[Two strong leads + both devoted to each other + political intrigue + marriage before love + a tangled romantic rivalry + the heroine makes money and builds her career, while the hero stirs up trouble and gets under her skin.]
The day the entire Wen family was thrown into prison, Wen Zhezhi was balancing her father's accounts.
Overnight, Wen Banjian was branded a traitor in league with the enemy. All 112 members of the family were sentenced to die at the execution grounds on the twenty-eighth day of the twelfth lunar month.
With half a sea chart tucked under her arm, she made her way to the capital and stopped the Regent's carriage in the snow. With a knife at her throat, she asked him outright:
"Your Highness, do you still want the thirty thousand dan of military provisions the northern frontier is short of?"
The entire court called Xiao Zhi a madman: he had murdered his brother, thirsted for blood, and would never live to see thirty.
But this madman lifted the carriage curtain, looked at her for a long moment, and said just one word:
"Get in."
She traded military provisions and sea routes for a retrial of the Wen family case. He used her ships and fragrance recipes to break the deadlock at court. Before they could even finish negotiating, the Empress Dowager's spies came knocking, and her former fiancé became the junior minister of the Court of Judicial Review overseeing the Wen case.
Pei Guanchao said she was playing with fire by bargaining with a tiger. She replied that at least a tiger ate people to their faces;
The Crown Prince asked her in front of everyone:
"Sister, I have everything Uncle has. Can't you pick someone else to love?"
Then, at the grand birthday banquet, that madman took her hand and announced to the assembled nobles:
"Take a good look, everyone. This is the woman who will soon be my princess consort."
From stopping his carriage in a snowy night to overturning the case against her entire family, this was supposed to be a transaction in which each got what they wanted. But one of them fell in love first.
"Wen Zhezhi, my life has belonged to you for a long time. Now give me yours."
