0. Prologue

If Ehrlich had done nothing at all and pushed her away, Hildegard would’ve thought a little less of him. A man who reacted normally to a properly married woman standing right in front of him and yet tried to preserve some untimely chastity could only be called a fool.

On the other hand, if he’d laid her down and spread her legs, the result would’ve been much the same. She’d have laughed at him. A man who turned every word he’d ever said into a lie the moment it suited him wasn’t someone she could take seriously.

Her provocation had been a kind of trap. Yet he’d stepped into neither side of it, almost as though he could see straight through her.

And now, he was unraveling her mind with his whole body.

“Haa……”

His breath against the back of her hand grew hotter and damper than before, as though his arousal was climbing. She flinched and trembled, and she felt his lips curve against her fingertips.

He was smiling.

The moment that smile touched the tips of her fingers, her heart dropped. He’d seen through her suspicion, the one she’d been quietly nursing about whether she could afford to underestimate him.

Should she apologize? But she hadn’t said a word out loud, so apologizing out of nowhere would be strange.

Like a deer caught in a trap pleading for mercy, Hildegard murmured faintly.

“Lord Walenstadt……”

Ehrlich went still. Hildegard felt his full attention settle on her and tensed.

She half-expected him to get angry, or to be sarcastic, or to lecture her on how one ought to apologize. The way someone had, once.

But just as he’d declared himself to be, Ehrlich was a different man from Leopold. Instead of crushing Hildegard with a frightening expression, irresistible force, or cruel words, he gave a quiet instruction.

“Ehrlich.”

“Pardon?”

“Call me by my name.”

Ehrlich’s voice was warm. It was probably because his breath was touching her fingers, but Hildegard felt as though he’d poured the shimmering heat haze of midsummer directly into her ear.

In other words, she’d clearly heard him but failed to understand the meaning, and sat there blinking like an idiot. Seeing her reaction, Ehrlich added an explanation.

“We’re hardly at the stage of using knightly titles with each other.”

“Oh……”

“Say it.”

She had no choice but to comply. Hildegard gathered what little breath she had and brought his name to her lips.

“Eh… Ehrlich?”

“Again.”

“Ehrlich.”

It wasn’t a common name, and she’d never once come across anyone else who shared it. As she took care to pronounce each syllable without stumbling, a cool sensation passed through her, like a blocked throat finally opening. It was probably just the strangeness of it.

“Yes. Good.”

“……”

Ehrlich smiled softly, as though praising her, and resumed what he’d paused. That is to say, burying his prominent nose in her hand while stroking his own c*ck.

Long scars ran across the backs of his hands, and his fingers were knobbly at the joints, blunt and rough all the way to the tips.

Nothing like his handsome face. These were a soldier’s hands, proof that he’d lived the life of a real knight from an early age, not merely in name.

And the c*ck those hands held……was, in a word, obscene.

It burned red like iron plunged into a forge, thick veins branching in irregular patterns standing out in sharp relief. Even for Hildegard, she’d never seen a man’s c*ck this nakedly before, and she couldn’t quite believe something like that could fit inside a body.

The head was swollen to the point of bursting, and every time his large hand stroked it without restraint, clear fl*id welled from the slit and ran down the length of him.

The shaft was soaked all the way to the base, gleaming obscenely, and with every movement of his hand it twitched in an off-rhythm, almost as though it had a will entirely separate from its owner.

It wasn’t a beautiful sight. If anything, it was so overwhelmingly raw that it hurt to look at. And it wasn’t just what she could see. The wet, slick sound of skin against skin, the smell, the heat……

Every element assaulted her senses. Hildegard felt like she might cry.

Even so, she couldn’t look away.

At some point she’d forgotten to blink, and she watched Ehrlich touch himself.

He was completely absorbed in it, radiating heat from his entire body, making his presence impossible to ignore. It was as though he could have done this at any time and had simply been holding back out of consideration until now.

Broad shoulders, a powerful chest, a torso with deep, symmetrical grooves, and thighs packed thick and solid like a warhorse’s. A body made entirely of muscle with not a soft place anywhere flushed with arousal and trembling finely.

No. It wasn’t him trembling. It was her.

If he hadn’t been holding her hand, she wouldn’t have been sitting upright like this. She’d have collapsed, seized by an impulse she couldn’t even name.

“……”

Ehrlich had gone completely silent. The only thing leaving his lips was uneven breath.

That rough sound reached her at unexpected moments each time, scattering her attention. She wanted to cover her ears but couldn’t. It wasn’t only because one hand was held. She could’ve tried with the other, at least halfway, but she didn’t want to.

And then she noticed something strange.

The only part of her body touching Ehrlich was one hand, yet somehow, completely different places were tingling all over her.

At first she thought she was imagining it, but she wasn’t. The sensation layered and sharpened with each passing moment. The sparks that had scattered sporadically across her whole body, at the nape of her neck, the tips of her br*asts, the small of her back just before the curve of her spine, the backs of her knees, all of it faded, leaving only a single point.

She focused, trying to locate it exactly. It wasn’t difficult.

The secret triangle below her navel, and lower still, the parted flesh she’d find if she reached down, and deeper than that, in a place she couldn’t even see herself, the folded entrance.

Right there, she felt moisture.

A slick fl*id was seeping through the narrow gap, spreading dampness between her thighs. Unable to believe it, she shifted her weight under the pretense of adjusting her position and twisted her thighs together, and the fl*id that had already pooled in her undergarments spread back onto her skin.

“……!”

She knew instinctively it was neither incontinence nor her monthly bleeding. There was none of the draining helplessness, none of the unpleasant cramping ache.

Hildegard had grown wet.

She’d looked at the man stroking himself while holding her hand, felt desire to be with him, and her body had responded to Ehrlich’s seduction on pure instinct.