His Wildcat Substitute Lover

Su Nian, a receptionist at a billiards hall, meets Lu Jingchen, a forty-year-old business tycoon. He rescues her from danger, takes her in at his villa, and pays for her education. It seems like a fairytale about a CEO and Cinderella. But Su Nian gradually discovers that he chose her only because she has the exact same face as the woman Lu Jingchen hates most in the world.

That woman, Shen Wanqing, betrayed Lu Jingchen twenty years ago, took every penny he had, and left him with the words, “You’re not even worthy of tying my shoes.” From then on, Lu Jingchen lived in hell, driven by hatred as he clawed his way to the top of the business world. Su Nian is nothing more than a carefully chosen substitute, a tool for venting twenty years of hatred.

An even more cruel truth soon emerges: Su Nian is the biological daughter of Shen Wanqing and Lu Jingheng, Lu Jingchen’s older half-brother. Lu Jingchen knew her real identity from the start. His approach, his tenderness, everything he did, was part of an elaborate revenge.

But when Su Nian leaves in tears and Lu Jingchen’s old wound bursts open, leaving him collapsed in a pool of blood and murmuring, “Don’t go,” who can still tell where hatred ends and love begins?

A secret past, a cruel romance built on a stand-in, the truth about a terminal illness, and hatred born of twenty years of misplaced devotion... This is a story about not knowing: not knowing whether it’s hatred or love, not knowing whose shadow she is, and not knowing who will ultimately destroy whom in a relationship that began as revenge.

When he finally learns how to love at forty, she no longer dares to trust him.