Not Your Billionaire Daddy Chapter 1

I followed a lifestyle influencer on Instagram.

Every evening, after twelve hours of staring at financial modeling sheets, I would sink into my sofa and consume her romantic updates like candy. Her niche was intoxicatingly specific: the doe-eyed entry-level recruit and her brooding, untouchable billionaire boss. An illicit, intoxicating corporate romance carried out in executive elevators and glass-walled high-rises.

Devon had caught me scrolling her feed more than once. He would lean against the doorframe, watching me grin at my screen, and tell me I was embarrassingly gullible. “It’s a brand exercise, Hannah,” he’d say in that dry, measured baritone of his. “She’s selling you an algorithm, not a life.”

I had scoffed and called him an unromantic cynic who couldn't appreciate modern storytelling.

Until yesterday afternoon.

The influencer posted a photo of her engagement ring.

It was an antique Ceylon sapphire cradled by an intricate halo of pavé diamonds, set in handcrafted platinum. It was breathtaking. And it was identical down to the millimeter to the ring Devon had pulled out of a velvet box three months ago when he asked me to marry him.

Delighted by the sheer, cosmic absurdity of the coincidence, I left a comment:

“What are the odds! My fiancé bought me the exact same one!”

Within ten minutes, the influencer replied:

“Oh, honey… your boyfriend definitely bought you a replica~ This is an archival piece won at Sotheby’s. It’s one-of-a-kind, and it’s sitting on my finger right now.”

* * *

My brain took an embarrassingly long time to register the venom coated in her pastel emojis.

Instead of realizing I was being publicly patronized, I simply thought there had been a misunderstanding. I walked into my bedroom, pulled Devon’s ring out of the velvet jewelry organizer tucked deep inside my nightstand drawer, angled it under the bedside lamp, snapped a crisp photo, and uploaded it straight into the reply thread.

I hadn't been wearing it to work. Meridian Global was a shark tank, and flashing an heirloom gemstone on the trading floor felt like painting a target on my back. Devon hadn't been happy about it. When he noticed my bare left hand the morning after the proposal, his jaw had set into that stubborn, aristocratic line.

“Are you really that desperate to appear available to the firm?” he had asked, his voice deceptively mild.

The second my photo went live, the internet descended.

“Girl, the secondhand embarrassment is killing me. Did you really think no one would notice the fake?”

“The audacity to post cubic zirconia when the original owner is right there.”

I blinked at the screen, genuinely bewildered. I typed back: “It’s not fake.”

The replies multiplied like bacteria.

“Keep dreaming, sweetie. I just reverse-image searched it—that’s an archival Chaumet piece. Sold at Sotheby’s Geneva last month for over four million dollars!”

“Her fiancé is the CEO of a publicly traded conglomerate. What does your boyfriend do, manage a strip mall? Know your place.”

I stared at my phone with the universal squint of someone watching a train derail in slow motion. How on earth had a four-million-dollar heirloom ring sitting in my apartment been branded a knock-off?

That was when the influencer herself drifted back into the comments, wrapping her cruelty in sickening grace.

“Alright everyone, please don’t be too hard on her. We all appreciate beautiful things, and it’s completely understandable why someone would want to pretend.

“Besides, my daddy really spoils me. If you guys hadn't dug up the auction record, I wouldn't even have known how priceless it was.”

Two sentences. In two sentences, she had cemented me as a pathetic, clout-chasing fraud in front of forty thousand onlookers.

My thumbs flew across the glass as I opened my private chat with Devon.

“Did you propose to me with a counterfeit ring?”

He was in London closing an acquisition. With the five-hour time difference, I expected him to be asleep or locked in a boardroom. Instead, my phone buzzed with an incoming FaceTime request three seconds later.

The screen lit up. Devon was wearing a white hotel bathrobe, his dark hair still damp and falling loosely across his forehead. He had clearly just stepped out of the shower. The linen fell open just enough to reveal the sharp cut of his collarbone and the hard lines of his chest. He leaned forward to pick up his phone from the vanity, and a rogue water droplet traced down the hollow of his throat.

I swallowed, momentarily losing my train of thought.

Devon didn't waste time. “You hate the cut? Or are you breaking the engagement?”

Before I could form words, he continued, entirely deadpan: “If you don't like it, I picked nine alternatives before I left New York. I’ll bring the portfolio home and we can go through them one by one.”

Nine?

“I have ten fingers, Devon,” I muttered. “Are you planning to encase both my hands in platinum?”

“Hannah—”

Someone knocked on his hotel suite door. He glanced toward the sound, annoyance flickering across his features, then looked back into the lens. “My car to Heathrow is in three hours. I land at JFK this afternoon. Don't do anything stupid while I'm in the air.”

The screen went black.

Between a looming cross-border merger and my impending exhaustion, I let the phone slide onto the sheets and went to sleep.

When I woke up at seven, my social accounts were on fire.

Over ninety-nine unread direct messages. My mentions were a sewer of mockery, accusing me of pathological vanity and desperate social climbing. A viral drama aggregator had screenshotted our exchange and blasted it across Twitter.

And to put the cherry on top: the influencer had blocked me.