The staff member brought out a matching set designed with a unified look in the same fabric.

It was an outfit with a black base accented with red.

“Would you like to try it on?”

“Let’s do that.”

Luna stepped into the fitting room to try on the dress and let out a small sigh. She was just thinking that a staff member would come in to assist her when.

Click.

The fitting room door opened, and the one who stepped inside was, unexpectedly, Caesar.

Luna’s eyes wavered with alarm.

At her questioning look, Caesar spoke with a composed expression.

“I told them I would help instead.”

He had been performing the role of an unusually affectionate newlywed couple from the start, and this seemed to be a continuation of that.

Recalling Caesar’s manner up until now, Luna shook her head without meaning to. She could picture exactly what he must have said without needing to have seen it.

Presently Caesar stepped slowly around to her back.

For some reason, with each step he took closer, her previously quiet heart began to pound fiercely, tinged with tension.

Then his fingertips, standing close behind her, lightly brushed over the loosely undone knot of the dress.

Caesar tilted his head slightly and whispered low against her ear.

“I am truly curious. What exactly are you scheming.”

His quiet breath tickled the back of her neck. Luna forced the corners of her mouth up and spoke as though nothing were the matter.

“Pardon? I am simply carrying out the role of Grand Duchess faithfully, just as Your Highness wished.”

At that moment, Caesar’s extended index finger slowly traced the bare skin exposed between the knot.

“Mmh…….”

Her shoulders gave an involuntary flinch at the mere brush of his touch. At the unexpected contact, goosebumps rose along her spine.

Caesar’s gaze rested on the tips of her reddened ears.

“Or is this reaction also part of the performance?”

“I, I really am being treated so unfairly…….”

Luna turned around hurriedly to protest, but his hand caught her shoulder first.

Held in his firm grip, Luna had no choice but to stop moving entirely.

Caesar slowly drew the loosened dress laces taut and tightened them. His fingertips were surprisingly deft, and the slack knot came together neatly under his hands.

A moment later, having tied the last knot neatly into place, Caesar murmured low.

“Well. I suppose I will find out in time.”

With those words he walked out of the fitting room without a backward glance. Only after the door closed did Luna, her face flushed, press her hand to the back of her neck where his breath had touched.

Even now, every place he had passed over still felt as though it had been scorched.

When he emerged having changed, Luna’s eyes went wide before she could stop herself.

His platinum blond hair, falling softly, blended with the black suit in a perfect harmony that left nothing to be desired. She herself was not lacking in looks by any measure, but standing side by side with Caesar, her own radiance seemed to dim by comparison.

Yet those beautiful eyes seemed to hold only his wife within them.

The staff members lined up around them could not have missed that undisguised gaze either, and they made no effort to hide the envy in their eyes.

His convincing performance left her unsettled. Caesar’s gaze was simply too persuasive.

Luna knew it was a performance, yet she worked to hold her stirring heart in check.

Having stared at Caesar in a momentary daze, she soon rose on her tiptoes and straightened his clothing. Whether because of his towering height, well over a hundred and ninety centimeters, she had to stretch her arm quite a distance to reach.

His collar had folded slightly, and the reflex to straighten it was something worn into her from her years as a maid.

But the moment she withdrew her hand, Luna suddenly became aware of what she had done and froze.

Caesar’s expression had shifted in a subtle, strange way.

“Ah… it was folded here.”

Luna drew back the hand she had extended toward his collar.

“I, I will go look around somewhere else then.”

Overcome by a sudden rush of embarrassment, she made that vague excuse and slipped away.

He realized belatedly that her action had been part of the performance, and gave a small nod.

He still wore a faint smile directed at his wife. Caesar, looking satisfied, gave an instruction to the staff member beside him.

“Add this one to the order as well.”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

From some point earlier, Luna had found it strangely difficult to look at him directly.

Fleeing from him in that way, she ended up arriving, somehow, at a section filled with undergarments and negligees for ladies.

There were girdles and bodice petticoats to wear beneath dresses, corsets that cinched the waist firmly, crinolines that created a full silhouette, lace-trimmed underskirts, and silk slips. All manner of undergarments worn by ladies of quality were displayed side by side.

In one corner, a separate collection of items gave off a more intimate atmosphere. The centerpiece of that display was a set of undergarments made of sheer mesh and delicate embellishments, the kind that would make anyone’s face flush just to look at.

“Shall I show you these, my lady?”

The staff member waiting there addressed Luna with a polite bow.

“Ah, no thank you. I am only here for dresses…….”

Crying out inwardly at the awkwardness of it, Luna refused firmly. But a familiar voice pulled her attention back.

“If you wanted to buy something like this, you should have said so.”

Caesar had drawn up beside her before she noticed and draped his arm around her shoulder with easy composure as he spoke.

“Pardon? Th, that is not what I…….”

Before she knew it, he was picking up the displayed undergarments one by one, listening attentively to the staff member’s explanations.

His focused manner, as though he could not afford to miss a single word, made him look almost grave, like a man conducting a thorough inquiry.

It was not a common sight for a man to be selecting women’s undergarments so openly and directly, and it was the sort of thing that made anyone who saw it doubt their own eyes.

Luna felt she could die of embarrassment.

She tried to express her feelings by carefully tugging at Caesar’s elbow, but he stood as immovable as a tree rooted firmly to the ground.

“Please… it is fine, let us go now.”

“These things touch the skin. One ought to feel them before buying.”

By now her face had gone as red as a beet. Luna felt she wanted to sink into the floor on the spot.

“From here to here.”

Despite her protests, Caesar went and delivered the full “from here to here.”

It was a line spoken by the male lead in a novel she had once come across in a library near the imperial palace, some time ago.

She had reflexively covered her mouth when she read the scene where he asked for everything from here to here in a dress shop. She had never imagined she would hear that very line in an undergarments section.

“Yes. We will deliver them to the Grand Duchy estate along with the dresses you ordered.”

“Anything in the right size, bring it along right now.”

There was something faintly urgent in his tone.

And what the staff members must have thought of the Grand Duke and his wife was plain without needing to look.

The staff member’s face had already flushed a rosy pink. Luna had the odd sense that she could see straight into the woman’s thoughts.

But it did not end there. Caesar seemed to have made up his mind today, and his final line was even more outrageous.

“My darling… honey butter. Wait just a moment. We will head back soon and I will lavish all my attention on you.”

Even Caesar seemed to have found that one no easy feat. His face remained composed, but the tips of his ears had gone red.

“Cough, cough.”

Luna choked in that instant and burst into a startled fit of coughing.

But he made such a fuss searching for water that she had no choice but to force herself to stop coughing before long.

She was genuinely worried about how he intended to deal with the aftermath of all this.

After that chaotic shopping trip concluded, the next stop was a well-known accessory shop.

There too, Caesar’s antics showed no sign of stopping.

Every time he called her ‘my darling honey butter’ or ‘baby,’ goosebumps rose along both her arms.

Nobles who happened to witness it stared with wide eyes, their surprise plain on their faces as they looked back and forth between her and Caesar.

They probably could not believe it. Luna herself could hardly believe it.

* * *

By the time the eventful shopping trip was finally over, evening had fallen.

They had purchased a great many expensive dresses and costly accessories, and a carriage loaded with the day’s spoils followed behind the Grand Duchy’s carriage.

Having spent the entire day going about with Caesar, Luna was utterly exhausted.

She had been forcing smiles all day, and her face felt on the verge of cramping.

Inside the carriage on the way back, Luna turned the hand mirror she had just bought over in her hands and spoke to him.

“You are quite the exceptional actress.”

Caesar had wiped away every trace of the earlier warmth and was staring out the window with a face changed a full hundred and eighty degrees as he spoke.

“You are going to have to try harder.”

“Even so, ‘my darling honey butter’… I was truly startled the first time.”

“One has to go that far to make a firm impression on people, does one not?”

“Why does an impression need to be made?”

She had been curious about this for a while.

Nobles who married through political arrangement out of necessity were extremely common.

Finding a couple joined by genuine affection was, if anything, the harder task. She had heard that many treated marriage as a transaction and lived as strangers to each other, so she wondered whether there was truly any need to perform the role of a couple in love.

Caesar held his silence for a moment at her question, then parted his lips slightly.

“I realized it is not something that ends by avoiding it.”

Did he mean the marriage, or the child?

But for that interpretation, his face carried a complicated look that passed over it too quickly to read.

Whatever his circumstances, they were no concern of Luna’s.

There was no need for her to know the full details of his situation.

In the end, she would simply go along with things to a reasonable degree, and when the time came, return to her own place.

With those thoughts in mind, Luna kept fiddling with the ribbon ornament on the hand mirror she had chosen herself.

While the two of them were each lost in their own separate thoughts, the carriage had already come to a stop in front of the Grand Duchy estate.