Chapter 18

Chapter 18

Leonard had no idea what he was supposed to say.

He bit his dry lips to no avail, and at last he opened his mouth.

“Why would you go this far for me?”

“What do you mean, this far? Do I need some other reason to protect my own husband?”

“It isn’t as though this is a marriage of love anyway.”

For an instant, Irenea wore a wounded expression.

But it vanished in a flash.

While Leonard wondered whether he had imagined it and searched her face, she was already looking thoroughly exasperated.

“Hmph, so that’s how you want to play it.”

“No, what I mean is…”

“Do you dislike me? You don’t dislike me. Isn’t that right?”

Irenea’s face, pressing for an answer, looked a little anxious.

Equally flustered, Leonard answered obliquely.

“It seems too early to be discussing whether I like or dislike you.”

“Play hard to get, within reason. You’re going to fall in love with me anyway.”

She wasn’t saying it out of overconfidence in her own charms.

It sounded more as though she were soothing herself.

“You saw the newspaper, didn’t you? The whole empire already knows you’re my man. Every path to another marriage is blocked, so be good and come marry me.”

Surely she didn’t mean for that to count as a threat.

Feeling a faint urge to tease her, Leonard thought it over for a moment and then spoke.

“As you know, thanks to you, the passage on ships bound for other countries has been put in good order, hasn’t it? I could just leave for some other country where no rumors have reached.”

“What did you say…?”

Her lips, rounded in shock, were rather adorable.

Leonard barely managed to hold back his laughter.

“Listen, you seem not to understand something. You need a boarding certificate to get on a ship, you know?”

“I know. I heard it was created to prevent stowaways.”

“Since you know, this will be quick to explain. Issuing that certificate in the empire falls under my jurisdiction. You can’t leave for another country without my permission!”

“I can. I’d simply cross the Great Forest.”

“…”

Silence followed.

The silence stretched longer than he had expected, and Leonard propped his elbow on the table and rested his chin on his hand.

Whether or not she was aware of his gaze, which openly studied her, Irenea only chewed at her lower lip.

At the sight of that face, which was almost pitiful, Leonard reached a hand toward Irenea and rapped on the table as if knocking.

“Marchioness Blair, instead of that, why don’t you threaten me?”

“…What did you say?”

“Just corner me. So that I can’t bring myself to say I don’t want this.”

Whether the intentions were good or bad, Leonard had lived his whole life being whipped.

That was the most efficient way to handle him, and he had offered the correct answer because this woman, who kept trying to hand him carrots, frustrated him.

But then.

“…How could I? To you.”

Though she had countless whips she could wield, she stubbornly tried to hand him only carrots.

Yet Leonard wasn’t moved by that fact.

It was because he had witnessed Irenea’s downcast eyes growing damp with a faint longing.

‘Who is she thinking of?’

What was certain was that it wasn’t him, the one sitting right in front of her.

…Of course. It seemed he was someone’s stand-in once again.

Not knowing that Leonard was mocking himself with that certainty, Irenea, as if she had made up her mind, took out a document and held it out.

“Fine. Whatever you say, my answer will be the same. I’ll refuse your refusal, so don’t waste time for nothing and sign here.”

“…”

Leonard started to object, but first he checked the document Irenea had handed him.

The word written in large letters at the top was “Pledge.”

“A pledge?”

“Yes. It lists the promises we have to keep to each other for our married life. Read it through, and if there’s an item you want removed or added, don’t hold back.”

“If I don’t hold back, will you grant everything?”

“We’ll adjust it gradually. Oh, and just so you know, items one and two can’t be deleted, so don’t touch those.”

At Irenea, who nailed it down as absolute, Leonard first looked over items one and two.

[ 1. No divorce. No infidelity. No cheating. No spending private time with any member of the opposite sex other than each other. Family is the sole exception.

2. After the wedding ceremony, no separate bedrooms. Barring unavoidable circumstances such as business trips, we must share the same bedroom. ]

At items entirely different from what he had imagined, Leonard couldn’t hide his bewilderment.

‘Wasn’t there a real lover she couldn’t marry?’

He had thought she was making this proposal because she needed a fake husband to present to the world, one who kept his mouth shut, didn’t fall for Viscount Calio’s schemes, and didn’t interfere with her business.

Unable to make sense of it, Leonard pointed to item one.

“The infidelity and cheating mentioned here…”

“They mean exactly what they mean in common usage. No physical contact with other women. No emotional exchanges.”

“Is meeting in secret forbidden too?”

Thud!

The force of a small fist slamming the table made the saucer tremble, and the teaspoon resting on it rolled off.

While Leonard looked at the teaspoon and Irenea’s fist with slightly startled eyes, the corner of her mouth, raised on only one side, quivered.

“Are you saying that there’s… someone I’d meet in secret? Is that what you’re saying right now?”

It was so menacing that someone seemed bound to die if he nodded, even as a joke.

Leonard quickly shook his head to say it was nothing of the sort.

“I was asking about your case, Marchioness, not mine.”

“Mine? Mine?! Ha, what do you take me for? Do I look like someone who would keep a husband and a lover separately?”

Judging by how she reacted, as though she had suffered a grave insult, it seemed not.

Leonard asked again in a much gentler voice.

“Then you aren’t seeing any other man at present?”

“I don’t know why you’re asking such a thing. If there were another man I was seeing, I would have proposed to him. I wouldn’t be going to such lengths for you, Sir Leonard.”

Come to think of it, if Marchioness Blair set her mind to it, there was no reason she couldn’t make a husband of a slave from another kingdom or a vagrant from the back alleys.

Even someone like him, a bastard and a former mercenary, she was trying to make her husband as though it were nothing.

‘Is there really no other man?’

Then what was the face I saw earlier? Was it a misunderstanding?

Leonard only skimmed the document in his hand with idle eyes.

His mind was so tangled that the clause promising not to interfere in how he spent the betrothal money paid in advance didn’t even register.

“So you mean to have physical contact and emotional exchange only with me…”

“Is that all I’ll do? I’m going to have a child, too.”

“What?”

Leonard belatedly realized that he had let slip aloud what he had been thinking to himself, and belatedly understood what Irenea had said in reply.

“Pardon? What are you going to do?”

“I said I’m going to have a child. I want to have a child as soon as possible.”

At her bashful face, the pledge crumpled hopelessly in Leonard’s hand.

He was so flustered that he could only blink hard.

“Aren’t you busy with your business? Pregnancy would bring many constraints. Is an heir so urgent that you would shoulder that kind of risk?”

“It isn’t an heir I want. I want to have a child who will become our family.”

Irenea’s hand, tucked beneath the table, wrapped around her own belly.

Without noticing Leonard, whose face had turned bright red from his own stray imaginings, she smiled wistfully.

“It’s been my lifelong wish.”

“A lifelong wish…”

It was a very modest wish to attach the word “lifelong” to.

But Leonard knew that, for some people, nothing was closer to impossible.

‘You want to buy this child? Hmm… Fine. Then hand over three gold coins.’

‘I bought you with money. You should at least be worth the price of those gold coins.’

‘Play the part of my son for the sake of my daughter. Then I’ll give you as much money as you want.’

The places he had stood had always been built from deals and contracts.

For that reason, though he had regarded the people around him as “like family,” he had never been able to regard them as family.

‘Come to think of it…’

Not a contract, but a pledge.

Perhaps Irenea hadn’t given it much thought. It might have been mere wordplay.

But she wouldn’t know that the fact that the document he was to sign was a pledge and not a contract had led Leonard to take a different view of the meaning of this marriage.

“…Honestly, I still don’t quite understand why you’re going to such trouble for me, Marchioness.”

“That’s…”

Leonard raised a hand to stop Irenea’s words and took the fountain pen from her.

Then he flipped through the document, which he hadn’t read closely, and signed his name on the very last page.

“Huh?”

“If what you truly wish for is marriage with me, I will gladly become your husband. You helped me at the moment I needed it most.”

Fortunately, Leonard had no illusions about marriage.

That was why he could make this decision for a reason like helping a benefactor.

Marchioness Blair would become his wife.

She would bear his child, and together they would form a family…

Honestly, it didn’t feel quite real.

But if it came true, wouldn’t that be rather wonderful?

He would have the family he had wanted so badly.

“…Did you just sign it?”

“I did.”

“You didn’t sign a fake name, did you? You wrote Leonard Elpiers properly?”

“Only my given name. By next year, I won’t be an Elpiers anymore. If you like, I’ll write the surname now too.”

“No! Write it again when you return the title to your sister. Leonard Blair!”

Irenea took back the document, confirmed that Leonard had signed properly, and cheered.

“Now you can’t back out! From this moment, Sir Leonard is my real fiancé!”

As if afraid Leonard might take it back, Irenea shoved the signed document into a desk drawer and locked it with a key.

Then she returned to the table and took out the ring with the blue gem from the box.

“Give me your left hand, quickly.”

Looking down at him as he sat in his chair, Irenea’s white cheeks had by now flushed with color.

Her sparkling eyes, the corners of her lips curling up so prettily, everything about her showed that she didn’t know what to do with her joy.

Wondering whether this was really something to be so happy about, Leonard nonetheless felt a tickle in his own chest for no reason, and silently held out his left hand.