Reclaiming Her Beauty

Song Yanning said goodbye to her father and traveled alone to the capital, where she arrived at the Duke of Anguo's residence. All she wanted was to keep her head down as an unnoticed cousin visiting the household until her father had settled things, then return to Yangzhou. The Anguo household was powerful and wealthy, and its young masters were beyond her reach. So why did her second cousin, Lu Jing, look at her in such an inscrutable way?

Lu Jing, heir to the Duke of Ningguo, was handsome, refined, and much sought after as a husband. Serving as a junior minister at the Court of Judicial Review, he had little interest in romance. He believed marriage was simply a matter of following one's parents' wishes and the matchmaker's arrangements. But the new cousin who had arrived at the household, timidly calling him “Second Cousin,” seemed somehow unusual.

And then… later on…

“Cousin, why are you looking at me like that?” The young woman looked far too innocent.

“So all that time, you were just pretending?” Lu Jing narrowed his eyes.

A string of murders brought long-buried events to light, and an investigation drew the two of them closer.

“Within a year, at the latest, I will come to Yanzhou to find you,” Lu Jing said.

“If he really comes to Yanzhou to find me, I'll be brave for him just this once,” Song Yanning said.