Chapter 6
“……Do you remember that I used to like sweet things?”
Lee-jae asked, briefly recalling her memories with him.
Strawberry whipped cream cake was something he used to buy for her often.
“Babies usually like sweet things.”
Lee-jae pouted a little. Even though she was a full-grown adult, being called a baby by him was terribly embarrassing.
“Why, you don’t want me to call you baby?”
“I’m an adult too.”
She had grown this much, and yet it hurt that whether she was the seventeen-year-old Seo Lee-jae or the twenty-year-old Seo Lee-jae, this man still did not seem to see her as a woman.
“Ah, the medical bill came out fairly high.”
The man stared straight down at Lee-jae, then lifted his teacup.
“What? The medical bill?”
“When I called my physician to the hotel, the house-call fee was pretty steep.”
Lee-jae’s eyes shook.
She knew he had called a doctor while she was unconscious. But she had never imagined he would ask her to pay the fee.
“I’m not such a stingy mister that I’d charge you for letting you sleep here and feeding you, so don’t worry.”
Lee-jae slowly nodded.
When she thought about it, no matter how wealthy Beom Do-geon might be, she could not ask him to pay for her. They were not anything to each other.
“Right now, I……”
“Oh dear. So you don’t have any money.”
For an instant, Do-geon looked at Lee-jae with almost pitiful eyes, then playfully curved his mouth. After pretending to consider it for a moment, he spoke in a way that suggested he was making a special allowance for her circumstances.
“Forget the money. Next time, I’ll collect something else I want instead.”
“What will you collect instead?”
“Well now, what could it be?”
When Do-geon asked with a cold smile, Lee-jae flinched.
“Don’t tell me……”
In an instant, Lee-jae’s face turned bright red, and she bit her lip to hide it.
“Say it. I hate people dragging things out.”
“Do you…… perhaps want to sleep with me?”
She asked even while knowing that probably was not it.
Because in Lee-jae’s life, whenever men said they wanted something other than money from her, it was always the same thing.
The man’s brows arched as if to say, What kind of absurd question is that?
At the coldness of his reaction, Lee-jae’s face grew hot.
Up to now, every man who had said he would give her something had wanted only one thing.
Her homeroom teacher in her third year of middle school, who had said he would pay for her school trip if she would play at being his girlfriend, the loan shark who had come to press her over the debt left by her dead father, the part-time job owner who had brushed a hand lightly over her waist while asking her to go drinking with him, and the countless blind date men.
Every one of them had harbored impure intentions.
So for a moment, she had wondered whether this man might be the same, since he said he would take something other than money.
Do-geon tipped his head back as though seriously considering it, then asked coldly,
“Why, have other bastards said they want to sleep with you too, Baby?”
“…….”
“Then again, is there any man who wouldn’t want to sleep with you, Baby?”
Do-geon said it so indifferently that the one left flustered was Lee-jae instead.
The moment she wondered whether Do-geon himself was included among those men, her heart suddenly started pounding like mad. So hard it made it difficult to breathe.
Every other man had been obvious, thinking only of how to get one night with her, but this was the first time she had seen a man say such blunt things in such a dry, matter-of-fact tone.
“All men are the same.”
“…….”
“They’d want to sleep with you because you’re pretty, Baby.”
“…….”
“Did you see the assemblymen’s beggar-like faces that day? What do you think they were thinking while looking at you.”
As though avoiding the intensity of the man’s gaze, Lee-jae turned her head to the side.
Do-geon’s eyes lingered for a long while on her flushed left cheek.
“Do you think I’ve never had thoughts like that either?”
“…….”
“In my imagination, the two of us have done all sorts of things.”
Without meaning to, Lee-jae swallowed.
“Curious?”
“……No, I’m not curious.”
When Lee-jae answered awkwardly, embarrassed, the man let out a short laugh.
“I’m joking.”
“…….”
“I’m telling you to be careful around men. And don’t go around carelessly asking whether they want to sleep with you.”
The man clicked his tongue in displeasure.
“Baby, you really don’t know how frightening the world is. Last time you recklessly asked me to marry you, and now you’re even asking whether we’d sleep together.”
As fearless as ever.
The man’s sharp gaze reached Lee-jae.
“Executive Director.”
Just then, Taek, one of his subordinates, approached.
Something seemed to have happened at the company. The neatly set line between the man’s brows furrowed as he listened to the report.
Lee-jae quietly drank her cocoa. Maybe because it had been so long since she last had it, it tasted pleasantly sweet.
Her eyes rested for a moment on the man’s broad shoulders, stretched straight and square beneath his sharply tailored suit, when he tilted his head and said,
“There should be a driver out front. Go on.”
At the words telling her to leave now, Lee-jae rose from her seat. She dipped her head and raised it again.
She was heading toward the door when he followed after her. The moment Lee-jae tried to open the hotel room door, the man overlapped his body with hers, as if wrapping her back in his arms.
Lee-jae drew in a sharp breath. The man’s thick musk scent wound around her without mercy.
The moment she felt the hard muscles of his chest behind her back, her toes curled reflexively.
All over again, she was reminded how large the man’s body was. If someone had seen them from behind, Lee-jae would have looked as though she had vanished, shut away inside Do-geon’s broad embrace.
He really was different from the young men she only saw on a university campus. Whether because of his large frame, or because he always insisted on dressing in suits, he felt all the more like a fully grown man.
Before Lee-jae, who had frozen in place, could decide what to do, the door swung open.
Ah, he was opening the door for her.
Looking flustered, Lee-jae slipped out of the hotel room.
His men were standing outside the door. Do-geon said to them as if tossing the words away,
“What are you doing? Baby is leaving.”
For an instant, the indifferent eyes of the men in black touched her briefly, then fell away.
Lee-jae looked embarrassed at the man who called her ‘Baby’ without the slightest hesitation even in front of his subordinates.
“Go on safely, Baby.”
* * *
Do-geon exhaled hazy cigarette smoke and looked out the window.
From the dizzying height of the hotel, he could see the woman moving slowly below like an ant.
Apparently she had refused the sedan, saying she needed to loosen her body a little. Since when was taking the subway a workout.
Among all the hurriedly passing people, she alone moved slowly.
Do-geon drew deeply on the filter and exhaled smoke.
“She’s tiny as a handful, and still she walks around just fine.”
Perhaps she had tired herself out from walking only a little, because after a while the woman sat on a bench in the park in front of the hotel and began rubbing her ankle.
The woman kept her gaze for a long while on the children running around the fountain in the middle of the park. She looked as though she had fallen into thought for a moment.
Then suddenly, the woman’s gaze lifted toward the uppermost floors of the hotel.
Do-geon looked down at her steadily, as though returning her gaze.
‘It seems the woman who came to the blind date isn’t Professor Seo’s daughter. Her name is Seo Lee-jae.’
He had never had the slightest intention of going to the blind date his mother had forced together. But when he heard that the other party was Seo Lee-jae, he threw aside the executive meeting that had run late into the night and went to the restaurant.
‘Please marry me.’
A girl barely twenty years old.
A baby whose blood had hardly even dried had come out to a blind date?
‘If there’s a kind of marriage you want, I’ll do my best to fit it. You can meet women outside, and also…….’
It seemed Lee-jae knew well enough herself how unreasonable a request she was making, because her face had been bright red as she proposed to him.
‘I think I’d be a good choice.’
A child he had come to know because of a favor from her father.
Unlike the dark world he belonged to, she had been an unusually pure and clear child.
Sometimes he had wondered how Seo Lee-jae was living.
‘Baby, do you even know what kind of relationship a married couple has?’
‘…….’
‘A married couple sleeps together day and night.’
He had deliberately stabbed at her with blunt, explicit words. To make her come to her senses.
But the answer that came back from her had been something else.
‘Even if I still have baby fuzz… my body isn’t completely childish.’
She’s cheeky, he had thought.
As if she were telling him not to underestimate her just because she was young.
Like a tiny kitten puffing up all its fur to make itself look bigger.
And yet he had still had to rein in the way his gaze was instinctively drawn to the deep straight curve of her chest glimpsed at a glance.
The Seo Lee-jae he met again had grown into a complete woman. If he had met her without knowing who she was, she was the sort who would have caught his eye at once.
The rounded forehead, the elegant tip of her nose, those large eyes that always seemed on the verge of tears, even the tiny pink lips.
Where had all the baby fat gone off to.
Her face had become slimmer, and yet in its own way that disappointed him too.
It annoyed him quite a lot, that she wore such a pure face while saying she could handle marital relations.
Did she even know the kind of thing that would drive men mad.
He felt disgusted with himself, like a real bastard, for having reacted even for a moment to a baby.
That little brat, anyway, whether then or now, she was a nuisance in the worst way.
‘Mister, please help me.’
The moment he saw her at the blind date table with that sorrowful face, he had been reminded of the young Seo Lee-jae who had once asked him for help.
Do-geon rubbed a hand over his face as though he had a headache.
“Ha, what a fuss over nothing.”
Mocking himself, Do-geon put the cigarette back to his lips.
After breathing the smoke out more deeply, he made a small gesture. From behind him, he could feel Taek’s presence.
“I investigated Seo Lee-jae’s household, just as you instructed.”
