Chapter 3 – A Person Who Bothers the Mind

While she was sleeping, she heard the sound of rattling.

Creeeak.

At the sound of a door, old with long use, opening, Eleanor’s eyes flew open. She was sure she had locked it, and yet the connecting door had opened, and a large figure entered the room.

Kars Beaufort!

“Y, Your Highness the Grand Duke? Why….”

Having just woken, her throat was hoarse and the words would not come out properly. Eleanor hurriedly sat up and asked in alarm, but Kars only smiled faintly and gave no answer.

He kept coming closer and closer toward the bed where Eleanor was lying.

‘Why is he coming this way?’

At this wholly unexpected situation, Eleanor’s mind went blank. She felt that she ought to avoid him somehow, but for some reason her body had stiffened and would not move.

She only barely managed to move her hands to cover the front of herself with the blanket, and before she knew it Kars had already come right up to the bed.

Eleanor moved backward to avoid him, but by then there was already a wall behind her, so she could retreat no farther. Kars’s large shadow fell over Eleanor.

“Wh, why are you doing this? If you keep this up, I’m going to scream!”

Though she cried out in a trembling voice, Kars paid no heed and only lifted the corners of his red lips in a languid smile.

The clear desire in his eyes as he looked at her.

No matter how inexperienced Eleanor was with men, she was not so innocent that she could not understand what that look meant.

The moment she saw Kars’s eyes, she instinctively understood what he wanted. It was an instinctive desire rooted in human unconsciousness.

Though she instinctively sensed his state, her body froze like prey caught by a predator and she could not move. Kars’s Adam’s apple bobbed noticeably. Watching him, Eleanor swallowed dryly as well.

At the suffocating tension, her lips dried completely, and just as she stuck out her tongue to moisten them, he swiftly bent down toward her. As his face came so close that she could feel his breath on her face, Eleanor squeezed her eyes shut.

“…….”

She had closed her eyes, sensing what would happen next, but though she could hear breathing, nothing happened.

‘What… what happened?’

When she opened her eyes again, his eyes, holding her reflection, were right before her. They were so close that she could see her own image in his gaze.

At the very moment their eyes met, he swallowed her lips.

“Mmph!”

She had not even the chance to stop him. His momentum was as swift and unrestrained as a lion pouncing on a rabbit. Eleanor’s eyes widened in shock, but by then she was already pinned beneath him.

Even when she seized his shoulders as he came at her and pushed, struggling with all her strength, he showed no sign of moving away. Resistance was meaningless before the ferocity of the man binding her down.

His hot breath brushed not only over her lips but also against her ears and the fully exposed back of her neck.

“Ah!”

A ticklish and strange feeling came over her, and her head spun. The world around the two of them, excluding only themselves, felt far away.

His hand slid over her body and then moved to her chest. Over her clothes, he caressed around the raised little bud.

The moment his finger tapped lightly against it,

“Ah…!”

The sound that slipped from her lips without her meaning it to felt so unlike her own that it startled even herself.

A hot warmth heated her body, and a strange sensation she did not want to escape seized her.

The body that had been squirming to get away from him had, before she knew it, gone slack and languid. She did not particularly want to know what exactly this feeling was. For some reason, facing it frightened her.

Then suddenly Kars rose and straightened his body.

‘Is it over?’

At the moment she let her guard down, he lifted her skirt, buried his face between her legs, and began sucking at her through the thin undergarment like a dog.

“Mmph! N, no!”

She tried pushing at his head to pull him away, but he refused to move. The more Eleanor tried to pull him off, the more persistently he pressed in. He moved aside the undergarment, and his hot tongue slipped inside.

“N, no! Hngh!”

She struggled to avoid it, but it was not he who weakened, it was her.

‘This is insane!’

Her trembling waist lifted, and her vision went white.

“Ahh!”

Kars looked down at her, collapsed and drained, with a smile on his face, then licked his wet red lips with his tongue. Soon after, he began undoing his belt.

With hazy eyes, Eleanor followed his hand. Then her gaze fell upon the front of his trousers, bulging to an alarming degree. As he undid his belt and lowered his trousers, he climbed on top of her.

“No!”

–

“Hah!”

Eleanor gasped as though she had just come up from deep underwater.

‘It was a dream.’

When Eleanor opened her eyes, she was drenched in sweat. It was still before sunrise, perhaps dawn, and a dim light filled the surroundings.

As she looked around with even her nightclothes damp and clinging to her body, she found she was alone in the room. Her heart still pounded rapidly, unable to escape the shock of the dream.

Trying to calm her racing heart, Eleanor breathed roughly and climbed down from the bed to check whether the connecting door was properly locked.

‘Thank goodness. It’s firmly locked.’

The connecting door was exactly as she had locked it. No one had entered her room. Only then did she let out a long sigh of relief.

As her tension ebbed, strength left Eleanor’s legs, and she slid down against the door. Only then did she discover that between her thighs, she was unpleasantly damp. It was all because of that strange dream.

For several days now, it had been the same dream over and over.

‘Why do I keep having dreams like this!’

From the very first night she came to the Grand Duchy, Eleanor had begun having strange dreams. She would wake after suffering from nightmares she could never bring herself to speak of before others.

‘A dream where Kars Beaufort opens the connecting door every night and comes in to force himself on me….’

In the dream, true to his notorious reputation as a libertine, he did all sorts of acts against her that were too shameful to describe aloud, just like in the dream she had had a moment ago.