Sweet Romance16 min read
Married for Money, Loved for Real
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I never expected a wedding to be a bank transfer and a signature.
"I'll sign the papers," my father said, "and you'll marry into that family. Three million—it's enough to save the company."
"I know." I tried to make my voice steady. "It's only business."
"Remember," my mother whispered in the kitchen as I packed, "be the good wife. If you play your part, everything will be fine."
I held my bag and thought of the months of bills, the empty company account numbers, the calls from creditors. I thought of the one thing I could still do: choose money or humiliation. I chose money.
Flynn Bean had the calm face of those born to wealth and habit. At the registry, he barely looked at me. He signed. I signed. No wedding banners, no ritual. My life shuffled to the price of a check.
"Welcome to the family," he said once, when he closed the door of his car and let me in.
"Thank you," I said, because where else would I say it?
1
Our new home smelled of old incense and expensive leather. The first night, he came in late—late enough to expect me asleep.
"You're back," I sang, more chipper than I felt, and caught his coat as he shouldered through the dark.
He looked down at me, and for a strange, warm second his face softened.
Then he kissed me.
It was quick. It was wrong. It was also the first time anyone had kissed me since I agreed to be a bride for money.
"Did you transfer my grandfather's funds?" he asked as if nothing happened.
My hand froze. "I haven't. I thought you'd—"
He pushed me away like I was mud on his shoe.
"You, Lainey, are so cheap," he said.
That sentence felt like an ice pick. I recovered my smile like a practiced actress.
"I'm worth thirty million," I said lightly. "I won't be poor all my life."
"You can hold those thirty million and sing lullabies to them," he replied, cold as cut glass. He tossed his tie and left to the bathroom.
I did what any practical woman would do: I took his discarded clothes to the laundry, slid into my own room, and slept. Money bought warmth, not love. I promised myself I would get every penny I could.
2
My father arranged the marriage because my family name could no longer carry weight. Flynn's grandfather, Ambrosio Hartmann, had once owed my grandfather his life; the obligation returned as a dowry. They considered me a solution, and three million sealed the deal.
In school corridors, I had heard whispers. Flynn Bean: a dangerous man, a leader, a man who passed through flowers and left no trace. Women were for passing, not keeping. My mother instructed me strictly.
"So be quiet, be pleasant—be the wife," she said.
He had that track record. He lived by rules I could only guess at. So I learned to accept small humiliations. When his clothes smelled like perfume that wasn't mine, I turned the other cheek.
At midnight I checked my messages. There was a long one from Sergio Peterson.
"You still love me, right? You aren't with him for money?"
I deleted it and blocked him. Old love couldn't rescue our debts.
3
Flynn slept late the next morning. I made breakfast and fussed with his towel and toothpaste.
"Flattery early in the morning," he mused, mocking. "What do you want?"
"Don't be silly," I said, buttoning his shirt. "You forget dinner with your grandfather. You told me."
He watched me with that strange look. I was buttoning a custom shirt with tiny buttonholes. My fingers trembled a little.
"Lower your hand. A little harder," I whispered, a gentleness sewn into my voice.
He leaned in, close enough I could feel the heat. "Do you know what early morning flirtation means to a man?"
"I don't," I lied, then wrapped my arms around him and said, "Hubby."
He scoffed. "You think you're made of gold? You touch me, you want money."
"Then touch me." I laughed like a child. He pushed me with disgust.
"I hate the sight of you," he said.
And yet, when his hand trembled at her name later—Yulia Boyd—something in me knobbed and broke. He didn't love me. I would survive. I would play my part.
4
At Ambrosio's estate, I saw the woman he'd whispered for: Yulia Boyd. She wore white and wind, and Flynn's hand left mine as if it had never been mine.
"Flynn won't want to talk here," I said, stepping aside.
Her eyes wetted with a practiced softness. "Flynn… he doesn't want me."
That was a show. I watched them and left the room to preserve my dignity. I kept my distance, but the bitterness settled like grit in my coffee.
That night Flynn didn't come home. I swapped dresses and heels and went to the bar, because if I couldn't have love, I'd buy oblivion with wine.
5
At the bar my friend Kyla Cote laughed loud and called out, "Glamor wife or fraud? Tonight you look like the latter."
I clinked glasses, drunk on wine and on an image of myself that wasn't a bought wife.
"Do you still talk to Sergio?" Kyla asked.
"No," I said. "He tried to give me five million to walk away. I blocked him."
"Good," she said, "No one gives you mercy for being poor. Make them buy your silence."
Half a bottle in, I stumbled home with a stranger who took me to the door. In the dark, Flynn was already there, on the sofa, watching the TV with a dead face.
"You're home late," he said.
I lost my balance and fell into his lap. He glared.
"You go dancing until five?" he said, accusing.
"Don't lecture," I cried, then made a fool of myself with tears. He grabbed my wrists in irritation — his hands were efficient with my body.
"Get off me," he hissed. I clung to him, making scenes on purpose.
"Don't be silly," he said when the stranger called to check on me.
Then I kissed him. It was a desperate, messy thing. He tasted like wine and leather and a hardness I had no charts for.
He pushed me to the bathroom and washed his clothes. He let the staff throw away everything I had ruined. He left the night angry. I slept, spent and small.
6
We began a strange dance. Flynn treated everything like an account to be balanced. Each smile I gave him came with a small debt. Each time he looked at Yulia, my chest tightened but I countered by spending: his secondary card produced handbags and shoes that I later pawned.
The store we bumped into carried Yulia as a salesperson. There among the shining leather she looked like a virgin deer. I smiled in public and ran my hand across an expensive bag.
"You like this one?" she asked.
"Pick whatever you think," I said and dialed Flynn's number in the shop.
He answered. "Yes?"
"Order all of them," I lied, "I like them all."
After I handed my card, after the swipe, I felt more alive than when I had said "I do."
"Su—Lainey," Flynn said later at home, annoyed, "You thinking of shopping so publicly?"
"Why shouldn't I live like a wife?" I answered.
"You want an allowance? You think I'm that tired?" he sneered.
I used the credit card, I laughed, I told myself it was a plan. I would gather every coin.
7
Kyla egged me on. "Punch first, apologize later," she said. "Your husband left you a ledger, not a life."
So I chased him. I bought a ticket and went to his city. I arrived at his door with brekkie, orange blush on my cheeks, and a plan to look like the wife that deserved a pocket.
The door opened. Yulia was there. My breath left me.
"You're early," Flynn said, eyes heavy. "This isn't a hotel."
"I came to visit. I'm your wife." I smiled. "You said you missed me."
He let me in. I sat. Yulia watched like someone waiting for someone else's cue. I took a breath, handed her breakfast.
"You should call him 'brother'," I said lightly. "You should call me 'sister-in-law'."
She blinked and said "sister-in-law," as if it were a word she'd never said aloud.
Flynn watched the scene. He didn't stop me, but he didn't encourage me either. He seemed like a man who enjoyed theater both ways.
"Make yourself useful," I whispered to her under my breath. "You owe me nothing."
8
Kyla insisted I confront Yulia openly. "Expose her," she said. "Make her pay."
I arranged to meet Yulia at a neutral café. She sat across from me, fragile, a white dress and a little face.
"You want me out?" she whispered. "I never asked to be a habit. If he moves on, I'll leave."
"So leave," I said. "But before you go—explain."
"Explain what?"
"Why you liked his shine? Why you kept him in a loop?"
She started to cry and appeal to old shared history. I told her I had read his old notebook, his notes about her, and how she had once called him "my first".
"You used him," I said. "You let him hold on. You never had the guts to refuse him properly, and you let him be your toy."
She snapped. She threw a coffee at me.
The café turned into chaos. Our chairs slid. Fingers grabbed hair. Within minutes, security led us both out and into separate rooms. Then the police station.
9
The police station entered the story like an unavoidable torch. We had both been foolish. We had both been ugly. But outside, the net of gossip had already spun.
Flynn arrived. "What happened?" he demanded.
"She started it," I said, angry and still stung.
It was in the police records, but it was also on fifteen phones. Someone had filmed the fight. The video went viral with a headline I never wanted: "Wife vs. White Moon: Bridal Brawl."
10
After that, social media followed us. Yulia posted a soft, wounded message. I posted a photo of my stamped bank account and a receipt. Kyla cheered me on in comments. Friends took sides like referees.
The fight turned our private war into a public sport. I had wanted to humiliate Yulia as retribution. But I had not planned the avalanche. People loved drama.
11
He came back later, presence slow and soaked like dusk.
"Why'd you hit her?" he asked, eyes wide and sharp.
"She provoked me," I said.
He stepped closer. "You picked a wrong fight," he said quietly, and then softer, "This woman once meant more than we understood."
I laughed. "Then keep her in your head, Flynn. But she won't be in my bed."
12
We spiraled between time zones and cold messages. Weeks would pass without a "how are you", then he'd return with a domestic surprise. Once he came home with an apron and asked, "Do you want me to make dinner?"
"That's not part of the deal," I said.
He smiled and broke my resolve like sugar under warm tea.
13
I got pregnant. It was accidental. My period hadn't come for months; my life had been all moving parts. The test showed two lines and a stamp of impossible reality.
"Are you sure?" Kyla breathed when I told her.
"I'm sure," I said. "I'm scared."
"Keep it," she said simply. "You chose to live on your terms once. This is yours now."
I decided to keep it. I would raise this child. Money was one thing, heart another. I had thought I wouldn't miss Flynn. But in the nights when nausea turned my ribs into shrines of pain, I thought, "He should know."
I resisted calling him. I told myself I wouldn't. Then at two in the morning, my water broke.
"Help!" I screamed between contractions.
He answered my call after I had swatted away other hands. He came. He held my harmonized panic like a fragile sheet. It was the first time I saw him raw: frantic, secretive, shocked into devotion.
"You're here," I said.
He hid his shake in his voice. "I am."
14
The birth was long and hard. I came home with a tiny human who smelled like cheese and new beginnings. My mother fussed; Kyla cried in the hallway; Ambrosio Hartmann dropped his sterner mask and prayed.
Flynn, for reasons my rational mind couldn't admit, did not sign that one piece of paper: the divorce papers remained in his drawer.
"You can have this child," I said once, exhausted on a couch soaked in milk and tears. "Keep them if you want."
He looked at the infant with a look that would have felled an oak. "I don't want a thing to do with laws now," he said. "I want this."
I laughed—a choked little sound. "You want what?"
"This. You. Them."
15
There were days of chaos and near-heroic care. Flynn caught meltdowns and diaper disasters. He learned lullabies with a ridiculous dedication. He took late-night shifts and practiced bus routes and formula recipes. He stayed. I wanted not to trust the ease of it, but each morning when I woke to him half-asleep, cheek pressed to our child's head, I softened.
"I thought you were a myth," I told him once.
"I woke up from wanting her," he said. "You made me jealous, then you made me brave."
"Are you sure it's not about the name on the legal sheet?" I asked, the old suspicion like a brittle bone.
He frowned. "This is small. This is us. Not money. Not past love."
16
Then Yulia returned, estranged and gasping and publicly small. She sought Flynn in the park where he pushed the stroller. She implored, "You owe me answers."
He looked at her gently, then he looked at me and our child, and for the first time he did not waver.
"You are not my problem anymore," he said. "Leave."
She flailed, lost. She tried to pull at his sleeve. He released no muscle and said nothing more. The scene was public: joggers stopped. Children stared. A woman recorded the entire exchange.
"I thought you'd be mine," she whimpered.
He said sharply, "Your 'mine' was a childish script. I was only a name in your notebook. You used a boy and chased a shadow. I'm done."
Her face crumpled as traffic flowed on. People took photos, whispered. The moment stretched like tape.
17
Kyla insisted on a public decree. "You wanted to humiliate her," she said. "Do it in public. Make sure she knows she can't hurt you anymore."
I took it further than either of us planned. We arranged to meet Yulia at a charity gala—Ambrosio's foundation evening where society slept in silk and applause. I knew everyone would be there, and Ambrosio loved the theater of justice.
"Are you sure?" Kyla asked, fingers tight on my champagne flute.
"I'm sure," I said.
18
On the evening of the gala, I wore what I hated but needed: a dress that declared ownership—a clean line, not flashy, but registered. Flynn stood beside me like a statue of myself that had learned to breathe. Ambrosio watched from the dais with the indulgent patience of a man who had once made pacts to save businesses.
Yulia came, pale and smiling, thinking the night might be her stage. She looked for comfort and found a sea of faces instead.
"Yulia," I said as soon as she approached. "We need to talk in front of everyone."
"What?" she blinked.
"Right here, before your dear friends." I nodded minutely toward the gathered crowd—cameras, smartphones, the chink of glass.
"You can't," she said. "This is wrong."
"I can," I said. "And you will let us."
I had told the gala organizers nothing, just a rumor: an "announcement" that would be the anecdote of the evening. Ambrosio's people had arranged an unscripted moment. The lights stung. Cameras turned.
19
I stepped forward to the microphone.
"Good evening," I said. My voice did not tremble. "My name is Lainey Ishikawa. Tonight, I have something to reveal."
A ripple. People angled their heads. Flynn held my hand under the table. Ambrosio looked amused, like a man about to watch a lesson.
"I married into this family," I continued. "Not for love. I won't pretend. But since then I've learned one thing: hearts can change. Actions show truth. I am here to show what actions teach."
I called Yulia up. "Please stand."
"Why are you doing this?" she whispered, red and lovely.
"My reasons are my own," I said.
I took out a leather-bound notebook - the very one I'd found in Flynn's old schoolbooks. The notebook had notes he'd written: messy, adolescent jottings about "Yulia - my first", "I will wait", things only a boy would write and only a man could later regret.
"I won't read all of it," I said into the microphone, and at once the auditorium sucked a breath. "But I will tell you what I found: years ago you used his loyalty as a platform. You let him hope without refusing him. You let him be your spare. Recently you returned expecting care, and when I asked for respect in return, you threw coffee in my face."
Phones flashed.
Yulia's lip trembled. "This is wrong," she whispered, helpless.
"I have proof of your plan to keep him tied," I said. "And I have recordings of your text messages to him when he promised to watch over you. He gave you kindness; you gave him ambivalence."
Then, quietly, I said, "You struck me in public last time. Tonight I will let the truth be public."
20
I displayed messages—screenshots that Yulia thought had vanished. I played a clipped audio of her earlier words: "You love him because he looks like his brother." A careless sentence, but in a room built on lineage and legacy it became a weapon.
"You used him," I told the crowd. "You played the part of the innocent girl, while letting a man keep you on reserve."
The murmurs rose like ocean swells.
Yulia stood, face pale as a torn page. People leaned in. The security made no move to stop me because I had the right: I was the wife and mother now, and the public saw it.
Then I told the story of the fight: the coffee, the cuts, the hair, the police room, the viral clip. I ended with a question.
"How do we value men, young women, whose hearts we borrow? Who do we protect when the borrower is cruel?"
Nobody applauded. They watched.
21
Yulia's reaction was a chain. First shock, then denial, then explosive anger, then desperation.
"You're lying," she wailed. "You have no right to show these things."
"Then step aside and let the truth settle," I said. "If you are honest, speak now."
She did something worse. She smeared her face with tears and accused me of staging this for revenge, of trying to make her a villain because I feared being replaced.
"Look at her," someone in front said. "Did you hit her? Who started it?"
"What did you expect?" Flynn's voice, clear through the hall. He had stood up, and his tie was loose, hair a touch mussed. He looked fierce in a way that even silence recognized.
He stepped to the microphone. "There is one thing you should know," he said. "I kept some things I shouldn't have. I wrote like a boy. But this is not about notes. This is about actions. Yulia, you came to my door demanding care, and you slapped the woman who was already there. You assaulted her in public, and when things got ugly you cried victim."
Yulia's mouth opened. "Flynn—"
"I know you since you were a student," Flynn went on, voice building, "and I thought I could be what you wanted. But you used my tenderness as a hammock, not as care. Tonight, my choice is clear."
The hall was silent as a held breath. Ambrosio's gaze was steely. Guests shifted. Phones clicked. Yulia's face began to lose the practiced sheen; her denial turned into small, raw panic.
22
I had prepared for a few things: to humiliate her by exposing the truth; to get witnesses to confirm the fight; to show the world she had been manipulative.
I had not prepared for the way she would unravel under the crowd. Her voice went high and thin.
"You can't do this," she hissed, to me, then to Flynn. "You can't take my dignity!"
"Your dignity had been borrowing kindness," Flynn said calmly. "You were kind only when there was advantage."
Then the audience turned from curious to vicious. Whispers became comments. Some recorded; others sighed in disgust. A woman near the front stood up.
"She's been stringing men along since school," the woman said. "I dated a man who told me the same story."
"Shame on you," another man muttered.
Yulia's cheeks were red. "You—" she began, then flinched as an older woman in the front row clapped slowly.
"Good," the woman said loud enough to pierce, "Show these girls they can't play with hearts. Men and women both deserve honesty."
23
The crowd answered in a chorus that burned like salt.
"Leave," "Shame," "How could you?" "Who gives you the right?" "What a scandal."
Yulia's face crumpled. She made a last effort at defiance.
"You can't ruin me," she cried. "I won't be defined by this!"
A chorus of phones chimed; a dozen messages pinged through the room as people shared.
"You used me as a stepping-stone," I said softly, far from triumph. "If you've been wronged, own it. But don't steel others' hearts for your own pleasure."
She ran. She stumbled through the crowd, water-streaked mascara like a soldier's defeat. Security opened a passage. People craned to stare. Some took photos. Some applauded. A few clapped in true admiration of the spectacle. Others shook their heads.
24
The punishment was not legal. It was social. It was public exposure: her hypocrisy lit by stage lights. But because this was a gala for donors and influence, the judgment carried weight. Associates muttered in hushed tones. Her social contacts dimmed; the donors she had thought were friends looked away. The woman who had walked in with a limp hold on a legacy walked out with less.
"She'll feel this," someone said nearby.
Yulia's denial collapsed into collapse. I watched her take the exit like a person who had been cut from the tapestry. She had been many things to many people, but tonight she found the cost of manipulation.
25
I did not enjoy her pain. The public shaming felt like a lever I had pulled on my own heart. I had sought retribution and found a cipher: humiliation did not return warmth. Flynn squeezed my hand.
"Are you okay?" he asked.
"I don't know," I admitted. "But he knows now. He saw me."
He pulled me in for a short, steadying kiss. "You are more than anyone's story," he said.
26
Days passed. Social media chewed and spat. Yulia's messages dwindled. Ambrosio called me into a small office.
"You did well," he said with an old man's finality. "Not elegant—none of that—but you were honest. The family respects honesty."
"He respects you," Flynn added. "You did not play to be the victim. You reclaimed your life."
Ambrosio's gaze lingered on me unusually. "We will help your father. But remember, Lainey, honesty must not descend into cruelty."
I nodded. I had learned the difference.
27
Our life grew complicated in new ways. Flynn was there. He changed diapers with a clumsy reverence. He came to my prenatal classes and took notes like a man studying ship navigation. He made tea at midnight, sat up when the baby cried, negotiated doctor's calls like a man who had finally chosen the thing his life would orbit.
"Why do you do all this?" I asked once, half asleep, one hand on his chest.
He smiled. "Because when I almost lost you, I realized how wrong I was. Because you stayed when it would have been easier to go. Because I can't imagine our home without the rhythm you and the child create."
I wanted to be cynical. I wanted to keep my ledger of hurts. But when he looked small and vulnerable at dawn, the ledger disappeared under common sheets.
28
There were relapses. He could still say cruel things in the old, polite voice. "Are you really worth this?" he asked once with a ledgered smirk.
I answered, "I'm worth being awake at three when the house smells like spit-up."
He learned to apologize with coffee. He learned to ask for forgiveness by taking out the trash himself without saying anything.
Sometimes forgiveness is not a ceremony. It's a series of small domestic acts.
29
Months later, when the child was a laughing, sticky human, a public moment returned.
Yulia reappeared, smaller, wiser, and asking for a job at a small charity. She approached me in the park. People walking by turned their heads.
"I've had time," she said. "I was wrong. I want to make amends."
The crowd that had once recorded our fight now watched. Some tsked. Some watched with curiosity. She knelt to tie a shoelace for a little boy and looked up at me.
"Can we speak?" she asked.
Flynn stepped forward too, hand protective.
I agreed to a meeting in the garden, public and quiet. She started to speak and to cry, a damp, honest pleading this time.
"I kept men as ornaments," she said. "I was afraid of being ordinary. I hurt people. I'm sorry."
She did not beg for my forgiveness alone; she asked to be a better person.
Public punishment had broken her armor. Now she was small and human, not merely a villain.
"You can't erase what you did," I told her. "But you can stop."
She nodded.
30
The months that followed were not cinematic, nor were they grand. Babies are small dictators that deliver late-night wonder and early-morning despair. Flynn changed schedules, I learned to write papers and prepare formula with equal skill, and Ambrosio taught me to play chess with him for quiet afternoons. Kyla studied with me, and Sergio occasionally called with awkward regrets that tried to be kind.
Once, I asked Flynn, "Do you regret—everything? The way we began?"
He put the child into my arms and knelt. "I regret I wasn't braver sooner. I regret that I let a notebook tell me how to live. But I don't regret this—us."
"I used to think money could buy everything," I admitted. "Now I know it buys nothing you cannot already earn."
He laughed, crying a little. "We earned some things the hard way."
31
One evening, years later, on Flynn's birthday, I walked into our bedroom to find a trail of small booties leading across the floor to the bed.
"What's this?" I asked, amusement curling into my voice.
He smiled and took my hand. "We never really married with cake," he said. "We married with an account and a signature. I want you to have something else."
He knelt and produced a small box. Inside, a simple band glinted. Ambrosio's old-fashioned blessing had been replaced by his own clumsy, gentle promise. He slid the ring onto my finger.
"Will you marry me the way people marry," he asked, "not with papers, but with choices each day?"
I looked at the little booties scattered like confetti and at the gentle man who had become my husband in truth, not only in name. The baby cooed from the next room, a steady drumbeat to our odd anthem.
"Yes," I said.
We laughed like two conspirators in a small, crooked world.
At night, when the house was quiet and the small human inhaled in sleep, I kept one tiny item of proof of all this: an orange blush compact I had worn the day I stormed the gate. It sat lightly under the drawer where Flynn kept his grandfather's watch. Sometimes I flicked it open, looked at the small smear of powder that had stained my cheek that night, and remembered the way a wrong move had taught me a better one.
And every time the baby put a tiny, sticky hand on my face and then smiled, I knew the lesson all over again: money had bought the entrance; he had bought a presence; and I had kept myself.
The End
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