Chapter 29

There was nothing more foolish than showing weakness before a ruthless plunderer.

She opened her eyes fiercely and shouted sharply at the Grand Duke.

“Your Highness Grand Duke, what kind of outrageous rudeness is this!”

“Be still. I am checking whether anyone followed us.”

Christian pressed his ear to the door and listened for movement outside.

Fortunately, he could not hear even the attendants.

It seemed all the staff had gathered near the ballroom.

Overwhelmed by his force, Charlotte shut her mouth without meaning to.

Bright moonlight lit his sculpted profile.

The slight disarray in him made him seem closer to ‘Chris’ than to ‘Grand Duke Eponhart.’

“No one. Now speak.”

“What?”

Charlotte bit down hard on her parched lower lip.

She could not understand the thoughts of such an outrageous man in the least.

At the woman’s slanted look, a self-mocking smile rose to Christian’s mouth.

“Do you truly not remember me, Miss Mary Robinson?”

At the name she had forgotten, Charlotte’s heart dropped.

The moment she heard it, it was as if she had been flung back into that day eight years ago.

But the eighteen-year-old girl who had once lived happily in a peaceful world no longer existed.

Again and again, she had cut that innocent version of herself to pieces and buried her deep within her chest.

The world was too cold and too cruel for one to live lost in tender sentiment.

Especially after the terrible torment she had suffered from the Barevarians five years earlier, something inside Charlotte had twisted badly.

What Charlotte had gone through was more than enough to leave her with a sickening contempt and disgust toward all men in the world.

‘If I could have your purity, Lady Roimond, I would not begrudge even a year’s worth of mine development costs.’

‘My Lady, I would offer two years’ worth. But in exchange, you must pay the price until I am satisfied.’

‘I’ll pay the interest somehow, so get out of my sight at once.’

Men were all the same.

All they had in their heads was lifting the skirts of a woman desired with l*st.

Chris would have been no different.

His desire had been clear from the beginning.

Perhaps he had been more obvious than anyone.

So Charlotte had nothing to expect from Christian, and nothing to be disappointed by.

Neither resentment nor longing remained.

If by chance they were ever to meet again, she had once thought she would treat him as though he had never existed for even a single moment in her life, and pretend not to know him.

That was all.

Soon Charlotte steadied herself and answered calmly.

“I have no idea what you are talking about.”

Her indifferent voice drove into Christian’s ears.

It felt as though all the years he had spent searching for her were being denied in their entirety.

But he could not give up here.

He could not lose the owner of the freesia scent he had sought for eight years.

No matter what form it took, he would make her his.

Christian’s fingertips brushed through her loosened golden hair.

He caught up a thick handful of it and brought it to his nose.

His high bridge pressed deep into the strands.

That ecstatic floral scent bored into him.

It crushed his senses with a richness far beyond that of the hair inside the pendant.

At the Grand Duke’s strange behavior, Charlotte’s body stiffened.

She had endured countless humiliations up to now, but never in such a way as this.

A shiver ran over her whole body.

The fear that he might force himself on her just like this weighed heavily on her chest.

Christian, maddened, savored her hair, then seized her chin tightly.

A frightened sound leaked from her small, shapely lips.

“Hh……”

“The hair, the color of your eyes, your voice, the sensation I feel from you, everything is the same. And you say you don’t know me?”

His harshly distorted face came right up before hers.

Unable to open her mouth because of the force gripping her jaw, Charlotte only shook her head again and again.

Christian stared down at the face of the woman rejecting him, then spoke as though grinding her beneath his heel.

“Say that you remember. Otherwise, I will do something worse than this.”

But Charlotte remained stubborn.

The more Christian threatened her, the firmer her resolve became.

A boiling sigh escaped his throat.

Worn out by waiting, he ground his teeth.

“Then this should make you remember.”

“Hngh!”

His hot breath descended.

Before she could reject him, their lips were joined.

He ravaged the inside of her mouth roughly, as if scraping a spring dry to its very bottom.

Their desperate breaths tangled, and his tongue drew hard against hers.

From her blue eyes, not even able to close in time, helpless tears spilled.

Charlotte pushed hard against his chest, but it was useless.

The more she withdrew, the more relentlessly Christian pursued her.

Like a starved beast after a winter of hunger, he consumed her tender flesh in a frenzy.

The woman trapped in his arms bit at his lips and beat his chest with her fists.

But he could not stop.

Her feeble resistance only deepened his intoxication.

After a long while of drinking down his thirst, he slowly breathed and lifted his head.

They had already fallen onto the bed long before.

Charlotte did not miss the instant Christian paused for breath, and shoved his face away roughly.

A thin scratch appeared on his smooth cheek.

“Stop…! Please, ngh, stop!”

The moment he met those blue eyes soaked in tears, Christian finally realized that something was wrong.

And that this situation was not what he had wanted.

Charlotte’s delicate chin trembled.

So did her capable fingertips.

She glared at Christian, now halted exactly as she had told him to.

She was the one who had been cruelly handled, and yet it was his face that looked wounded.

His black eyes looked empty and hollow, like a castle that would collapse at a touch, and the soul inside them looked even more ruined still.

But Charlotte did not want to understand him.

All she could think was that at least he had listened when she begged him to stop.

Then, from lips that bore not a single wound no matter how much they had been bitten and pressed, an absurd question came.

“Why?”

“…?”

For a moment, Charlotte doubted her own ears.

From the moment she first met him she had thought him a reckless man impossible to understand, but what kind of question was it to ask why in a moment like this?

And yet he asked her again, truly seeming to want the answer.

“Why?”

Ignoring his earnest question, Charlotte poured out what she needed to say.

“Please send me back, even now. I will pretend that what just happened never happened, so please.”

“…Never happened?”

Christian felt as though he had been struck across the back of the head with a hammer.

It was that sharp a blow.

Never happened.

Yes.

Just as she was making that kiss from a moment ago into something that had never happened, it seemed she had counted that night eight years ago as something that had never happened too.

A hollow laugh escaped him.

His insides boiled, and yet he had no idea how to ease them.

His darkly stained eyes swept over the woman soaked with tears.

She had treated him cruelly, and yet he could not understand why she was the one crying.

But he did know that the woman’s tears were not, as they had been eight years ago, born of pleasure and delight.

Those tears had been unbearably sweet, but the tears now were bitter enough to sting the tip of his tongue.

With his innate judgment, he realized that even if he took this woman to the end now, the tears would not turn sweet.

His crooked voice sharply cut through the warm air.

“You want me to send you back?”

Charlotte nodded, pouring all her plea into the motion.

She knew well that he was not a man one could reason with, and yet somehow she felt that now he might grant her request.

Clinging to the thin strand of reason still left in him, he gently tucked Charlotte’s disheveled hair behind her ear.

The savage eyes that had obeyed instinct cooled into stillness.

A numb voice, impossible to read, brushed the shell of Charlotte’s ear.

“All right. I’ll let you go.”

“…!”

Charlotte could scarcely believe his sudden change in attitude, but she did not ask why.

Leaving this place before his mind changed came first.

He quietly watched the woman wriggling free from his arms.

The urge to trap her there again lifted its head moment by moment, but a promise was a promise.

Regardless of the way his trousers were swollen tight, he had no thought of rushing things.

The brief taste of sweetness had soothed his desperate thirst.

So now he had to endure.

Whether on the battlefield or in business, he had an uncanny sense for when force should be used and when force would be useless.

To use force effectively, one needed skill.

Breaking an egg was not difficult, but if one broke it carelessly, the yolk would burst more often than not.

With the instinctive judgment he had been born with, he realized that if he wanted this woman whole, he had to let her go for now.

There was no need to be impatient.

What mattered more was not losing again the fish he had once let slip away.

Whether she was Mary Robinson or Charlotte Roimond, whatever her name might be.

In any case, this woman had all but fallen into his grasp already.

As Charlotte rose from the bed, he said to the back of her head in warning,

“But remember this one thing.”

Charlotte’s shoulders flinched.

“I have not forgotten anything. So making it as if it never happened is impossible.”

Without a word, she stood up, and without looking back even once, left the bedchamber.

The scent of freesia lingered in the room all through the night after she was gone.

***