The Billionaire's Seventh Fiancee

Six of Jack Bach's brides died before they ever reached the altar. A fever. A wreck on the coast road. Black water. A long fall. Two quiet rooms. For six years the city has counted the funerals and called the richest man in it a walking curse, so when the Bach family announces a matchmaking ball for their only son's seventh bride, with eighteen million dollars promised to whoever is chosen, half the eligible women in the city run the other way.

Natalya Taylor does not run. She is the unloved bastard daughter of a bankrupt tycoon, a schoolteacher with a locked room of her own, and her father's family has just bartered her to the Bach estate to save their company. She walks into that ball with a plan of her own: marry the cursed groom, take what she came for, and be gone before the whisper touches her. He marries her with a contract, a staged kiss, and a mother's monk-approved list of lucky surnames, and warns her exactly how the last six performances ended.

Then two things go off script. The cold husband starts standing between her and the family that sold her. And her secret comes out on a living-room screen, exposed by the sister who paid to humiliate her, at the exact moment Natalya has stopped wanting to use him.

An hour later a white van takes her off Sunrise Road. Nine hours in a warehouse that smells of paper flowers and old rope. A funeral card with six names printed under a black line, and one sentence: You will be fine until the altar.

The curse is not a curse. He is Alden Xander, a photographer with a dead sister and a ledger of six entries, a man who planted dread and harvested grief because grief was the only crop his family's ruin ever grew. He rang the bell six times, and fear did the rest, and the city told itself ghosts. Now he means for the seventh wedding to end like the others, at an altar, in front of everyone Natalya has learned to love.

She reads the threat twice and goes back to her cooking. While a beggar turned gatekeeper watches the docks, a mother-in-law opens a box of six white envelopes, a father's confession explains what really became of the woman Jack buried beside his heart, and a dead woman's letter asks one last favor, that every light keep burning, Natalya does the one thing no bride before her thought to do. She sets a date, invites the fear inside the garden fence, and walks the aisle at noon with every light on.

The Billionaire's Seventh Fiancee is a contemporary romance about the marriage nobody in the city bet on: a husband who forgot how to be loved, a wife who came for revenge and stayed for the man inside the fortune, and a family that learns the difference between a curse and its secrets. Standalone. Happy ending. No cliffhanger.