His Son’s Bride

Chapter 1

AURORA

"I said I was hoping to lose my virginity during my years here, not sleep with the whole of Kingston University."

I slam my third—or is it fourth?—cocktail on the bar, and Chloe nearly spits out her drink.

Tiana just gives me that look, the one that says here we go again, but I'm past caring.

The bass from the club's sound system pounds through my chest, matches the frustration that's been building for four years.

"Feeling dramatic tonight?" Chloe wipes her mouth, grinning like this is the best entertainment she's had all week. Her blonde hair catches the club lights, making her look like some kind of chaos angel. "You didn't sleep with the whole university. Just, what, five guys?"

"Fifteen."

They both stare at me.

"Fifteen dates," I clarify, grabbing my drink back. "Not fifteen—you know."

Tiana's face softens, her dark skin glowing under the ambient lighting. She reaches over, squeezes my hand with those perfectly manicured nails. "Rory, you don't have to explain yourself to us."

But I kind of do, don't I? Because even I don't understand what's wrong with me. Fifteen perfectly decent guys. Some of them were hot. Most of them were smart. A few actually made me laugh. And not a single one made me feel anything below the waist except vague disappointment.

What is wrong with me?

"Maybe you're demisexual," Tiana offers, because she's the kind of person who actually reads articles about this stuff. "You need an emotional connection first—"

"I had emotional connections! Daniel and I dated for three months. Three months of hand-holding and deep conversations and him reading me poetry, and when he finally tried to kiss me, I felt like I was kissing my brother."

"You don't have a brother," Chloe points out, twirling the little umbrella from her cosmopolitan.

"Exactly. That's how bad it was. I invented a brother just to describe how wrong it felt."

Chloe snorts into her drink.

Glad to know my misery is entertaining her.

Maybe I am defective. That is the quiet fear I never said out loud, not even to myself. Like, there was a switch everyone else had flipped at puberty, and mine just… never turned on.

I know the theory. Know the anatomy. Know exactly how it was supposed to work. I just never felt it.

And the worst part isn’t the lack of sex—it’s the way my friends look at me when I try to explain. Like they feel sorry for me because my intimate parts refuse to work.

I sigh, looking around for the hundredth time, trying to get my mind to enjoy today.

Around us, the club pulses with life—beautiful people in expensive clothes, drinking expensive drinks, pretending their lives are exactly what they want them to be. Lumière is the kind of place where you come to be seen, to matter, to forget that tomorrow you might go back to being nobody.

Tonight's supposed to be a celebration. I finished my chartered accountant program. Four years of balance sheets, tax codes, and financial statements, and I'm finally done. I should be happy.

Hell, I should be drunk and sloppy and making out with some random guy in a corner just because I can.

Instead, I'm sitting here mourning my dysfunctional vagina.

"You know what I think?" Chloe leans in, and I brace myself because Chloe's theories are always dangerous. "I think you've been dating boys when what you really need is a man."

Here we go.

"Oh my God—"

"No, listen! Think about it. All those guys on campus, they're what, twenty-two?

Twenty-three? They're basically children.

They still think pizza counts as a romantic dinner.

Meanwhile, you—" she waves her hand at me, "—you've been running your father's books since you were sixteen.

Laundering money for the family business. You're basically thirty in your brain."

"That's not how brains work," Tiana says, but there's weight in her voice. She knows what I am. What my family is. The Olivera name doesn't just open doors—it kicks them off their hinges, and sometimes people don't survive the entrance.

"You know what I mean. She needs someone mature. Someone who's actually lived. Someone who's not going to piss himself the second he finds out her dad's a mafia Don."

I fish my phone out of my clutch and pull up the notes app. The bucket list stares back at me, mocking.

Aurora Olivera's Bucket List (Age 18):

Get into top accounting program ?

Make real friends ?

Travel outside the country ?

Learn to drive stick shift ?

Get drunk in a foreign city ?

Stand up to Dad at least once ?

Willingly lose virginity to someone I actually choose

Own something Dad's money didn't buy ?

Seven out of eight. Not bad, except the one I'm missing is the one that matters. The one that's supposed to make me feel like I own my body, like I'm not just some pawn waiting to be traded off in my father's next alliance.

Four days. That's all I have left before I go home. Before I step back into that world of arranged marriages and family obligations and being Luca's daughter instead of just Aurora.

"Stop looking at that thing," Chloe snatches my phone. "Tonight's about celebrating, remember? You're a certified accountant! You can legally bore people with tax law now!"

"Living the dream," I mutter, but I smile. Because she's right. I did do it. I got my degree, proved I'm more than just a pretty face my father can auction off to whatever capo or underboss needs a wife.

For four years, I got to be normal. Or as normal as someone like me can be.

Though normal is relative. Even here, even tonight with vodka in my blood and Chloe's chaos energy doing its best to distract me, I can't fully turn it off.

The club's owner is at the bar. I clocked him twenty minutes ago — the way he keeps checking his watch, the way his eyes track the floor managers, the specific anxiety of someone watching cash flow in real time.

The VIP section is at sixty percent capacity on a night that should be eighty.

Overstaffed by at least four people relative to what I can see coming through the door.

Someone's either over-ordering to skim from the top, or the cover charge numbers are being reported wrong.

"You're doing the face," Tiana says.

"What face?"

"The one where you're auditing something in your head."

"I'm not—" I stop. "The owner's losing money tonight and he doesn't know why yet."

Chloe stares at me. "We're celebrating. Can you maybe turn off the forensic accountant brain for one night?"

"It's not a switch. It's just how I see things."

Tiana squeezes my hand. "We know. We love you anyway." She grins and raises her glass. "To Aurora Olivera, the only person I know who made financial accounting sound sexy."

"To Aurora," Chloe echoes, "who will definitely lose her virginity before she turns into a nun."

"I hate you both."

"You love us."

They're not wrong. I do love them. I met Tiana when we were fourteen, at a charity fundraiser neither of us wanted to attend. My father had sent me in a dress I hated, and her father had dragged her along because appearances mattered more than comfort in both our worlds.

We found each other hiding behind a dessert table, eating tiny pastries with our fingers and pretending we weren’t listening to men who spoke too quietly and smiled too sharply.

She looked at me, powdered sugar on her lips, and said, “Your dad scares people.”

I said, “Yours too.”

We’d been inseparable ever since.

Chloe crashed into our lives two years later—literally.

She knocked over my stack of textbooks in the school hallway, tripped over her own feet trying to apologize, and somehow managed to insult my shoes while doing it.

“They’re ugly,” she said, wincing. “But like… in an expensive way.”

Tiana laughed. I stared.

Chloe grinned like she’d just won something. “Hi. I think we’re friends now.”

And somehow—annoyingly—she was right.

We clink glasses, and I let the vodka burn its way down my throat. The DJ switches tracks, something with a heavier beat, and the crowd on the dance floor swells. I should feel it, that pull to move, to lose myself in the music. But I just feel tired.

Three weeks.

Then I see him.

He's in the VIP section, raised above the main floor like some kind of king surveying his kingdom.

Silver hair—not gray, but actual silver, the kind that catches the light and makes you think of expensive things, dangerous things.

The kind of hair that shouldn't be sexy but on him?

On him it's devastating. He looks maybe forty, maybe older, but age sits on him like power.

Like he's earned every year and made them all count.

A suit that probably costs more than most people's cars, tailored so perfectly it might as well be a second skin.

Black, crisp, the kind of formal that says money and taste and don't-fuck-with-me all at once.

Broad shoulders. Strong jaw. The kind of face that's seen things, done things, survived things.

He's not dancing, not drinking, just... watching.

And right now, he's watching me.

My breath stops.

Oh.

It's not like the movies, where everything goes slow motion and the music fades. The club's still loud, still chaotic, still full of writhing bodies and flashing lights. But there's this... thing. This pull. Like someone just plugged me into an electrical socket and forgot to warn me first.

His eyes are dark from this distance—almost black in the club lights—but they're locked on mine and I can't look away. Don't want to look away. My skin feels hot, too tight, like I'm suddenly aware of every inch of it.

My nipples tighten.

Just like that. Just from a look.

Am I going crazy?

I suck in a breath, cross my arms over my chest because what the hell, what the actual hell is happening to my body right now?

I've been kissed, touched, groped by twenty-three different guys and felt nothing, but this man across the room just looked at me and my nipples are pressing against my bra like they're trying to get his attention.

Who is he?