1. The Viscount Wants To Go To The Mill

「Do not open the desk drawer, just burn it entirely.」

Lily added a line at the end of her will.

“No, does it seem too strange to say not to open the drawer?”

She muttered to herself and erased that sentence. Then she wrote again.

「Burn the desk entirely.」

That didn’t seem right either.

“What if they open the drawer before burning it?”

Should she put a very special lock on it? But if she put an unusually special lock on it, they might think there’s something valuable inside and break it open.

She revised the sentence in her will again.

「Please burn the contents of the desk drawer as they are private.」

That wasn’t it either.

“Ugh.”

Should she take it out and burn it now? And then live the rest of her life as a modest woman…

‘Then what fun would life be?’

Lily sighed and firmly closed the drawer again. Even if she burned everything in there, it wouldn’t solve the problem.

What was inside wasn’t much. Just some n*de drawings delicately depicting male bodies, as a small hobby. They weren’t drawn from real life, just imagined.

Anyway, as long as she had paper and a pen, she could draw them again. Burning them now wouldn’t make her maintain a modest mindset for the rest of her life.

Lily closed the drawer again. And glared at the will.

“Should I put a box inside the drawer, lock the box, and then ask them to burn it entirely?”

No matter how she thought about it, her curious fifth cousin wouldn’t follow that will properly.

Wilhelmina, nicknamed Lily, the Viscount of Aiden, was alone.

It had been about three years since her divorce. She had no children, and if she didn’t remarry, her inheritance would go to her fifth cousin, whom she had barely seen. He was a cheeky brat who eyed his aunt’s property, even though she was only four years older than him.

Anyway, it didn’t matter. Lily did have money, and she didn’t care where her wealth went after she died. The issue was privacy. She didn’t want people to say that the dignified Viscount had such a secret hobby after her death.

“Oh, I want to meet a good man.”

Lily threw the will aside and slumped over her desk.

She wanted to meet a great man. A young and handsome man. A man with strong thighs who could easily lift a woman. She didn’t care about titles or money. She had those herself.

Lily had a dream. To meet a big, good man, live sweetly together, and have three children to raise well.

The common opinion was that women had less s*xual desire, but that didn’t apply to Lily.

In her teenage years, she dreamed of someone while pinching her thighs. She wanted to marry a handsome, tall man with defined abs and a deep groove down his back, and live a life where bones and flesh burned with passion. Just get married first. She would do everything within the bounds of the law. In the bedroom, the living room, the study, the stable, the garden, and the park… Hmm, no, that was illegal. She didn’t plan to go that far.

And Lily knew she was a top-notch candidate in the marriage market. The Aiden family was a fairly dignified family, and they had a fortune far greater than their name’s value. Lily was an only child, and there were no evil uncles or aunts to covet the family wealth. She was also considered pretty and was healthy.

On the other hand, all she wanted was a man’s appearance and character. Not even someone with the traits of a saint. As long as he was devoted to her because of her wealth, she could forgive a moderately charming freeloader.

Therefore, Lily could choose her perfect husband from a wide range of options. A tall, handsome man with broad shoulders, a slim waist, and one who looked great in clothes.

But Lily wasn’t experienced enough to know why he could wear tight leather riding pants and a short tunic without hesitation. They say you don’t know until you see it, but how could she have known that she had to check a man’s underwear too?

Inside was an acorn.

They say a couple can work through anything together, but an acorn was too much. She had heard that compression mattered, but even if an acorn expanded five times, it was still just five acorns.

After that day, the charming man with blue eyes and a refreshing smile was gone, leaving only a husband full of inferiority.

‘Thanks to that, the divorce was quick.’

Since everything, including the wealth and title, was Lily’s, she paid a large sum for alimony and swiftly divorced her husband.

Her ex-husband accused her of being a lascivious stone woman¹석녀 (stone woman) traditionally refers to a woman who is barren or unable to have children. It was an oxymoron, but since he was a popular man, the rumor spread quickly. Lily didn’t feel like refuting it, so she let it be.

She didn’t have the energy to remarry. If even such a man turned out to be an acorn, what was the point of checking men who were less than him?

‘It’s all fantasy, just fantasy.’

Muttering to herself, Lily doodled on the paper. The body of her ideal man. Six-pack abs, strong arms, and below that…

‘Oh, I have no motivation.’

In the end, she abandoned that too. Then she opened the drawer, swept the papers into the fireplace, and burned them. The papers burned well.

“This won’t do, Miss Lily.”

Her secretary Anna said in a composed manner.

“I have no inspiration.”

“If Miss Lily’s illustrations are missing, the sales of the Verdain Weekly will drop by half.”

“I wasn’t drawing them to make money anyway. Whether that yellow press sells or not.”

Lily drew daring illustrations for a serialized novel in a sensational weekly magazine. Always under a pseudonym. It started as a hobby. Now, the income had been too significant to ignore.

“Mr. Pulque might rush over and ring the doorbell.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to draw, I can’t draw. I have no inspiration.”

“Have you seen Mr. Randolph’s new novel manuscript?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t it inspire you?”

Lily shook her head while looking out the window. Randolph was a novelist who, along with Lily, drove the sales of the Verdain Weekly.

“Mr. Pulque is wailing.”

Still, Lily had nothing much to say.

“It was just a hobby anyway. I’m not going to starve if I don’t draw it.”

“This is why authors should be locked up and fed only apple pie…”

“Sorry?”

“Nothing.”

Anna replied with a calm face.

“I don’t feel like drawing. What’s the point of drawing a hundred times? There’s no substance. No men.”

“I’ll get some eels by tomorrow. Also, turtle and snake wine.”

“I told you, there are no men.”

“There shouldn’t be any men. That’s the source of Miss Lily’s inspiration.”

“No men?”

“No men, but overflowing vitality.”

Lily didn’t respond to that and lamented instead.

“It’s really empty. If I die living like this and the contents of my drawer are revealed, Verdain Weekly will be the happiest. Mr. Pulque would be thrilled to write an article titled 〈Shocking Drawings Found in Viscount Aiden’s Drawer!〉 or something like that. No, it would be more like 〈The Last Works That the Mysterious Illustrator Had to Hide Until Her Death! Grand Reveal!〉”

“Do you have any?”

“I burned them yesterday.”

“What a waste.”

Anna said too seriously. Lily glared at her. This was different from the daring illustrations. She could never show this to anyone.

“Anyway, Miss Lily will end up drawing again.”

“I’m planning to burn them immediately after drawing them now.”

“You said the same thing when you first started drawing. Why can’t people endure without showing their creations to others?”

Lily herself wanted to understand that psychology.

Knock, knock.

At that moment, there was a knock on the door.

Anna quickly closed her mouth. Lily’s side job was a secret. The reason Anna was kept as a separate secretary was precisely because of this. No one at Verdain Weekly, except for Pulque, knew Lily’s true identity.

“Viscount, it’s Cohen.”

A voice came from outside the door. Lily composed her expression and adjusted her tone to be cold. She also put on her thin gold-rimmed glasses.

It was a kind of resistance to her true feelings. She couldn’t reveal that she was imagining this and that in her mind or that she judged men by their thighs. As a result, Lily often pretended to be colder than her actual personality.