The Mermaid's Stand-In
MatureYou're a marine biologist playing a heiress at a yacht auction—and the billionaire who wants to buy her company now wants to buy you.
When a case of mistaken identity at a private yacht auction puts you in the crosshairs of a ruthless billionaire, you're forced to impersonate a vanished heiress to survive. But as the line between performance and reality blurs, you find yourself drawn to the very man who wants to own you. With the real heiress's life hanging in the balance, can you keep up the act without losing yourself—or your heart? A tale of forbidden love, hidden identity, and the dangerous game of desire.
The story begins
The salt wind whipped across the deck, snapping the hem of your borrowed gown against your calves. Below, the Mediterranean glittered like black glass, broken only by the wake of a hundred-million-euro hulls. You’d come for the algae samples—the biofouling on these floating palaces was a scientist’s dream—but the moment you’d stepped aboard, the dream had curdled.
A steward had mistaken you for a guest. Then another. Now you stood at the rail, clutching a champagne flute you hadn’t touched, watching the real heiresses laugh in clusters of diamonds and borrowed smiles.
“Miss Vance.”
The voice came low and close, a blade wrapped in silk. You turned. Julian Ashford stood a foot away, his dark suit cut like a warning, his eyes the gray of a storm front. He didn’t offer his hand.
“You’re harder to pin down than the press suggests,” he said. “I’ve been trying to arrange a conversation for months. Imagine my luck finding you here, alone.”
Your pulse stuttered. Vance. The name on the manifest you’d borrowed to get past security. A lie you’d never expected to meet face-to-face.
What happens next is up to you.
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