Your Highness, He Wants to Offer Himself to You

Reading Guide

1. Both leads are virgins | Marriage first, love later, with a mix of sweetness and angst

2. This is not a strong female lead story [important]. The heroine is the type to use a bit of cunning, play the victim, and leverage the hero’s influence.

3. The story follows the heroine’s perspective, and her storyline is explored in detail. The second male lead has a larger role early on, and the romance between the leads develops slowly.

4. The romance between the leads is underway (note added 10.25).

When Yan Zheng, the least favored concubine-born daughter of the Changxin Marquis’s household, was thirteen, she was poisoned and blinded, then sent to a farm twenty miles outside the capital to “recuperate.”

In early winter of the tenth year of Yonglin, exactly four years after Yan Zheng’s failed attempt to end her life, Pei Su held a short knife and pressed her against his blood-soaked chest.

A faint metallic smell of blood hung in the air. Yan Zheng leaned quietly against the man and heard him say:

“If you don’t want to die, keep quiet.”

*

Pei Su considered himself a man who repaid favors and settled scores. Once free, he asked a close friend to “repay his debt of gratitude” on his behalf.

He and Yan Zheng should have gone their separate ways from then on, with nothing more between them. But by a twist of fate, his attempt to do a good deed went wrong, and he dragged her back into the Marquis’s household, a blazing pit of misery.

By the Qujiang River, the third Miss Yan sat beneath a pomegranate tree, her empty eyes fixed straight ahead.

Pei Su was silent for a long while, then said, “If you don’t like that man, why not marry me instead?”

Yan Zheng was so startled that she snapped the grass stem in her hand. His Highness Prince Su looked entirely matter-of-fact as he added, “You saved my life, so I’ll repay you by offering you my hand.”

*

Just one day later, Yan Zheng received a marriage contract.

After their wedding, Prince Su treated her no differently from a principal wife. Others said she had won the greatest stroke of luck imaginable.

Spring outings and autumn hunts, brewing tea and burning incense. In a daze, she even began to believe that Pei Su truly loved her.

After she regained her sight, Pei Su always kept her by his side. Curious about the wide world around her, she rummaged through his country estate, and he only teased her about it.

One night, Yan Zheng accidentally smashed a porcelain vase on his bookshelf.

Light shone through from behind the wall. In the inner chamber, the person who had murdered her mother was being kept in comfort by Pei Su...

That was right. How could a concubine-born daughter like her really have won the greatest stroke of luck imaginable?

She should have known from the start that Prince Su must have had another plan.

Theme: Stand on your own and grow strong.