Sweet Romance10 min read
How I Bought a Cold-Hearted Billionaire and Kept Him
ButterPicks12 views
I never planned to be generous. I planned to win.
"You look tired," he says when I slide into Adrian Seidel's office like I belong there.
"I only looked tired because I was up plotting," I answer, and watch the corner of his mouth threaten a smile.
"Plotting what?" Adrian asks.
"How to make the most handsome man in the room kiss me," I say, careless, and he blinks once like anyone would blink at a joke.
He isn't a joke. Adrian Seidel is a legend with a calm face and an even calmer bank account, and the last time anyone called him "soft" he gouged them with patience until they apologized. He has a habit of staying perfectly composed while the world burns. I like that about him.
"Don't be ridiculous," he says, but his fingers curl a little around the pen on his desk. "You're ridiculous."
I waggle the jade bracelet on my wrist—the one Annalise Wells, his grandmother, gave me that morning—and lean my chin in the palm of my hand.
"This bracelet matches my ambition," I tell him.
"You match the bracelet," he says softly.
The first time I read the story that would become my map, I read past the heroics and the sobbing and landed on a sentence that froze me: the original heroine, Giovanna Allen, would come back broken and hungry for what she lost, and Adrian would—by fate or spite—give his life away for her again. I read it twice. I read it a hundred times.
"No," I whispered to the book. "No. Not on my watch."
Because when you know the plot, you don't follow it. You rearrange it. And when the plot offers the coldest, most impossible man to warm, I did what any sensible opportunist would do: I warmed him before the original heroine could.
"Journey," Adrian says once, when the hospital lights shift, when his hand finds mine and holds it like he'd rather break than let go. "You are reckless."
"Someone has to be," I tell him. "You are very good at being a legend. I'm very good at being an awful temptation."
"You are a temptation I didn't expect," he says, serious enough that it lands.
I glance down at him—the way his jaw tightens, the way his fingers press a thumb the size of a small coin into the back of my hand—and I feel a tiny, delicious thrill that has nothing to do with the plan and everything to do with him.
"You saved me," I say suddenly.
He narrows his eyes.
"You are impossible," he murmurs.
"You married me anyway."
"You're impossible," he repeats, but the edge is gone. He kisses my forehead.
*
"Adrian, he really is your fiancé now?" Crew Henderson asks when he drops in like an overfriendly storm.
"I am," I say. "Official."
"How?" Crew grins. "Did you overthrow a board or seduce a guard?"
"I used a plan," I say. "And a lot of lipstick."
"Do tell," Crew says. He always says that.
I tell him the bare bones. I leave out the moments that felt like stealing a heart and keep the parts that sounded like strategy. Crew claps once.
"You're terrible," he says.
"Thank you," I answer.
"Adrian," I say one evening when it's only us in his study and the city is muffled like a sleeping animal beyond the glass. "Tell me why you never smile at anyone like you smile at me."
Adrian is very smooth about weapons of emotion. He doesn't argue. He doesn't storm. He just looks at me cleanly and says, "Because you asked to break me."
"That sounds dramatic," I tell him. "Also not true."
"It is dramatic," he says. "But it might be true."
I kiss him because the truth barely matters when he leans in. He tastes faintly metallic—coffee on the tongue—and when he pulls back he looks a little stunned.
"You keep winning," he says. "Why don't you stop."
"Because I want to keep winning you," I say, and the room seems to tilt a little with the honesty of it.
He laughs, discreet and short. "You're shameless."
"That's the point."
"You're my point," he answers. And the look in his eyes is the most dangerous kind of promise.
*
Giovanna Allen was subtle at first.
"Journey," she said the first time she looked me in the eye, crisp as a winter leaf. "Are you the woman Adrian fell for?"
"I am his fiancé," I replied.
She smiled politely like someone buffering for battle. "I see."
"I will be direct," she said later, leaning forward in a café we both thought would swallow gossip politely. "Adrian loved me first."
"Did he?" I asked.
"He always said—" Giovanna began.
"Do you want him to have been selfless?" I interrupted. "Because if you wanted to be loved while acting like a saint, you chose the wrong man."
She stared. "What?"
"You hurt him before," I said, slow and accurate like a scalpel. "This time it's different."
Her face hardened. "You don't know him."
"I know he likes shrimp dumplings," I said, and she blinked so fast her mascara blurred. It was a little mean and entirely true.
She left the café with a quiet that tasted like a promise. I smiled into my coffee and felt like myself—slightly wicked, mostly satisfied.
But Giovanna started scribbling darker lines into the edges of my days after that. Phone calls at midnight. A shadow outside the restaurant. A knife left like a punctuation mark in the trash bin outside my office. She grew like mold—sudden, hidden, dangerous.
When the night she chose came, my hand was steadier than hers.
"You're crazy," Giovanna screamed in the stairwell, breathing hot smoke and accusation and an old pain she did not own anymore. "If I can't have him, nobody will!"
"Giovanna, stop," Adrian said, voice low, hands up in a way that was both warning and mercy.
"I will make you remember," she snarled. "I will make you remember who you loved."
"You loved the idea of me," Giovanna spat at Adrian.
"It's different now," Adrian said. "Leave her alone."
I moved like a gust of control. We struggled. She lunged. She fell. The stairwell swallowed sound.
Later I sat at my makeup table and reapplied a thin line of lipstick because the world looked better in crisp edges.
"Journey Parker," I said to my reflection. "You did not come here to be background."
"Good," Adrian said behind me, his voice close and deliciously soft. "You never were."
*
The public punishment happened in a room full of lights and cameras—an auditorium filled with people there for a wedding, for spectacle, for gossip, for the way a life can be turned into a headline. It happened where the world watched, and that was the point.
"Why are you doing this?" Giovanna cried when the giant screens lit up with the first clip. Her face was white as plaster in the strobe of filming lights.
"Because you set the fire," I said, and I said it into the microphone like someone knotted to truth. "Because you tried to take my life and put yourself in Adrian's arms afterward as if you had earned anything."
"Don't you dare—" she began.
"Watch," I told her.
The screens showed a clip that had been stitched together carefully: Giovanna slipping a cigarette into a wastebasket, then a second later pushing a panicked man—Arturo Carson—toward the match she lit. It showed the way she smiled when the smoke alarm shrieked, the way she turned and walked like a queen as flames licked the curtains. People in the crowd gasped as if the footage were a physical blow.
"You set them both up to look like victims," I continued. "You stabbed the man you claimed to love and then framed another for what you did."
Adrian didn't move. He sat behind me, his hand like a band around my waist. His face didn't change much, except that something thin and hot flickered in the corner of his eyes—justice, maybe. The cameras loved him for it.
Giovanna tried to look outraged. "That's edited!" she shouted. "They're lying!"
"Here's the full unedited clip," I said, and a new angle flooded the screen: a security camera from the back hallway showing Giovanna's hand, the knife, the way she lingered before she shoved it. The crowd made a sound like someone sucking a breath through teeth.
"People," I said softly, "you will see she made a bonfire of people who trusted her."
An ember of laughter rippled around the room like a wave. It felt dangerous, like the slow burn of a confession spreading.
"How can you—" Giovanna whispered. Her voice broke.
"Watch the hospital footage," I said. "Watch the footage of her leaving the scene. Watch Arturo's face when he was accused and the way he took money and ran."
Arturo's face went ashen. He used to be a man with a plan, a charmer. Now he looked smaller, like a magician whose rabbit had bolted.
People in the auditorium began to murmur and then clap—a slow, vicious applause that built momentum like a storm. Cameras zoomed in on faces—investors, old family friends, strangers with phones. Comments filled the livestream feed like ants: "I can't believe it." "She did this?" "Burn her."
"Public shame is not enough," a woman near the front hissed, shaking her head, "but I can't deny the relief."
Giovanna's bravado cracked. First came a thin, defiant sneer, then denial—her fingers scrabbling for air like she could catch a phrase and reshape the truth. Denial turned to anger, anger to panic. She pounded on the stage lectern with both fists, and the sound cut through the chatter.
"You're not making a scene," Adrian said, stepping forward for the first time. He sounded weary and far too calm. "You made a crime."
Adrian's voice moved through the auditorium like an even hand holding a scale. "Security," he said, and they came forward—two men in suits who moved like trained things.
Giovanna looked at the crowd and then at the cameras and then at Adrian. The transformation was terrible to watch: "You think you can just—" she began, and then she couldn't hold the mask. Her face collapsed, and the crowd leaned forward as if to collect what spilled.
"Please!" she cried, the word ragged. "Please! I'm sorry! I didn't mean—"
"To whom?" a woman shouted from the audience. "To the people you burned? To the life you ruined? To the man you stabbed?"
The crowd's voices braided into an ugly chorus.
"I—" Giovanna sobbed. Her shoulders shook. "I wanted him back."
"You wanted the headline," someone else said. "You wanted the pity. You wanted what you never gave."
Around the auditorium, people began to stand. Phones rose like nodal stars. Some recorded, some whispered. Several in the front row knitted their brows in barely contained disgust, others watched with arms folded, slambooks of judgment floating on their faces.
Giovanna knelt on the polished floor as if the room could be a confessional. She reached out and tried to touch my foot. Her fingers trembled.
"Don't," I said. "Don't touch me."
She flinched like a struck animal and shrank back. Tears made grooves down her cheeks.
"You're done," I told her plainly. "The police will take this—"
"Please, I—" Giovanna's body convulsed with grief, with the evaporating image of a life she'd tried to steal and couldn't, and the crowd began to boo instead of applaud. Some people cheered. Others were silent, stunned by the spectacle they were eating up.
Arturo fared worse. He tried to speak at one point, to plead that he had been manipulated, but the videotape was a ledger of his small betrayals. Sponsors called in live. A major partner withdrew his pledge with a curt statement. An influencer público—someone with more than a million followers—stood up and declared their company would cut ties.
"Public confessions are cheap," an investor said on camera later, speaking for many. "Reputation is not."
Arturo's voice turned thin and brittle. He begged for forgiveness from the crowd and then from family members who turned away. The cameras captured everything—the small wheeze of humiliation, the way his hand covered his mouth, the way he slumped when people turned their backs. He stepped outside the auditorium into a world where his name had become a tag for villainy. He called lawyers and heard echoes of "withdrawn." Press releases folded like bad paper.
Giovanna meanwhile had become a cautionary tale in an hour. Her pleas diminished into a series of noises that meant little to anyone but herself. The live replays did what videos do best: they exaggerated the small truths into echoing, unavoidable facts. People who had loved her at the margins called to say they were "shocked," a polite word for betrayal. Her friends—few of them—stared at her like they were looking at a crime scene.
She begged on her knees. She tried to explain. She was too late.
The cameras caught Adrian when he finally spoke into the mic again. He was quiet and, in his way, merciless.
"You hurt people for the sake of owning a moment," he said. "You used your small cruelties like weapons. You didn't love anyone, Giovanna. You loved the idea of being loved."
The crowd murmured approval. The security guards guided the pair away, not as heroes but as accountable things. The livestream remained on; people continued to watch, comment, judge.
When the police handcuffed Giovanna and led her past the waves of phones, she saw me in the crowd. Her face was a shape of pure panic. She reached out one last time, begged me, made promises. She asked for mercy.
"Justice," someone in the pews shouted.
"Not for revenge," I said aloud. "For truth."
Her plea came and cracked. The cameras were merciless. The crowd cheered. Somebody recorded the whole thing and uploaded it to a hundred sites within minutes. People who had never known us made a decision about her in the time it took to upload a clip. Her phone lit with messages—some private, some public—calling her names like closure.
She couldn't hold onto Adrian by force, by fire, or by theatrics. She could only collapse when the world refused to salvage the images she had tried to make sacred.
It was a public punishment that left no doubt. It was not cruel for cruelty's sake; it was cruel because she had chosen cruelty first.
When the cameras finally left and the crowd scattered, the silence felt like land. Adrian put his hand at the small of my back.
"You did that," he said softly.
"I did it because I couldn't let her take more," I said. "And because I could."
He pressed closer. "You could also have done it without the spectacle."
"No," I said. "Not in a story like this. Not when the hurt was meant to be quiet. Someone had to make it loud."
He kissed me, hard and brief, like sealing a wound.
"Promise me," he murmured against my lips. "Promise me you won't lose yourself in the winning."
"I promise," I said—though promises, even when true, are small things under the skin.
He smiled, just a ghost. "Good. Then let's go home."
*
We married with the jade bracelet on my wrist and the old blanket from his car folded in the backseat. Annalise Wells cried and said something about stubborn girls and happier men. Crew Henderson toasted something he wrote down in two seconds and regretted three hours later.
"Do you still want me?" Adrian asked that night when the lights were off and our breaths were the only sounds.
"Do you still choose me?" I asked back.
He took my hand and set it over his heart. "Always," he said.
"Always," I answered, and the word felt a little cruel and a little true.
We had won. We had hurt. We had survived the parts of ourselves that could be used like knives.
Outside, the city hummed. Inside, I had a place to sleep and a man who looked at me in a way that made my chest hurt—a look that was both mine and not mine.
There will be gossip columns and there will be flame comments and there will be days when the past tries to tug at the hem of the present. But for now, I hold the jade bracelet and his hand and let the light wash us.
"Journey?" Adrian says into the dark.
"Yes?"
"What will you do when the book ends?"
I smile and squeeze his fingers.
"I'll keep living," I say. "And maybe teach a class on how to win."
He laughs, low and delighted. "Don't teach that to my mother."
"She could use a lesson," I tease. "But the one thing I will never teach is how to lose you."
He kisses me then, not to seal a scheme, but to keep what we made, small and real.
When the morning comes, I will put on the bracelet again. I will see the faint mark on my wrist from where he once gripped too hard in the dark. I will think of the ribboned moments—wild, tender, victorious.
The jade warms around my wrist. The blanket in the closet smells like him. And somewhere in the dust of the past, I can still hear the echo of a voice I used to imitate when I first began this plan—soft and confident and utterly mine:
"Little One, you are my light."
I press the bracelet and the words feel true.
The End
— Thank you for reading —