The Wrong Bride

Marriage by Contract, Book 2

By: Maya Alden

Narrated by: Raven Hawkins, Noah B. Perez

One Shotgun Wedding + One Wrong Bride = One Big Mess

Duncan Archer doesn't do relationships. He prefers buying a date over buying dinner for a date.

One night in Paris, he is set up to believe that the daughter of a French mob boss is his paid date. When she ends up pregnant, there's no way out but marriage. First, Elsa is carrying his child. Second (or maybe first?), her father has a gun to his head.

Now, the eternal bachelor is expecting a baby, dealing with a violently criminal father-in-law, and coping with parents thrilled about becoming grandparents.

And his new bride? She's sweet, strong, and surprisingly captivating. He can't get enough of her both in and out of bed. She says she's in love with him. He's behaving like he's in love with her, and he doesn't even know what that four-lettered word means. She's scaring the life out of him.

Old habits die hard, and in his attempt to protect his heart, Duncan doesn't trust Elsa and does the one thing she begged him not to do.

Too late, Duncan realizes that the wrong bride is actually the right wife. If he can't win Elsa's trust back, he could lose the two most important people in his life, his wife and their child.

The Wrong Bride is a billionaire, surprise pregnancy, marriage of convenience romance. It's a complete standalone and features a shotgun wedding, forced proximity, mafia-adjacent, a ten-year age gap, Paris, and no cheating.

©2024 Maya Alden (P)2025 Podium Audio

Weird choice in betrayal

The MMC has a prostitute addiction and is overall a grumpy jerk, but for some reason the big betrayal that Maya Alden is known for creating in her books had nothing to do with either of those but with some weird arms dealership situation?? It just felt weird and not at all worth the work up to it. I thought maybe the betrayal would be something to have to do with him paying for sex, like his past haunting them or even more with his trust issues (which I suppose is kind of the premise of the betrayal) but no. It felt random and not very planned out or angsty.