“What’s taking so long! The food will go cold.”

Her hands trembled at the head cook’s bark. The spoon she was using to arrange the garnish nearly slipped.

What Lisa did here amounted to little more than odd jobs. The greatness lay in creating the food itself. A decoration that a single pass of a fork could ruin held no particular value.

Even if the family complained about a poorly set table and the head cook bore the brunt of it, all that was needed was a promise to be more careful next time. The food was what mattered; the presentation was nothing.

Anxious not to let the main course go cold, the trolley loaded with plates of food left the kitchen in a hurry.

“Oh, right. The mint.”

All the rushing around had made her forget. She needed to add a leaf or two. Lisa grabbed a sprig of mint and hurried after the trolley.

In her haste, she collided with someone coming down the stairs.

Something hard caught under her foot and her body pitched forward. She stumbled and went down on her knees before she realized she had stepped on the man’s shoe.

It was the man from earlier. The guest she had briefly crossed paths with in the main hall.

The trousers encasing his long legs bore a crisp, sharp crease. A deep blue jacket without a speck of dust and a vest with a gold jacquard pattern suited his lean frame well. Simply standing there looking down at her, he somehow seemed far more aristocratic than the count himself.

Without quite meaning to, her gaze drifted a little higher.

Ash-grey hair cut neatly away from the collar, a face of perfect bilateral symmetry, a straight nose that lent him a distinctly masculine appeal.

But the eyes, shadowed and deeply set, were dry of any readable emotion. The pupils gleaming between dark lashes were as dark as an abyss.

Something dead……

Why did she get that feeling from a man of such ideal beauty?

The sharp cheek, sculpted as if from stone, did not move. He showed no change of expression whatsoever, and it was only after quite some time that she realized she had been rudely staring at his face.

“I’m sorry.”

Only then did his chin tilt slightly. The look he directed down at her, one side of his jaw cocked at an angle, carried a faint arrogance.

It was the expression of a wolf lurking behind a wall of ice, with a quiet sneer buried in it.

He lifted the corner of his mouth without making a sound.

Even that faded almost immediately, leaving one to wonder if it had been imagined. The only trace of displeasure was in the way he smoothed his already-immaculate clothes.

His black eyes settled on what lay beneath her head cloth. She should have gotten up first, but instead she yanked the cloth down tight.

He had clearly noticed the platinum blonde.

Her mother had reminded her of it often while she was alive. The day might come when that hair color brought her humiliation, so she was not to be careless with herself.

Other women in the household had said worse things under the guise of advice. Silver hair alone got you halfway with a man, they said. And since Lisa had the face to go with it, she might make a great deal of money someday.

The faint mockery gone from his face now, the man looked her over. His gaze traveled from the bundle of mint in her hand to her scattered skirts, then settled darkly on his own shoe a step away. The black polish on one side had gone dull where she had stepped on it.

His long shadow drew closer. A sleeve with a diamond cufflink reached toward Lisa’s hand where it rested on the floor. Was he going to help her up? She flinched, and her fingers and toes trembled finely.

“……”

The man parted his lips, their outline as fl*id as a brushstroke, and plucked off a few of the mint’s tender leaves.

Then he used them to wipe the scuff from his shoe.

He straightened, and flicked his fingertips. The spent mint leaves scattered down over Lisa’s head.

“Move.”

The voice fell like an ice-cold shower, utterly without feeling.

There was no hostility in him, yet a sense of crisis crashed over her as though she were under attack. She shuddered with a fear she couldn’t name. Lisa dug her pale, bloodless fingernails into the carpet and pressed herself against the wall to stand.

As he passed by with the faintest stir of air, a small leaf that had been sitting on top of her head fell in a sorry little drop.

* * *

The way of men and women is a strange thing.

What draws two people together isn’t simply a matter of looks. Character and background can’t be called essential conditions either.

In business, the answer is usually clear enough. But the game between a man and a woman is entirely random.

The answer was right in front of Renato. Smila Maldini. Good family, well-educated, not unpleasant to look at. A perfectly adequate match, all things considered. She seemed a little dim, but if the union was simply a matter of bringing her into the household and producing heirs, he could tolerate it.

Smila sat beside him and kept up a steady stream of small talk.

“It looks like the food agrees with you. I’m glad.”

He had no preferences when it came to food. He chose not to mention that he had once hovered near death after eating something rotten. At this table, Renato needed only to be the well-bred young lord he appeared to be.

Eating was the process of placing matter containing nutrients into the mouth and chewing. The only adjustment required was that what took three minutes to swallow in the military had to be drawn out to thirty or more at a dinner table.

“The presentation makes it all the more appetizing.”

He treated his prospective fiancée with impeccable manners.

“If you tell me what you like, I’ll have it prepared.”

“I have no particular preferences. What do you enjoy, Smilla?”

The count and countess listened to the smooth exchange with contented expressions.

Renato was making an effort, in his own way. He was squeezing out a patience that was not at all like him, trying to find something to feel for a first-rate bride. The problem was that his impression of her from the main hall and his impression of her now at dinner were exactly the same. Regrettably, she had the quality of flat, tasteless water.

No, Smila was not at fault. The real problem was with himself.

Specifically, the part of his brain where normal thought processes had broken down.

Renato was bothered by the count’s napkin, which was a moment away from sliding off the edge of the table. He found it hard to ignore the rouge stain on Countess Karolina’s wine glass, and harder still to overlook the strand of hair that had gotten into Smila’s mouth while she ate her dessert pudding.

He kept feeling the urge to look down at his shoe. Was the scuff still there? The sensation of being stepped on by that woman hadn’t faded, and he had the feeling the mark was still there too.

Not a trace of romantic feeling for Smila, and his head was full of entirely unrelated thoughts.

Oblivious to all of this, the count posed a pointed question.

“I hope you didn’t have too hard a time in Cehin? You were at a youth military academy there, I believe?”

Renato had received military training early on in Cehin, the neighboring country where he had lived in exile.

It was a school for the sons of well-off military families, so there was nothing that could really be called hardship. The only thing was that years of communal living had instilled some peculiar habits in him. He had come to have a deep aversion to anything out of place in his dress, or to broken promises.

A mild obsessiveness, one might say.

Long-serving soldiers often developed a similar mindset. Fixed routines, regular habits, an upright bearing, these things became second nature.

Renato had a particular intolerance for uncleanliness. This was separate from rolling through mud during training. He was not the only one at the military academy with an obsession with cleanliness, so it attracted little notice. He was regarded as nothing more than a cadet who was slightly excessive about tidiness.

So it was only natural that having someone else’s footprint on his shoe would bother him. That being a few seconds late to dinner would sit uneasily in his mind.

In truth, this rigid mental structure had formed long before the military academy. His early years had been painful enough that he wanted to carve every memory of them out of his mind entirely.

“Yes, I learned a great deal.”

Renato shook off the old thoughts that had briefly surfaced and answered with composed politeness.

“And your future plans…… have you given them any thought?”

“I’m considering the officer’s academy.”

It was rather absurd, receiving his education elsewhere and then becoming an officer in this country. But these days, alliances and enmities shifted with interests in every nation, and Renato had been accepted on the basis of his prior record.