She had passed the imperial administrative officer exam as soon as she came of age and had lived devoted only to work for exactly five years until this day.

On the day she entered the imperial palace and first saw the emperor, Elia fell head over heels for the emperor’s beautiful appearance.

That amazingly handsome man is my superior!

She never dared dream of capturing the emperor’s heart.

Just being able to watch him closely was enough.

That said, did she absolutely love the work? That wasn’t the case.

The emperor was a tremendous workaholic. The work was arduous and difficult, and when there were major events, documents would pile up to an unmanageable degree.

After work, she was so busy that it was difficult to have separate leisure time. It had been a year since she last saw her parents during her vacation.

The days were so busy that dating, let alone meeting friends, was difficult, but she was happy.

Elia was a woman who enjoyed love purely enough to be delighted just by being able to see the man she had unrequited love for every day by her side.

But.

The incident began a month ago.

⁕⁕⁕

Rumors began to spread that His Majesty the Emperor finally seemed to be looking for an empress.

The rumor started from the words of Count Kent, the emperor’s aide, who came out after meeting with the emperor to discuss the Foundation Festival.

At Count Kent’s suggestion that it would be good to repair the empress crown stored in the imperial treasury in advance, the chief chamberlain busily got to work.

The maids began to chatter and spread the word.

It took less than a day for the empress selection story to reach Elia’s ears.

At that time, Elia was in the middle of wrestling with numbers while drafting the Foundation Festival budget.

And as soon as she heard about the empress selection, she was so shocked that she crumpled up the paper she had been calculating on for a long while.

Empress selection.

It was news that made the sky fall.

It was something that would happen someday.

The emperor was a young and attractive man.

The empire was a country with solid foundations, but that was a system that could be maintained when the emperor had a solid heir.

The emperor was already twenty-five years old. It wouldn’t have been too late even if he had married long ago and had an heir.

But Elia didn’t want to see the man she had harbored unrequited love for since she was eighteen, for five whole years, get married.

On the day she heard about the empress selection, she couldn’t even remember how she finished her work.

All she remembered was roughly handling whatever came to hand before leaving work, then lying in bed and crying her heart out.

The next morning, in the mirror, she saw herself with both eyes so swollen that even a goldfish would call her “big sister!”

It was such a terrible state that she absolutely couldn’t go outside.

Since things had come to this, Elia decided to sort out her feelings and sent someone to the imperial palace.

Elia sent a letter through a messenger saying she was quite unwell and would unavoidably need to rest for just one day, asking for understanding, then lay there blankly, truly blankly, just staring at the ceiling.

It was something that would happen someday.

No. Rather, it was late.

It made no sense for a handsome emperor to remain single until twenty-five with not even a single scandal.

She had been blessed all this time……

All day long, the emperor’s handsome face flickered before her eyes, and emotions surged up several times, making tears flow endlessly.

She cried, then became dazed, then cried and sighed about a hundred times before her heart finally calmed down.

When the sun was slowly setting over the western mountains, Elia got up from her bed.

Let’s leave.

It was time to give up this fruitless unrequited love.

Her parents, who lived looking forward to their only daughter, had been telling her to come back to her hometown for a long time.

The money she had diligently saved while working at the imperial palace for five years would be enough to properly expand the old mansion of the Weiss family, and since it was a household that owned substantial territory even if small in scale, it would be fine to rest for a while and think about what to do next.

Once she made up her mind, the rest was easy.

From that day on, Elia quietly began to settle her affairs.

She created documents for whoever would come as her successor and did in advance what could be done ahead of time.

In doing so, she made quite a few mistakes in the work she actually had to do.

It was no wonder, since her heart was in the bean field while she tried to do twice as much work as usual.

Finance Minister Zeke, her direct superior, scolded her asking why she was making so many mistakes lately, but the emperor was strangely quiet.

She might have found it strange that her superior, who used to scold her frighteningly for obvious mistakes, had changed, but Elia didn’t have the mental capacity to notice even that.

Having spent a month in such a daze, she had somehow reached this point today……

⁕⁕⁕

“Ah, mmph.”

The kiss Elia had dreamed of was a soft, strawberry-scented breath, moist and gentle, shared between a man and a woman as their lips met.

She had never even imagined such an intense act that felt like being devoured. It felt like the emperor’s lips were stealing her entire breath.

Too surprised to even avoid it, when her breathing became labored and she barely managed to turn her head to avoid the emperor’s lips, the emperor’s lips followed without giving her any gap.

“Mmph!”

If asked whether she had never once imagined kissing the emperor, that wasn’t true.

She swallowed dryly while looking at the emperor’s lips as he sighed with his long arms covering his eyes from fatigue, admiring the beauty of those smooth lines.

How warm and soft would those lips be?

At that delusion, she had covered her flushed cheeks, not knowing what to do with herself.

Once, she had even stolen a kiss from the emperor’s lips in a dream and run away. The day after waking from that dream, even knowing it was just a dream, she was so embarrassed she couldn’t even look at the emperor’s face.

That was exactly the extent of the kiss with the emperor that Elia had imagined.

She had never done or wished for such an act that felt like being bitten by a wild animal, she swore to heaven.

“Mmph! Mph!”

With both arms firmly restrained, there was no way to escape.

The emperor invaded Elia’s small mouth with an attitude that showed no hesitation and ravaged the inside of her mouth.

Her arms were bound to the bed, her head was in the emperor’s grasp. The only things she could move were her two legs.

When she struggled and tried to break free, the emperor, who had been stirring inside Elia’s mouth for a while, paused and finally separated his lips.

Licking his saliva-wet lips, the emperor showed a smile resembling mockery.

“Are you trying to stimulate me right now?”

Following the emperor’s gaze as he said this, what entered Elia’s sight was the emperor’s member, magnificently er*ect from being stimulated by her struggles.

It was so unfair she could go crazy and jump around.

Stimulate! What did I even do!

Moreover.

Elia rolled her eyes to turn her gaze away from the emperor’s member that boasted tremendous majesty. Though it was hidden by the silk robe and only the silhouette was visible, even the silhouette was enough to guess the size of this weapon.

At Elia’s appearance, not knowing what to do with her flushed face and just rolling her eyes this way and that, the emperor laughed shortly.

The low laughter doubled her shame.

‘This is driving me crazy.’

Elia bit her lower lip, which had swollen from the rough kiss. What kind of situation was this?

Why was the emperor acting like this?

No matter how much she thought about it, she had done nothing wrong.

He said she hadn’t made a drunken scene, and she had thoroughly completed preparations for the handover for her successor.

No matter how hard she tried to recall, she had never done anything wrong enough to deserve being tied up and treated like this.

Tears that hadn’t come out since she cried so much a month ago suddenly surged up.

She felt wronged and scared.

The emperor pressing down on her body didn’t seem like the person she knew.

The emperor Elia knew was always cool-headed, steady, and quiet.

The man who gave beastly kisses while in attire no different from being n*ked, with such a menacing thing er*ect, was not the emperor she had loved.

“Sniff.”

Already in an unseemly state, and now with tears coming out too, she felt utterly miserable.

Elia tried hard to hold back her tears while inhaling.

As she struggled desperately to suppress her burning eyes, her shoulders shaking, a large hand slowly approached and cupped Elia’s cheek.

“……This is troublesome.”

“……?”

The emperor stroked Elia’s cheek with his long fingers.

Whether it had flowed from the crumpled pewter cup, a faint smell of alcohol came from those fingers.

In the emperor’s eyes that she carefully looked up to meet, an indescribable light was flickering.

“I only intended to create a situation where you couldn’t just walk away.”

The emperor had been saying incomprehensible things from earlier.

“But it’s becoming a bit hard to endure.”

Murmuring in a deeply lowered bass voice, the emperor kissed Elia’s cheek.

Unlike the rough kiss on her lips, it was a light kiss like a gentle breeze.

The tickling breath moved from her cheek toward her ear. A low voice tickled her ear as it whispered.

“Just a little, I won’t be rough, so would just a little be okay?”

The requesting voice was gentle.

But the desire hidden within it was burningly hot.

Elia, who understood the barely concealed desire, opened her mouth in horror.

Just a little? What?!

⁕⁕⁕