Signed, Not Chosen

joycejehoch Romance

My father signed my name before I walked through the door.
There was no warning. No conversation. Just a contract on his desk and a pen waiting for me.
The man on the other side of the deal was Damien Cole.
Billionaire. Powerful. Cold in a way that made people nervous around him.
I signed because my brother’s company was falling apart, and my father used me to save it. I told myself it would only last for one year. A fake marriage. Public smiles. A few pictures for the media. Then we would go our separate ways.
That was the plan.
But Damien was not the man I expected.
His house felt full of secrets.
His grandmother knew our marriage was fake almost immediately, but she said nothing.
And Damien himself was different when nobody was watching.
Behind the expensive suits and cold eyes was a man carrying pain he never talked about. A man who had loved someone once and lost her. After that, he built walls around himself so high that nobody could reach him anymore.
I was not supposed to care.
I was signed, not chosen.
There is a difference.
I understood that from the beginning.
What I did not expect was how real everything would start to feel.
Somewhere between the fake smiles, the late nights, the arguments, and the quiet moments, I stopped pretending.
And when I finally learned the truth about my father and the real reason this marriage happened, I had a choice to make.
I could walk away with the money and the freedom I wanted.
Or I could stay with the only person who had ever truly seen me.
Not for what I could give him.
Not for what he could use me for.
Just me.
And for the first time in my life, I was not ready to let that go.

Unfold