The Vampire Lord's Substitute Bride

Thirty thousand dollars. That was the price of my mother's life, and the price the Sterlings put on me.

My sister was promised to a man the whole town called a monster - a brute they'd banished to the woods. She refused to marry him. I took her place. One year in his house, and my mother's surgery would be paid.

I signed my sister's name and moved into a cabin with no heat and no lights, married to a man who watched me like I was a ledger he was reading.

Then the deadline came and the money didn't. I went back for it, and my sister laughed and told me she'd spent all thirty thousand on a membership to a private club. Her mother stood in the doorway with her coffee and said nothing while they shut the door on me.

I had nothing left but the box my husband had put in my hands that morning. Inside it was jewelry three hundred years old.

Julian Beaumont told me his family had almost nothing left. He told me I was the lady of his house.

He never told me what he was.

That he doesn't eat, doesn't sleep, doesn't breathe.

That he can hear every mind in this valley - every thought, every lie, every secret, all of it at once, all the time -

except mine.

He has a year to find out why. I have a year to decide if I want him to.