The Million Dollar Destiny — R.M. Johnson

Not long ago, when Monica Kenny's husband realized she'd gone through premature menopause and would never give him the children he so desperately wanted, he took a mistress, deceived and divorced her. Monica tried to move on, but was unable, feeling the fool for allowing herself to be so badly abused and mistreated by the man she loved. Unable to look herself in the mirror, Monica was determined to even the score. She needed to hurt Nate in a way in which he would never recover. She needed revenge! That would come in the form of stealing from him what he valued most in the world: his son, the boy Monica had recommended they adopt two years ago, in order to save their marriage. Her husband rejected the idea at the time, only to later adopt the infant after his divorce from Monica was finalized. In order to succeed with her plan, Monica must convince a judge the child should be taken, and she will have to paint Nate as an adulterous, unfit parent who provides a hazardous living environment and abuses his child. That man is who Monica truly believes her husband to be, but it will be hard to prove, considering Nate has been acting the model father and has announced he's “changed his ways” and “become a better man”.

Knowing her husband and the lies he tells, Monica enlists Nate's past mistresses -- the only women she believes can help: Daphanie Coleman and Tori Thomas. Monica positions the women to seduce Nate into succumbing to his most primal urges. But when the psychopathic killer, Freddy Ford -- a man who has shot both Monica and Nate in the past, and left them for dead -- breaks out of a psychiatric institution seeking revenge, the task of rescuing the child Monica loves from the man she hates, becomes more complicated, increasingly impossible and even deadly.

CHAPTER 1- Excerpt

Tangled in the soft white linen of the king-sized bed, Monica savored the warmth of little Nathaniel's four-year old body. He lay sleeping, breathing softly beside her, his head in the bend of her arm, his arm thrown across her belly.
Monica hadn't given birth to the boy, but Nate had recently granted her permission to adopt him. They stood in the law offices of his close friend, and with little Nathaniel holding tight to one of Monica's pant legs, she bent over the desk, grabbed the pen with a trembling hand and signed her name to the adoption document.
Natural born or not, she loved the boy as though she had carried him to term, fed him from her own breasts.
She remembered two weeks ago, coming back to Nate's house for the first time after they last separated, her heart pounding so hard she felt dizzy. When the door opened, Nate was shocked to see her and hurriedly invited her in.
In the living room, the images of the night she was shot over a year ago, flooded back: Monica wearing a bath towel after showering, walking out to see a man pointing a gun at her husband, that man shooting Nate twice then turning the gun on Monica and firing -- the excruciating fractioned millisecond of pain she felt of the bullet burrowing into her skull, before she blacked out and fell naked to the floor.
Standing in the living room on the day of her return, Nate's arms around her, Monica told herself she could not be weak; if she wanted her son away from the dangerous man she knew Nate to be, she would have to lie, connive and act as cold and heartless as Nate always had.
Now in bed, she lay in total contentment, the early morning sun peeking through the bedroom's horizontal blinds, casting bright stripes on the comforter. She stared up toward her outstretched arm, the sunlight catching one of the cuts on her 8 karat solitaire wedding ring, making it shine so bright, she had to squint against its glare. It still felt odd and somewhat foreign on her finger, for she hadn't been wearing it twenty-four hours.