Chapter 17

Unlike the man approaching with his heavy presence on display, she was in a position where she could neither go forward nor back because of the shoes she had kicked off. Kyle, staring at her face reddened with irritation, opened his mouth.

“So, what do you think after looking over the husband candidates?”

“That’s not why I came.”

Hazel shot back in a sharp tone. But the man remained steadfast.

“Your ‘father’ doesn’t seem to think so. There’s only one reason parents bring a daughter of marriageable age to a salon full of young men. Didn’t you come knowing that too?”

“I only greeted people. It didn’t mean anything.”

And I have no reason to talk about this with you either. Hazel exercised restraint and swallowed only that last part.

Meanwhile Kyle drew even closer. Hazel looked up at the man’s face, now suddenly right before her.

He had always looked down at Hazel. Even in childhood, if nothing else, he had always been up in a tree.

The words slipped out at once.

“Don’t look down at me.”

But the man stared at her steadily.

With a displeased expression, Hazel staggered as she stood. When her stockinged feet touched the floor, pain swept over her and her face twisted for a moment, but it was already too late.

Even enduring the throbbing in her calves and rising to her feet, Kyle was still more than a head taller than she was.

“……”

Emotion surged like a whirlwind.

The man before the theater overlapped with Kyle as he looked down at her. Eyes as though looking at something dirty, a face telling her to stop it, a cold voice saying he did not know her.

As the backs of her knees faltered, they struck the chair. Her knees bent backward with a jerk, and the long blanket tangled in her dress.

“……!”

Heat rose to her face. Kyle watched with a calm expression as Hazel floundered and in the end landed back in the chair. No, had he looked down at her?

It felt as if tears would spill from humiliation. She did not want to show him any more of herself, dragging tears around because she could not control a single emotion.

Rather than receive such treatment, like a child, from this man, Hazel chose to lash out, sweeping her arm wide to fling off the tangled blanket.

“If you’re done watching, go. It’s not good for us to be alone in a place like this. Someone could come in. People won’t talk kindly. If, just as you say, Father sent me here to look for a husband candidate, then all the more.”

There was only one meaning contained in that indirect phrasing.

Please get out of my sight.

There was no way he would fail to understand. Hazel was confident that her words were so openly cold that it would hardly even be accurate to call them aristocratic phrasing.

But no matter how much she told him to go, the man’s straight legs stayed where they were. Her patience reached its limit. In the end Hazel threw aside the blanket and lifted her chin.

“Just get out……”

At that moment the man spoke.

“How about me?”

“……?”

“How about considering me as your husband candidate, Hel?”

Her eyes, burning with anger, rounded wide. With all her strength she stared at him, thinking about what she had just heard—no, the nonsense she had just heard.

What is he saying right now? A husband candidate? Consider? Whom, Kyle?

Even while she thought, time passed, and Kyle moved. Watching the man’s knee, which she had never once imagined would ever touch the floor, bend so easily, Hazel cried out.

“You……!”

Hazel’s blood turned cold. Looking down at this man for the first time in her life, Hazel widened her eyes and tried and tried again to grasp the situation.

It was not a dream. She knew the meaning of this action. In a place where only the two of them were present, a man kneeling before a woman. He lifted infinitely serious eyes and looked at her.

An alarm rang in her head. The instinct that she had to get out of this situation seized her mind.

But the dress was too heavy, and the path of escape was blocked by the man. She could run nowhere. Just like Bukata, which she had no choice but to come to.

She could not breathe. Hazel stammered,

“W-what are you saying right now……”

Not a finger, not an eyebrow could move at her own will. She had drunk nothing, much less alcohol, nothing that should leave her impaired or restrict her actions, yet it felt as if she had sunk into deep water.

Panting as though paralyzed, Hazel repeated over and over inside herself. Don’t, please don’t, anything but those words. Let’s not make this worse than it already is.

But this summer, had there been even one thing that had gone the way she wanted?

The words she had desperately wished he would not say appeared at last.

“Marry me, Hazel.”

Thus was completed the third memorable saying of the man Hazel had come to loathe.

As always, in a form utterly selfish, devastating to only one person.

* * *

The mocking remark that she was only pretty, and the coldness of saying he did not know her, were nothing more than pebbles tossed by a child compared to this third line.

Hazel’s face turned pale.

“……What?”

“Marry me.”

It had shifted from the command ‘Marry me’ to the urging phrase ‘Please marry me,’ but the context remained the same.

Kyle looked up at her with an endlessly serious face.

Just as it was Hazel’s first time looking down at him, it was Kyle’s first time looking up at her. Still kneeling like a loyal servant, Kyle watched her bloodless face.

Even before coming to the salon, he had not planned to rush matters this far. It was not merely because Hazel had failed to show herself.

Society had held a fundamental question.

Would the proud Charles Fitzroy truly acknowledge Hazel Fitzroy as his daughter?

If it were merely a formal father-daughter relationship without true feeling, then showing favor toward her might return as a backlash. Her ambiguous position was an enormous risk factor for suitors.

And by now, the suitors who might have become his rivals were all probably drunk on the illusion that their own assumptions had been right. A shabby young lady dropped in the middle of wolves without a guardian, an adopted daughter so ignored that there was not even any intention to marry her into the nobility. Was it not too clear a picture.

Hazel Fitzroy had been abandoned.

From the perspective of ordinary people.

But Kyle was a businessman and an investor. It was his unmatched ability to recognize potential before its value rose that had brought Kyle to where he stood now.

And in his eyes, aspects invisible to the public were perfectly clear.

“It won’t be such a bad deal for you either. You’re perceptive enough to know that. The Marquis has no intention of marrying you to a nobleman, though I still do not know the exact reason.”

At a glance, the Marquis seemed indifferent to Hazel. His attitude of keeping her shut away in the house for over a month without even letting her go out had fed that rumor.

But that absolutely did not mean the Marquis hated Hazel.

Kyle had seen it clearly. The old man’s sharp eyes sweeping the room from the shadows before handing Hazel over to Madame Sinclair. Kyle had keenly caught that fleeting moment in which he wondered whether he should let his daughter go inside, or take her back home.

An action that could not appear without affection.

Therefore Kyle was certain. The reason the Marquis had let Hazel enter alone was because he thought he himself might become an obstacle to Hazel.

To young gentlemen, Marquis Fitzroy was not an easy conversational partner, and so there were almost none who could cheerfully approach his daughter and speak with her before the Marquis’s stern, watchful eyes. Rather than that, it was better to hope Madame Sinclair would guide matters herself.

‘Luck was on my side too. It helped that I was the first to witness her being led over by Madame Sinclair.’

Kyle spoke as though reciting something.

“If you must marry someone anyway, I don’t think it would be so bad if that someone were me.”

The shoes she had thought were glass were diamonds. The pumpkin carriage that had looked as though it would vanish into bubbles after midnight was in fact an express train to the upper class.

As though escorting her, Kyle held out his hand.

“Well? Isn’t it worth considering?”

“……”

What in the world is this situation? Hazel looked down at the man with an expression of utter disbelief.

Noisy commotion drifted in through the corridor. Outside was so lively, and yet the room was so quiet.

Around the plane trees in Sainsbury, the wind had made the leaves rustle, and the stream had flowed on singing softly, but in the little room of Madame Sinclair’s house, a silence settled so deep that even breathing could not be heard.

At that moment, behind the face of the kneeling man, she saw the red neon sign. Naturally, the cool shadow that had lain over the face of the suitor looking up at her seriously overlapped with the shaded face from before, backlit by the streetlamp.

“I don’t know her.”

So really. The answer had already been decided. Hazel forced out her reply.