Chapter 1

“Ngh……”

Raul quickly caught the swaying crown prince by one arm and asked, half-complaining.

“Did you drink too much again, Your Highness?”

But the crown prince said nothing and simply leaned his full weight against him, and Raul’s knees buckled under the unexpected load.

He planted his feet and forced himself upright, and his already flushed cheeks went even redder from the effort.

“Good grief, how much did you have this time.”

While Raul was grumbling, Andrea finally stirred and answered in a low, hoarse voice.

“Enough with the nagging.”

Tch.

Raul pursed his lips, hauled the crown prince all the way to the bed, and dropped him there without ceremony.

The broad-shouldered young man collapsed and seemed to fall asleep on the spot, breathing in soft, even sighs.

Raul watched the clean line of his nose for a moment and muttered under his breath.

“Well. At least he’s not a mean drunk.”

He had heard plenty of men turned nasty with drink, but in all the time Raul had attended him, the crown prince’s only drinking habit was to get friendly and clingy for a moment before passing out cold.

Raul clicked his tongue, made a halfhearted attempt to roll Andrea onto his back, then gave up and simply swept the disheveled hair off his forehead.

With arms as slender as his own, there was simply no flipping a man built like a knight.

“Better to just leave him.”

Even after a night of pleasure and coming home dead drunk like this, His Highness always woke on time.

A few hours from now he would pull himself together, get up on his own, and head to the training grounds.

‘No reason for me to wear myself out over it.’

Raul muttered to himself and covered a yawn with one hand.

“Yaaaawn……”

Then his gaze drifted down and lingered on the crown prince’s sleeping face.

The disheveled platinum hair and the elegant profile made up of clean, sweeping lines. Remarkably handsome.

Even the bob of his throat visible beneath the loosened cravat managed to look both graceful and unmistakably masculine.

‘Honestly, lines that good are a gift to draw. Hard to imagine not enjoying life with a face like that.’

Raul took a good long look at his master’s exceptional features, then returned to his own room and stretched.

“Yaawn, maybe I should catch some sleep too.”

But a glance at the time told him it was already four in the morning.

His Highness never pushed back his morning schedule, which meant he would be calling for Raul again in an hour or two at most.

“Plays as hard as he wants and somehow still keeps a perfectly regular routine.”

Raul decided he might as well get some work done instead.

He had actually napped earlier in the day, knowing His Highness would return late, so he was not tired in the slightest.

He draped his uniform jacket over the back of a chair and undid a few buttons of his close-fitted shirt.

Beneath it, a strip of white bandaging wound tightly around his chest came briefly into view.

He had been thinking of leaving it, but lately his chest had been feeling more constricted than usual, so he loosened the knot just slightly.

The gap gave way, and the small but natural shape of his chest rose gently back into place. Breathing became easier at once.

‘Hah. That’s better.’

Yes. Raul was, in fact, a woman. Her real name was Riley.

By some twist of fate she was currently serving as the crown prince’s personal attendant, but she was undeniably a young lady.

There was no one left in this world who knew her true identity, but that was fine.

Riley let out a quiet sigh, pulled her desk chair out, and sat down. She took out a sheet of quarto paper and a pencil.

“Deadline’s piling up. Better get to work.”

She sharpened her drawing pencil with neat, scraping strokes, then began moving it across the page, working from memory of Andrea’s face.

She had served him for four years already, yet the moment she actually tried to draw her master’s face, she realized it required careful observation.

Scratch, scratch, scrape.

The sound of pencil on paper rang out bright and crisp.

She worked best like this, in the deep of night with only a single lamp burning.

Riley had a second occupation alongside her duties at the palace.

She had a talent for drawing, and while she had never attempted anything as grand as oil painting or watercolors, her figure sketches were, in a word, extraordinary.

That particular word was not her own assessment, but one passed along through an intermediary from the publishing house.

Some time ago, she had entered an anonymous competition held by a newspaper looking for illustrators.

That chance opportunity had led to occasional scouting offers, and she had been moving between commissions ever since, shamelessly following whichever publication paid the most.

It had started with caricatures and short comic illustrations for the back pages of the newspaper, but somewhere along the way she had lost track of herself, and now she was drawing…… something else entirely.

Specifically…… expl*cit illustrations for serialized fiction.

She had taken care to route everything through intermediaries and other roundabout channels so that her identity as a palace attendant would never be exposed, so there was absolutely no chance of being found out.

Hah!

Riley let out a dry little laugh and kept her pencil moving.

Lately the request had been to draw the novel’s male lead, “Captain Alain,” with a sleek, muscular physique, and she had been delivering exactly that, but the demands had been steadily escalating.

First it was a half-undressed pose, then full n*dity, and now they were requesting suggestive poses with the heroine.

She had been quite flustered when that request first came in, but they offered three times her usual rate, and Riley simply could not refuse.

In the end, she had stepped into the shadows.

‘The response has been wonderful again, dear artist! However, if you could render Captain Alain’s gluteal muscles and thighs with a bit more precision, that rippling quality, you know the one, I believe the print run would increase considerably. Particularly because requests of that nature have been pouring in through discreet channels from among the noble ladies.’

Her illustrations were circulating quietly among the noble ladies!

‘Well, well. Popularity is always welcome.’

What was there to refuse when gold coins kept rolling in? La-la-la.

She hummed to herself, thinking of her steadily growing bank balance.

She had to chip away at this week’s deadline whenever she had a spare moment.

There was, in truth, one secret buried in all of this.

The real-life model for “Captain Alain,” the male lead she drew, was none other than…… the crown prince she served.

Andrea Leon de Aurelion.

Beyond his record as a military commander and his current authority as the de facto power in the kingdom, His Highness’s  striking looks and his bold, pleasure-loving nature had sent his popularity soaring to the heavens.

“Sorry about this, Your Highness.”

Riley hummed the words she did not mean at all and began sketching Captain Alain in the n*de.

In her defense, she’d had no choice.

The face that was always hovering in front of her was that face, and the only man who showed her his bare body, a body built to perfection with muscle, every single day, was the crown prince. What artist could resist using him as a reference?

In short, she had absentmindedly referenced the figure constantly in front of her eyes, and it had turned into a runaway success.

So Riley’s drawing pencil kept sliding boldly across the page.

There were moments, of course, when a twinge of guilt crept into some corner of her heart at the thought of processing the crown prince she had served for four years into a character for er*tic fiction and selling him off.

But every time that happened, Riley shook it off without a second thought.

“Nobody’s ever going to know anyway, hehe.”

Who would ever notice that the hero of a smutty serial running on the back page of a cheap newspaper bore a curious resemblance to the crown prince of the Kingdom of Arvel?

Everyone in the kingdom was familiar with His Highness’s face from the front pages of every paper, of course, but connecting him to the lead of a novel like this would require a level of imagination most people simply did not have.

“And even the ladies who read it in secret will just blush and tell themselves it’s a coincidence, won’t they?”

Above all, anyone who had gone out of their way to obtain such a novel would be far too busy hiding that fact to go spreading rumors about it.

‘Besides, I only use him as a reference. I’m not copying him exactly.’

Riley nodded to herself, adding her own private defense.

A little while later, she was inking over the pencil lines and adding shading to finish the piece when her hand stopped.