Kingdom Ranch Western romance

Married To My Ex-Fiancé's Silent Uncle

Ming Yue

Twenty minutes before the "Wedding of the Century" at The Plaza, I stood outside the Presidential Suite in a fifty-thousand-dollar Vera Wang gown. I was the girl from a West Virginia trailer park about to marry Hugh Maxwell, the golden heir to a billion-dollar defense empire. I pushed the door open only to find Hugh pinned against the bed with my own stepsister, Floy. She was wearing my bridal diamond necklace, and the sounds of their laughter scraped against my eardrums like sandpaper. I didn't scream; I listened as Hugh grunted that once the wedding was over and the trust fund unlocked, he'd dump "that hillbilly trash" on a bus back to the mountains. They weren't just cheating; they were planning to steal my family's land deeds and leave me with nothing. When I set off the sprinklers and exposed their naked bodies to the paparazzi, the Maxwell family didn't apologize. They called me a "greedy peasant" and threatened to ruin my life unless I signed a new deal to save their crashing stock. I realized then that I was never a bride to them. I was a transaction, a rounding error in a ledger to be used and discarded. They thought my poverty made me weak and my silence made me a victim. "If we don't have a marriage certificate by midnight, the bank freezes thirty percent of our liquidity," their lawyer warned. So, I gave them exactly what they wanted. I used a loophole in their hundred-year-old family covenant and married the only other direct heir available. I didn't marry Hugh. I walked into the ICU and married his uncle, Fleet Maxwell-the legendary war hero who had been in a vegetative state for months. Now, I am the matriarch of the Maxwell dynasty. I've suspended Hugh's executive powers, exiled my mother-in-law to the Swiss Alps, and taken control of the family vault. They think I'm just a gold-digger waiting for a "corpse" to die so I can collect a fifty-million-dollar widow's payout. But last night, as I lay beside my comatose husband, the man they called a vegetable gripped my hand back.

Modern Scheming Contract marriage Billionaires CEO Flash Marriage Revenge Age Gap

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Every single one of us holds our breath as our ship drifts closer and closer to the glowing planet.

Glorra Quin Lune lies before us, a brilliant, terrifying nightmare miracle. Its entire surface is engulfed in Neron, glowing vivid blue and white. Arcs of power jut from the surface of the planet to every one of its five moons, ensnaring them as well.

The amount of power trapped around that planet could obliterate this entire solar system if it blew.

Slowly, slowly, Deliverance drifts toward the planet.

My palms sweat as I look at the holoscreen and check the readings.

They’re high, but we aren’t in the danger zone yet.

“This is far closer than I was ever able to get,” my father says in a low voice as he, too, looks at the readings. “Back then, I couldn’t get closer than a league before my ship started shutting down.”

I nod, though I’m barely hearing him. My heart is thundering in my ears.

I never plan things well enough. I barrel in without thinking. I could have thought about this for two minutes before I dragged us all across the galaxy to a planet that is too dangerous, swarmed by too much power, to even approach.

But here we are.

“This is Valen Nero aboard the vessel Deliverance,” he says into his com. “If anyone is out there, if anyone can hear me, please respond.”

We all hold our breath as we listen, pausing for an entire two minutes.

No response comes through.

They’re dead, they’re dead, my brain screams at me. No one could survive that blast of power.

They called to you for help, my heart counters. You heard them. You saw yourself here in the future. There has to be a way this is possible.

Information flies across the holoscreen as our systems try to get a reading on the impossible system before us.

“What about that moon?” my father asks as he stares at the information with furrowed brows. He points at the smallest one. “Its reading as the least amount of Neron. What if we just try to get to one of the moons for now?”

The readings are going insane, trying to measure something that’s beyond any scale we ever conceived of.

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