The price of her forgiveness
He threw away the only woman who ever loved him for free. Now he'll lose everything to win her back.
In this billionaire romance, Lachlan Vance has the empire, the engagement and the penthouse, but not a single peaceful night. Three years ago, he believed forged evidence and cast out Kaelia, the woman who stood beside him when he had nothing.
Then a mysterious investor buys up his debt and walks into the boardroom. It's Kaelia, the hidden heiress to Australia's richest mining dynasty, and the secret investor who built his first company. She has no interest in his apology. She wants him to watch it all fall.
To keep control, Kaelia is forced into a contract marriage with the man who broke her. Lachlan takes the basement desk, the public humiliation and every punishment she hands him. But the closer they get, the more secrets surface, including a daughter he never knew existed.
Someone engineered his worst mistake, and that person has been sitting at his dinner table all along.
A groveling male lead, a cold heiress, a secret baby, a second chance, and twists you won't see coming.
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Chapter: EVERY SECOND THURSDAYChapter 10: Every Second ThursdayLachlan's I found Dev in the stairwell on the thirty-eighth floor, eating a cold meat pie out of a paper bag."Don't tell my wife," he said around a mouthful. "She thinks I'm on the salad.""Dev. I need to ask you something, and I need you not to be offended."He stopped chewing. The stairwell was concrete and fluorescent light and floor polish, the one place in the building the cameras didn't reach. I'd found out Dev hid up here in my first month as CEO and never said a word, and I'd never once asked him why."Go on.""Did you tell anyone about the twelve per cent?""No.""Not even in passing?""Lachlan." He set the pie down on the step like a man laying down a weapon. "You said tell nobody. I haven't told my wife or my mother. I wouldn't tell my own reflection.""Gideon Marsh said it to me at lunch. The exact figure."Dev didn't flinch. He went still, eyes on a point over my shoulder while his mind worked."That's not possible. The figure's on one
Last Updated: 2026-10-12
Chapter: THE NUMBERChapter 9: The NumberLachlan's Harold Carmichael did business the way he did: fast, and without apology."December," he said around a mouthful of rare beef. "The sixth. It's a Saturday. My people have already looked at the church.""It's March.""It was March. Now it's December.""We agreed last Sunday.""You agreed. With my daughter and your uncle. Nobody asked me." He pointed his fork at me. The private dining room on the fifty-first floor of Carmichael Shipping was all dark wood, brass and framed photographs of ships, a place built to make a visitor feel already trapped inside the hull. Below the windows, Circular Quay. Ferries, gulls, and a cruise liner the size of a suburb parked at the terminal like a joke.Gideon Marsh sat across from me, cutting a piece of fish into very small, very exact pieces. He hadn't said a word since the main arrived. He'd smiled when Harold spoke, and nodded now and then, like a man who'd rehearsed on the way over and was waiting for his cue. I'd bar
Last Updated: 2026-10-12
Chapter: THE MAIN IN THE CAPChapter 8: The Man in the CapKaelia's Mack Delaney held the note between two fingers, tilted it toward the window, and said, "Cheap paper. Cheap printer. Whoever sent this wanted to scare you, not impress you.""It worked," said Jett."It was meant to, yes." Mack slid it into a plastic sleeve with the care of a man who'd done it many times. He was sixty, with a retired policeman's squint and a shirt that had never met an iron. "People who want to hurt you don't write notes. They just do it. A note means somebody wants you to stop.""Stop what?" I said."That's the question."We were in the back room of a pie shop in Surry Hills, because Mack didn't trust his own office. The air smelled of pastry and hot fat. His laptop sat on a stack of flour sacks. Jett perched on an upturned crate with a sausage roll he hadn't touched. I stood, because I couldn't sit.I'd rung Thea from the car. It had gone badly."The email came through a board portal," she'd said, in the clipped voice that meant
Last Updated: 2026-10-11
Chapter: THE VOICEMAILChapter 7: The VoicemailKaelia's "Is work a bad man?" Wren asked, her mouth full of toast.I stopped with the knife halfway through the butter. "Who told you that?""Uncle Jett. He said you're going to work to be cross with a bad man."Behind me, Jett became very interested in the coffee machine. "Uncle Jett talks a lot for someone who sleeps on our couch.""Is it true?""Work is spreadsheets and boring phone calls. Nobody's bad."She chewed on that. She had Vegemite on one cheek and a look I knew, the one that said she'd caught me leaving something out. She'd had it since she was a baby, as if she'd been born knowing that adults edit."If he's bad," she said, "tell Uncle Jett to be cross too.""I promise."I kissed the top of her head and kept my mouth there a second too long, like I was memorising her. Honey and sleep. I'd stopped sleeping through a night the day she was born, and I had never once wanted that back.In the car, Jett waited until we'd cleared Palm Beach. "I only sai
Last Updated: 2026-10-11
Chapter: What she deletedChapter 6: What She DeletedLachlan's "We have three options for the cake," said Dominique, "and one of them is a fountain.""No fountain," I said."No fountain," Briony agreed, a half-second later, and then smiled at the wedding planner as if we'd made a joint decision.Wednesday, a quarter past two. The function room at Watsons Bay had a wall of glass facing the heads, and the light off the water was so bright it hurt to look at. Dominique had set the table with swatches and menus and a tray of miniature sandwiches nobody was eating. She was young and fast and wore a headset like a pilot, and she looked at us the way people look at a couple they've been told is very important."Then it's the lemon and elderflower, or the three-tier vanilla, or..." She fanned the cards. "The twenty-first of March is a beautiful date. Late summer. The light at five o'clock is just spectacular.""Is it?" I said."It's gold. Everyone cries.""Good."Briony looked at me. "You could try to sound interest
Last Updated: 2026-10-06
Chapter: The doctor who vanishedChapter 5: The Doctor Who VanishedLachlanI didn’t tell anyone where I was going. Not Marcus, who’d left three messages by eight a.m. Not Briony, who sent a single text, Feeling better. Dinner tonight?, and then a second one, a minute later, Everything ok? Not Cormac, who would have said be patient in that voice that makes a man feel like a fool for wanting answers.I sent my driver home, took the old grey Volvo out of the garage, and drove across the city alone with the folder on the passenger seat and the seat belt across it, because I couldn’t stand to see it slide.Marlowe Street is a narrow road behind the hospital district, all brass plates and awnings and the smell of cut stone. Specialists’ territory. People come here to be told things in low voices. I found the number halfway down on the left and pulled in under a plane tree, and for a while I just sat there with the engine ticking.Shutters. That was the first thing. Grey metal shutters, pulled all the way down over a groun
Last Updated: 2026-10-06
