Chapter 5

“Our recommended dishes are a seafood salad with fresh shellfish and crustaceans along with grilled vegetables, a steak of chicken br*ast cooked in a stone oven with yogurt sauce, a cream lasagna made with goat cheese, and a barbecue platter of smoked suckling pig ribs.”

While listening to the server’s smooth recommendations, Charlotte’s gaze remained fixed on the menu.

She had entered knowing it was an upscale restaurant because the atmosphere looked nice, but the prices were far beyond what she had imagined.

‘I thought it would be expensive because it’s a fine restaurant by the sea, but this is beyond imagination. An ordinary laborer would blow a whole month’s wages on a single meal.’

Thinking of Chris, she quietly whispered with just the shape of her lips,

“This place is too expensive. Let’s go to another restaurant.”

She had chosen the restaurant that looked the most expensive in order to trouble him, but she had never meant to put him in such a difficult position.

But Chris closed the menu and, as if for show, said,

“We’ll have all of the recommended dishes.”

Charlotte was not the only one shocked by his answer.

The server also glanced over Chris’s clothes and then asked again as if confirming.

“If you order everything, it would be enough for about four adults. Will that be all right?”

“Of course.”

While the server smiled brightly and confirmed the order, Charlotte kept silently protesting with the shape of her mouth.

In short, she meant, Are you insane?

“Yes, your order is confirmed. If you need anything, please ring the bell on the table.”

Charlotte sent the server an awkward smile, and the moment the server left, she immediately turned to Chris and demanded,

“No, are you really going to eat here? Are you trying to wipe out all your money? Who spends this much money on one meal!”

“I don’t think that’s something to be said by the person who gave all the money she had on her to an orphan.”

Charlotte was left speechless.

He really was a man who, irritatingly enough, only ever said things that were true.

And yet, because of this rational side of Chris, Charlotte’s wariness gradually softened.

When she had first seen him, she had thought he was some strange man with his mind slightly gone, but now she saw him as a person whose personality had simply grown sharp from a hard life and who sometimes did things she could not understand, though he was still perfectly sane and capable of judgment.

An odd silence continued until the food arrived.

Charlotte stole glances at him while pretending to look at the sea, while Chris did not even attempt to take his eyes off her.

As if so that whenever Charlotte turned her head, their eyes would meet.

‘Is staring fixedly at people a habit of his?’

Her right cheek and the nape of her neck, scorched by the man’s gaze, grew feverishly hot.

She had not even been exposed to the blazing sun, yet her skin felt burning warm, as though it might scorch.

Charlotte’s fingers fidgeted on her lap, then soon moved through her hair and touched the soft skin at the nape of her neck.

The skin at her fingertips was so hot that she flinched in surprise.

Her whole neck was as hot as a stone heated in fire.

‘It’s June, but we’re heading north, so it shouldn’t be this hot.’

Just then, the salty, heavy sea breeze swept in through the wide-open terrace window.

The vivid blue-striped tablecloth fluttered brightly in the wind.

Charlotte’s heart stirred like that tablecloth, flapping without direction.

Under the vividly blue sky, golden hair scattered this way and that depending on the direction of the wind.

Following the tangled, disheveled strands, Chris’s gaze grew complicated.

Pure white skin, a rosy flush blooming on it like flower dye, and soft golden hair brushing over it.

And the freesia scent that intensely stirred his nostrils.

It was the fresh and sweet smell of spring that his mother had once gathered into her arms and given him in abundance when he was young.

To be able to smell something.

‘Strange. Is it simply a passing illusion?’

Two years ago, during the war, he had lost his sense of smell, and since then he had been unable to smell anything except the stench of corpses, of blood rotting and flesh decaying.

Unfortunately, smell was not the only thing he had lost.

His sense of touch and taste had dulled as well.

But even in a state no different from having lost three of his five senses, he felt no particular sense of loss.

He simply found it inconvenient in carrying out operations, being unable to smell poisonous gas, unable to tell spoiled food apart, and unable to distinguish the warmth of the living from the chill of the dead.

A romantic sentiment like having lost something precious from his life was not the kind of emotion he dared feel.

He had merely sharpened the instinct he had been born with even further, trying to minimize inconvenience instead of spending time suffering over loss as other people did.

He had already endured years even more dreadful than the brutal war before it, and because of that, he was used to living while suppressing the emotions and senses a human being ought naturally to feel.

So even if he had completely lost senses that might as well not have existed, it had not been important to him.

To be exact, that was true until yesterday morning, before he boarded this passenger ship.

A passenger ship he had boarded by chance, following wherever his feet took him.

Until he felt the intense scent of freesia on a ship he had boarded without knowing either its destination or its route.

It was a strange sensation, as if a colorless world were being dyed with yellow paint.

Overwhelmed by a scent so powerful it felt as though there were nothing in the world but freesia, he lost the reins of reason.

Seized by an intense desire, one he had never felt in his life before, to find the source of that fragrance, he succeeded in locating its owner through his sharply honed instinct.

The vision that had gone hazy and yellow brightened the moment he found that woman.

The closer he got, the thicker the floral scent became, beyond all denial.

An instinctive curiosity rose in him.

Was that fragrance coming from hair yellow like flower petals?

Or from that fair skin?

Or else, was it a more primal floral scent, rising from somewhere deeper within?

He leaned his huge body back against the chair and let out a languid breath.

A strange impulse bound him fast, the urge to seize that loose-spilling hair in one hand and bury his face in it.

Mary Robinson, that woman was not only different in scent.

Whenever he touched her, he could feel the heat of a living human being.

Senses that had remained dull no matter whether he plunged his hand into hot potato soup, was cut by a sharp blade, or was shot by a gun, now came vividly back to life.

The pounding of his heart pumping roughly, and the movement of blood reaching to the tips of his fingers and toes, felt unfamiliar, yet welcome.

His mouth had gone completely dry.

It was not a thirst that would be eased no matter how much water he drank.

He swept his tongue over the rough roof of his mouth as he stared at Charlotte.

As Charlotte struggled to calm the heat rising in her under his relentless gaze, Chris suddenly asked,

“When did your parents die?”

“Is that the kind of question people ask before a meal?”

“They do in the army. I suppose they don’t outside of it.”

At the word army, Charlotte’s heart softened at once.

After smoothing away the bluntness from her gaze, Charlotte answered gently, however she pleased.

“They passed away ten years ago. In Dalteum’s bombing.”

“Then it was during the First War.”

“That’s right. What about you, Chris…?”

Charlotte had almost called Chris ‘you’ again, then corrected the form of address.

Saying Chris felt unbearably awkward, as if her tongue had gone numb.

His dark brows lifted sharply.

“Speak casually.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty. You?”

“I’m eighteen. I became an adult not long ago.”

“Only a two-year difference. Speak casually. It’s uncomfortable for the listener.”

“Ah….”

She sensed that even if she refused, she would not be able to win against a man this headstrong.

So she decided that, just while he was treating her to this expensive meal, she would humor him a little.

“All right, Chris. When did your parents die?”

She spoke carefully in a familiar tone, but once she did, she felt a strange sense of release.

It felt almost like she was talking to a friend, to the point that it gave her a faint sense of closeness.

At that cheerful tone, the corners of Chris’s eyes softened at once.

“Twelve years ago. During a Dalteum raid as well.”

“So you were left alone at eight. I was too….”

Charlotte’s voice trailed off.

Knowing well how lonely it was to become an orphan at such a young age, she pitied his circumstances while also feeling a deep sense of kinship.

She had lived a life wanting for nothing on the inheritance her parents had left behind, but the loneliness of losing one’s parents was not something that could be canceled out by that sort of money.

Of course, most orphans who did not even have that sort of money had done no less than endure a terrible cold-front kind of misery with nothing shielding them at all.