[Sweet and Satisfying Historical Romance] [Female Shopkeeper] [Fake Marriage Turns Real] [Crime Solving] [Mutual Firsts, One-on-One Romance]
Su Fengchun is the best wedding-feast shopkeeper in the capital.
One day, she goes to the Fu family to collect the remaining eight taels she is owed. Inside, she finds that the bride who was carried through the doors just yesterday is already lying in a coffin. She presses her ear to it and hears fingernails scratching the wood. She opens the coffin and saves the woman, only for Madam Fu to turn around and accuse her in public: she was the one who drugged the bride, and the one who used a life to extort money.
Lu Zhaoye, the junior prefect of the Capital Prefecture, gets her out of trouble, then shows up at her shop with silver and a proposition: a fake engagement for two months, for a hundred taels, so she can accompany him to the Marquis's family banquet where a match is to be made.
She readily agrees: fifty taels up front, the other fifty when the term is up. Her shop stays open, and she won't move into his official residence.
She thinks this is just a deal: he investigates cases, she earns money. That is, until she realizes the bride who was buried alive, the merchant women whose dowries were swallowed up, and the murder cases that were hushed up all point to the mentor who taught him to read. And until he stands outside her shop late at night and says he didn't come to investigate a case, but to see her.
Su Fengchun twirls her tailoring shears and smiles. "My lord, I haven't told a single lie."
But their fake marriage was only supposed to last two months. She doesn't even know when she started taking it seriously.
