6.12

“What if I refuse?”

Leon slowly approached Ellen and wrapped her in his arms. His hands were trembling, and his heart was beating furiously.  

“Miss Novary, I love you. No man in this world could love you more than I do. So, please give me a chance….”  

Before Leon could finish his sentence, Ellen burst into laughter. Then, as Leon looked at her in confusion, she wrapped her arms around his neck and briefly pressed her lips to his.  

Their lips met again. They kissed several times, their lips touching and parting repeatedly.  

Even after their lips separated completely, Leon still gazed down at Ellen with a confused expression, as if he couldn’t understand what was happening.  

Ellen chuckled softly and spoke.  

“To be honest, I have no intention of marrying Bernard. The reason my father suddenly insisted on the marriage… is because he secretly searched my room and found the contraceptive pills I had.”  

She hesitated slightly when mentioning the contraceptive pills. She wondered whether she should even bring it up, but she felt she needed to be honest with him.  

After all, it was all related to him. She wanted him to know the truth without any misunderstandings.  

At that moment, Leon’s expression changed.  

“Could it be that your father thought you were promiscuous and decided to hastily marry you off to Viscount Goat’s family?”  

“…Yes.”  

Ellen sighed softly and answered. Revealing the truth made her feel suffocated. It was embarrassing enough that Leon now knew about the insults her father had hurled at her.  

“This is absurd.”  

Leon rubbed his forehead with a troubled expression.  

“I will take responsibility. I will go meet your father right away. I’ll—”  

He grabbed Ellen’s hand, ready to head to the Novary household immediately, but then stopped.  

“What exactly are you planning to say to him?”  

Ellen asked.  

“To propose… No, never mind.”  

Leon paused mid-sentence, seemingly stopping himself from saying the word “proposal.”  

“To be honest, on the day we first shared intimacy, I intended to propose to you. Of course, back then, it was more out of a sense of duty and responsibility than love. But later, I realized that proposing with such feelings wouldn’t make you happy.”  

Leon spoke slowly and deliberately, as if each word had been carefully considered before leaving his lips.  

“Even now, I want to go to Viscount Novary and tell him that you are neither promiscuous nor immoral, and that I want to take responsibility for you. But this is just my one-sided love, and I can’t force it onto you. You already refused my earlier request to take responsibility….”  

Leon lowered his head deeply.  

It seemed he was aware that, despite Ellen giving herself to him, the emotional knot in her heart had not been completely untangled. He had sensed her lingering hesitation, which had made him feel deeply insecure and led to his earlier outburst of anger upon hearing about Bernard’s marriage proposal.  

Ellen decided it was time to reveal her own feelings.  

By now, Leon had endured enough emotional turmoil.  

In fact, Ellen felt that she had been even crueler than Leon, knowing his feelings for her yet pretending not to notice. 

She had given him hope but never fully opened her heart to him. It was exactly what Leon had done to her before.  

This ambiguous relationship needed to end now.  

“It’s not one-sided. I love you too. I’ve loved you for a long time. No, I’ve only ever loved you since the beginning. I’ve never even looked at another man.”  

Ellen gently cupped Leon’s cheeks with her hands. As Leon slowly lifted his head, their eyes met.  

Ellen smiled brightly at him—a smile he hadn’t seen since her return from Melchia.  

“….”  

Leon, caught off guard by her sudden confession, couldn’t believe what he had just heard. He froze, unable to respond, staring blankly at Ellen’s face.  

Her radiant smile. It was so dazzling that he couldn’t look directly at it.  

The bright expression he had longed for, dreamed about, and wished for, was now right in front of him.  

A single tear slowly rolled down Leon’s cheek.  

“Oh? are you crying?”  

Ellen’s radiant smile vanished, replaced by an expression of surprise and concern as she looked at Leon.  

“I must be overwhelmed with emotion.”  

Can someone cry from being too happy?  

Even Leon couldn’t understand himself. The tear had fallen so suddenly, without his realizing it.  

When he thought about how the woman before him, so beautiful and radiant, had finally directed her feelings toward him, the emotion overwhelmed him, and the tear slipped out.  

Ellen gently wiped away the tear from Leon’s cheek. It was just a single tear, so it disappeared quickly, but his eyes remained moist.  

“I hope you’ll only show me your smiling face from now on.”  

“As much as you’d like.”  

Ellen smiled brightly once again. Then, she stood on her tiptoes to match Leon’s eye level and softly kissed the corner of his eye.  

“I’ll do better from now on. So don’t cry anymore.”  

She soothed him, wrapping her arms around his neck and leaving small kisses around his eyes. Leon held her waist as he received her kisses.  

“Have all the tears been wiped away now?”  

After a long series of kisses, Ellen asked.  

“It’s embarrassing. This is the first time I’ve shown my tears to anyone.”  

Leon lowered his head, seemingly shy.  

“There’s no need to be embarrassed. I’ve shown you plenty of embarrassing sides of myself, haven’t I? Doesn’t that make us even? Or should I cry now too? Then you wouldn’t feel embarrassed anymore. What do you think?”  

Ellen teased him playfully.  

“There’s no need for that. Instead, I hope you’ll let go of all the resentment you’ve held against me. I don’t expect you to love me the way you used to. I just want you to stop building walls between us and come closer to me. Every time you seemed to be on the verge of crossing over, only to draw a line at the last moment, it was truly painful for me.”  

Leon looked at Ellen with sorrowful eyes. In response, she planted a quick kiss on his lips and smiled bashfully.  

“Seeing you lose your composure earlier out of jealousy and shedding tears now has made all my anger disappear.”  

How could she stay angry when the man who had clung to her so desperately was now moved to tears by her radiant smile?  

The moment his tear fell, all the resentment she had harbored melted away like snow.  

And the words she had once said about being unable to return to loving him as she had before—all of them felt meaningless now.  

In fact, she realized she loved Leon even more now than she had back then.  

So she wanted to say one final thing—the words she had always wanted to say but had never been able to.  

“Will you stop pushing me away now? Do you know how much it hurt every time you acted like you cared only to push me away? From now on, I won’t hold back. I’ll say everything I want to say!”  

Ellen poured out all the feelings she had kept bottled up.  

It was time to say goodbye to the days when she hid her pain and pretended everything was fine.  

Her relationship with Leon would change from now on. It wouldn’t be a one-sided dynamic where she endured everything out of fear of being disliked. Instead, they would talk openly and resolve their issues together.  

“As long as you don’t marry another man, I don’t mind what you do.”  

Leon smiled faintly. Now that the radiant smile he had longed for was finally directed at him, he felt reassured.  

His lips met hers once again, conveying the unmistakable message that she was now his.  

Their lips met and parted briefly several times, as if Leon was marking her as his own.  

“As I said earlier, the marriage was something my father decided on his own, and I never intended to go through with it anyway. If he had insisted on it, I was ready to abandon my family name. Honestly, I thought Bernard felt the same way. That’s why I suggested we figure out a way to avoid the marriage together, but instead, I ended up making you angry.”  

Ellen smiled awkwardly.  

“If your father continues to push for the marriage, how about abandoning the name Ellen Novary and becoming Ellen Guilford instead?”  

“Hmm… That doesn’t sound bad.”  

If she were to date Leon, her father would immediately break off the marriage with Bernard and try to latch onto Leon instead.  

That would be another problem, but Ellen didn’t want to think about such complicated matters right now.  

For now, she just wanted to smile brightly at the man standing before her—her lover.  

For the first time, she felt like she truly had a lover. Not a fake relationship born out of a bet, but a genuine connection rooted in mutual feelings.