One Night, His Unseen Legacy

After ninety-nine failed attempts to win the heart of the brilliant but cold Dr. Julian Burke, I drugged him for one night of passion. It didn't make him love me. I fled to London in shame.

Three years later, a photo surfaced. It was Julian, smiling tenderly at a younger woman-a dead ringer for his deceased first love.

I flew back to New York to end our sham engagement, but he destroyed me first.

He publicly accused me of leaking his research, and his testimony sent me to prison. While I was inside, I was brutally attacked and lost a kidney. My father, crushed by the scandal, died of a stroke, and I wasn't there to say goodbye.

I was just collateral damage in his twisted atonement for a ghost, a convenient villain to protect her manipulative sister. He let me rot, believing I was a monster.

But he didn't know the secret I carried from that one night.

After my release, I took our son and vanished. I would build a new life, and he would never know the son he abandoned or the woman he truly broke.

Chapter 1

Chandler POV:

I stood at the edge of the London Bridge, the cold wind whipping my hair around my face. Three years. Three years since I last saw him, three years since I drugged him and forced a night of passion, thinking it would make him love me. It didn' t.

My phone buzzed in my hand, Gale's name flashing on the screen. She was my best friend, my confidante, and my only connection to the world I' d abandoned in New York.

"Hey, stranger," she said, her voice a familiar blend of concern and exasperation. "Are you still ignoring my Julian updates?"

I stared at the murky Thames below. Ignoring Julian Burke's updates had become my religion. A silent vow against the pain.

Ninety-nine attempts. Ninety-nine times I tried to chip away at the ice surrounding Dr. Julian Burke' s heart. He was brilliant, a neuroscientist whose mind was a universe of its own, but his emotional world was a frozen wasteland. I loved him with a ferocity that bordered on madness.

My family' s money, my brother Charlton' s influence – none of it could buy his affection. Our engagement was a business deal, a $5 million donation to his lab, brokered by Charlton, meant to secure my position by his side. I had convinced myself that proximity would breed love, that my fire could melt his ice. I was wrong. So desperately, painfully wrong.

That last night. The desperation had clawed at me, a wild animal in my chest. He was leaving for a conference, his bags packed, his mind already miles away. I saw my chance, a twisted, desperate gamble. A sedative in his drink, a night stolen, a memory I both cherished and despised. Then, I fled. To London. To escape the wreckage I' d made and the man who wouldn't see me.

"No,