She clearly had not expected him to ask something like that.

She did not understand why it mattered, but asked carefully.

“You want me to suddenly feel flustered? Wh, why? What for?”

Riley looked belatedly at his chest, heaving slightly with agitation, and understood what he meant.

……Was she supposed to be flustered?

She had bathed him and dressed him every single day for four years. Was she supposed to feel awkward about that body just because she was wearing a skirt now?

Andrea had moved even closer in the meantime, looming over her, and narrowed his glass-grey eyes as he pressed on.

“Then when you first saw my body, you……”

He stopped mid-sentence, as though something had just struck him, and pressed a hand to his forehead with a groan.

The thought that he had asked a sixteen-year-old girl to attend his baths and help him dress had hit him all at once, bringing a wave of self-reproach, regret, guilt, and helplessness.

Every time it crossed his mind, he wanted to kick something.

‘If I had known, I never would have asked that of you……!’

But before he could say anything, Riley, who had been fidgeting with her clasped hands, began answering earnestly.

“Well…… it was a bit of a shock at first, but after a while I stopped feeling anything. It just became ‘work.’ It’s just a normal man’s body, isn’t it?”

Riley shrugged with a deliberately casual air.

Andrea, still pressing a hand to his forehead, let out a deflating sound and laughed.

His pride was wounded, somehow.

Two people with heat rising to their faces, and this was the conversation they were having. He felt a slow burn of indignation.

Riley’s words played on repeat in Andrea’s head.

‘Stopped feeling anything…… just ‘work’…… a normal man’s body……’

Well, she did sell a drawing of it, so she’s not exactly faint-hearted.

But still. This level of indifference.

Was he going to have to begin this relationship having already forfeited all his cards, his masculine appeal stripped away by overexposure?

Having to play a game with every important card already face-up on the table.

For someone called the king of gamblers, the thought was intolerable, and his stomach twisted.

It was his own fault for falling for his own attendant, with no one else to blame, but the fact that he could not start things over with the fresh, romantic flutter of a new beginning was deeply unsatisfying.

For him, ‘Raul’ becoming ‘Riley’ had made her feel like an entirely new person, but to Riley, had he become ‘the dull figure whose body she had seen too many times to find interesting,’ ‘a body that was nothing more than a work task?’

He had even liked her when she was ‘Raul.’

This feels genuinely unfair.

Something had to be done.

He raked a hand roughly through the hair Riley had just carefully smoothed, and turned away.

“Hah, forget it. I’m going to sleep.”

Andrea snatched his clothes from Riley’s hands and walked out of the room.

Riley stood there blinking, then quickly followed to the door and watched Andrea disappear into the guest room across the hall.

She felt the urge to follow and attend to him, but stopped herself.

The resentful, grumbling look he had given her. The way he had stepped toward her so abruptly. Thinking over the things he did not usually do, she wondered if he was simply in a bad mood.

Right, I’m not his attendant anymore. He’ll call if he needs something.

But why had he asked that just now?

Asking out of nowhere whether seeing him undressed left her unmoved.

Now that he had asked, she was more aware of it than she wanted to be……

Riley scratched her cheek awkwardly, feeling a warmth creeping up to her face.

˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

A few days later, Andrea stopped by the Daily Minerve office and happened to find Roso alone.

Glad to have Roso there, who was perfectly suited for strange consultations, Andrea chewed on an unlit cigar and took his time before speaking.

“By the way.”

“Yeah?”

“If the other person has seen my……”

“……?”

Andrea rubbed the knuckle of his index finger under his nose and said nothing for a moment, then finally put the question out.

“……my bare body…… so many times that they feel nothing…… what should I do about that?”

Roso, who had been leaning back lazily, sat up at the question.

“Your Highness, do you have someone you’re seeing? But if they’ve ‘seen your bare body so many times they feel nothing,’ that means you’ve been together a long time…… is this a slump?”

Andrea furrowed his brow as though struggling with something, but had no other way to explain it, and gave a vague nod.

“Something like that.”

He felt a pang of self-reproach at the fact that he was seeking relationship advice from someone so unreliable, but Roso did run the ‘free love’ column in the Daily Minerve, and had an unexpectedly sharp read on popular taste, which had made the column quite well-received.

Maybe asking him would turn up some kind of answer.

But Roso tilted his head.

“Hmm…… you’ve been to bed together so many times that the spark is gone…… then why not try varying things a bit? Doing the same thing every time gets boring for a woman. You know how it is, sometimes they need you to blindfold them, tie their hands, try something with a bit of thrill to it. You have to do everything Captain Alain did, I keep telling you.”

Any mention of Captain Alain put Andrea in a bad mood, and he narrowed his eyes with a low growl.

“We haven’t been to bed.”

Roso’s expression grew even more baffled at that.

“How is that possible? You’ve shown her your bare body countless times but you haven’t slept together? How does that work?”

Hah……

Andrea exhaled deeply and waved a hand as though telling him to get lost.

“Never mind.”

But Roso arrived at an entirely different conclusion on his own.

“Oh! Are you perhaps seeing the young lady who used to subscribe to 『A Ballad of Flame and Loss』? She’s been admiring Your Highness’s physique through the pages for so long that the real thing doesn’t do much for her? Come to think of it, I think I heard Rufus say something about how a brain soaked in that kind of material can end up like that.”

Andrea had no way to explain his actual situation, but Roso had helpfully supplied a convenient cover story, so he went along with it.

“Right.”

“Oh ho.”

Roso’s eyes curved with a sly gleam, and he launched into an explanation.

“So normally you undress after the attraction develops, but in this case you’ve already shown everything and now you need to build the attraction from scratch, is that it?”

Andrea’s brow twitched slightly at Roso’s crude framing, but it was accurate enough, so he gave a perfunctory nod.

Roso grew more animated.

“The order got reversed, but the fact that she kept subscribing to that novel means she…… has fantasies about that sort of thing between men and women, and Captain Alain’s appearance was her type.”

Captain Alain’s appearance, meaning his own. Was his appearance Riley’s type?

Of course, she had said she drew him not because he was her type but because he was the only model available.

But then he recalled the way Riley would clasp her hands together after dressing him and always marvel.

‘Truly the finest. Goodness…… Your Highness is without question the best in the kingdom!’

He used to smile along without meaning to, charmed by those bright, star-like eyes sparkling with pride.

Something warm stirred in his chest.

……This is a problem.

Since learning Riley was a woman, the restraints in his heart had been loosening rapidly. Which meant he was heterosexual after all……

Had he been instinctively responding to every one of her girlish mannerisms all along?

It seemed that ‘she’s the same s*x’ had been the one thing keeping his feelings from running completely unchecked.

Letting him deceive himself into thinking it was simply the fondness of an older sibling for a younger one.

But now that he knew the truth, control was not coming easily.

Especially since Riley had started wearing dresses, letting her hair grow a little, and speaking with a woman’s cadence.

Riley was now, to anyone’s eyes, a young lady.

A pretty one, at that.

Looking at that clear, fine-featured face and thinking that neither he nor anyone around him had ever suspected for a moment, he felt like a fool.

Hah…… she’s adorable.

Andrea was floundering in the unfamiliar, ticklish, tender feeling when Roso’s voice pulled him back.

“Either way, the next step is ‘tactile stimulation.'”

“……Tactile stimulation?”

“Right. The original misstep was showing her your undressed self so many times that she got tired of it, but naturally a person moves from sight to the next stage, meaning touch. What would it feel like to touch that skin…… what would it feel like to be pressed under that thick chest…… what would it feel like to be pierced by something long and thick, that sort of thing.”

Roso, who enjoyed simultaneous romances with multiple gentlemen, articulated his experiential expectations with ease.