The Diamond Wild Rose

Lin Yan was the finance world’s dreaded “ice-cold dealmaker.” At twenty-five, she controlled billions in capital and believed that “love is the most worthless kind of risky investment.” Then, one stormy night, she came across a man bristling with thorns: Jiang Si was crouched in the ruins of a demolition site, making a bed for a stray cat from pieces of broken glass. His fingertips were bleeding, but he didn’t seem to care.

“How much is this lousy cat bed worth?” She rolled down the car window, her voice as cold and hard as ever.

The man looked up. Rain and mud splattered across his sharply defined face, and his gaze was sharper than the broken glass. “Can you afford it?”

Later, she watched him draw on the street with chalk for more than ten hours, just to raise money for winter clothes for an orphanage. She watched him turn the diamond cuff links she’d casually thrown away into a collar for a stray dog. And when her rivals set her up and everyone turned against her, he used those hands, hands that had held paintbrushes and hauled bricks, to shield her. “Lin Yan, your theory of value doesn’t work on me.”

Only then did Lin Yan realize that this man, who lived in the city’s urban village and scraped by on odd jobs, was like a wild rose growing unchecked. He carried the earthy smell of the soil and unruly thorns, yet he had carved a crack into her sealed diamond fortress, letting in a sliver of light.

She grew used to his paint-scented jacket draped over her leather sofa, to finding her profile hidden in his paintings, and to the earnestness he couldn’t conceal when he said, “Your money can’t buy a genuine heart.”

But when her family forced her to accept a marriage alliance, and his paintings were