Ran Away On Her Wedding Day — So I Took Her Place And Married The Billionaire
Part 2
The heavy click of the brass lock sounded like a gunshot in the silent room.
Dan didn’t walk toward me right away.
He stayed perfectly still by the window, letting the crushing silence stretch until my nerves were completely frayed.
“Six months,” he finally said.
I blinked, my trembling hands still gripping the heavy silk of my skirt.
“What?”
“You desperately want your family’s house saved.”
He spoke clearly, like a man closing a massive ledger.
“I desperately want a wife who exists long enough to satisfy my grandfather’s will and keep the board from dismantling my company.”
He crossed the room, stopping just close enough for me to smell crisp cedar and cold air.
“You live here for exactly six months.”
His intense green eyes gave absolutely nothing away.
“You wear the ring, you let the world believe whatever it finds convenient, and at the end of it, your mortgage is ash.”
He tilted his head slightly.
“You go home to your bakery ovens, a very wealthy woman, with my absolute gratitude and my complete absence.”
I stared at his perfectly composed face.
“And in between?”
“In between, we are complete strangers who happen to share an address.”
I negotiated my mother’s peace of mind right then and there, making him swear she would never know it was a cold business transaction.
He agreed with a slight narrowing of his eyes, clearly unused to a baker’s daughter making aggressive demands.
That night, I didn’t sleep a single wink.
I wandered into the vast, surgical steel kitchen at two in the morning.
Brenda, the observant housekeeper who had seen right through my disguise on the terrace, was already sitting there.
She silently poured me a steaming cup of chamomile tea spiked with dark brandy.
“I’ve watched a lot of ambitious women walk through that front door,” Brenda murmured, sliding the warm mug across the stone counter.
“You’re the first one who genuinely looks like she’d rather be anywhere else.”
She warned me that Dan wasn’t the ruthless shark the financial papers made him out to be.
His grandfather had taught him repeatedly that loving anything was the surest way to watch it get sold off.
Empty, she told me quietly, was vastly safer for him.
The next morning, the real, looming threat arrived.
Rachel, Dan’s sleek and utterly terrifying cousin, cornered me in the sunlit parlor.
She smelled intensely of expensive perfume and deeply rooted resentment.
She explained the dangerous continuity provision in the grandfather’s will.
The board wasn’t just looking for a legally signed marriage certificate.
They were actively looking for a real, emotionally involved spouse.
If they found out I was a convenient fake, the company would be aggressively torn apart, and my family’s bakery would inevitably go down with it.
The ultimate test would be the massive foundation gala in exactly six days.
An executor named Gary, a relentless man who read rooms like tax audits, would be watching our every single move.
I found Dan later in the quiet gallery, staring blindly out at the shifting bay.
He reluctantly admitted Rachel was absolutely right.
It wasn’t enough to simply be legally married on paper.
We had to be utterly unembarrassing.
We had to flawlessly look like two people who actually chose each other.
How was I supposed to convince a suspicious auditor that we were madly in love when my new husband practically flinched every time I looked at him?
