[Step-siblings + six-year age gap + secret crush + devoted, sweet romance]
[Guiding madman + taking by force + explosive sexual tension]
The year my mother remarried, I was sixteen. With my hair in a high ponytail, I strode through the gates of the Sheng family home and became Sheng Huainan's stepsister in name.
Sheng Huainan was the formidable head of the Sheng family, renowned in business circles. He was as cold as ice to everyone else, yet he would always creep closer to me in the dead of night: tucking in my blankets, leaving a light on in the entryway, and even sitting on the edge of my bed the night I had a fever, whispering, “Don't be afraid. I'm here.”
At my eighteenth birthday party, he lit my candles.
The flames danced in his eyes, and his voice was so hoarse it barely sounded like him. “What do you want? Your big brother will give you anything.”
My heart pounded like a drum, but I stubbornly said, “I want you to stay away from me.”
His low laugh rumbled in his chest as he trapped me in the cloying sweetness of the cake's aroma. “It's too late. It was too late from the day you came to live with the Shengs.”
Later, at his engagement party, champagne spilled. Amid the crowd dressed in finery, I suddenly heard the emcee's voice falter.
Sheng Huainan tore off his tie and pushed through the crowd, dropping to one knee amid shattered crystal reflections.
“Ji Tiantian,” he said, clasping my fingertips stained with wine. His voice was so quiet only the two of us could hear. “For these six years, I've counted the midnight chimes three thousand times. Can you guess what I was thinking each time?”
As the room erupted in shock, he kissed my trembling eyelashes.
It turned out he had built an inescapable kingdom for me in the dark long ago.
The world calls it forbidden, but he would break every taboo for me.
It's pretty cool that the male protagonist can abandon the world and be with the female protagonist.