After I Remarried, My Fallen Ex-Husband Came Back Alive

My next novel, After Tempting My Legitimate Brother, is coming soon. If you're interested, visit my author page and add it to your collection~

[Blurb]

In the second year after Shen Panzhang remarried, her former husband Yan Wei, who had supposedly died in battle, returned alive.

Word was that not only had he survived, he'd led his troops to crush the enemy and reclaim lost territory. After returning to the capital, he'd put down a rebellion and rescued the besieged emperor. For his great accomplishments, he'd been made Prince Rongxiao.

When news reached Wangjing, everyone waited to see Shen Panzhang's humiliation.

Not long after word of Yan Wei's death in battle arrived two years ago, Shen Panzhang had abandoned her infant child and eloped with her lover.

Now Yan Wei wasn't dead at all, and he'd been made a prince.

Everyone thought Yan Wei was not a man to cross. Having betrayed him, Shen Panzhang surely wouldn't escape a terrible fate.

At a palace banquet one day, Prince Rongxiao Yan Wei got drunk and seized Shen Panzhang by the wrist.

Just as everyone was waiting for the show to begin, they heard the usually sinister and ruthless Yan Wei speak in a hoarse, yearning voice:

"He'er misses his mother. Would you come back and see him?"

-

Shen Panzhang was known in Wangjing as a wooden beauty. A legitimate daughter of the Minister of Rites, she had a beautiful face but was actually awkward and taciturn.

Yan Wei had killed his father at nine and committed rape at eighteen. He was cruel and vicious, and had done every manner of evil.

When Shen Panzhang was fifteen, she tried to elope with someone, but the attempt failed and ruined her reputation. In the end, she had no choice but to marry the notorious Yan Wei. At the time, Yan Wei had just been beaten half to death by the Prince of War for raping a maid in his household and sent to a temple to lay low.

Everyone said that a soft-spoken, timid girl like Shen Panzhang would suffer terribly after marrying Yan Wei.

But nobody knew that on the eve of their wedding, Yan Wei came to see her, covered in injuries and with his head shaved. When he met her eyes, the gaze that was usually so cold held something more. In a stiff voice, he said, "As long as you stop thinking about that man, I'll treat you well."

Just as he'd promised, during the three years Shen Panzhang was married to Yan Wei, he treated her with the utmost care, as if she were a precious treasure.

*

[Bonus Scene]

#Two sharp-tongued husbands face off: place your bets on who'll make the other furious first#

Yan Wei sent their son over several times, leaving Shen Panzhang's current husband, Xue Guan'an, constantly on edge. He knew perfectly well what Yan Wei was up to.

One day, the usually refined and gentlemanly Lord Xue finally lost his temper and cursed, "You're a prince, for heaven's sake. You keep making excuses to see my wife. Are you trying to become her lover on the side?"

Yan Wei was hit right where it hurt and stormed away in embarrassment.

A few days later, their son casually mentioned the incident to Shen Panzhang. She asked Xue Guan'an whether he'd really spoken so rudely in front of the child.

Xue Guan'an hadn't expected Yan Wei to be so devious as to get their son to tattle, and he despised him all the more.

Yan Wei sneered and shot back, "Only the man with a child can be the principal husband. Some people haven't managed that even after all these years. Besides, as the saying goes, the one formally married is the wife, while the one who elopes is a concubine. By that logic, calling you Concubine Xue is already giving you too much credit."

*

[Reading Guide]

***Not updated daily. Two updates a week, on no fixed days. If there's a ranking event, I'll update accordingly.***

One-on-one romance, both leads' first relationship, happy ending;

A story of mutual healing; no household scheming, not a female-power fantasy, focused on everyday romance.

[Upcoming Novel: Please Add to Your Collection]

My next novel, After Tempting My Legitimate Brother, is coming soon. If you're interested, visit my author page and add it to your collection~ Thank you~

On the day Pei Qingfu married Mu Zheng, the young general guarding the north, she received a wedding gift from her legitimate elder brother, Pei Shuyue.

She accepted it with a smile and thanked him, finally feeling a weight lift from her heart.

She thought that the secret past, when she had deliberately grown close to her elder brother in order to survive, had ended neatly.

But she never saw the dark, anguished look in the eyes of the man who turned and walked away.

Later, the general's household was caught up in a struggle over the succession, and was brought down overnight.

To save her husband, Pei Qingfu went to plead with Pei Shuyue, her nominal elder brother, who was now the chief minister, a close confidant of the emperor, and the most powerful man in the court.

Behind the high walls of the inner residence, the man stood with his hands behind his back and said nothing for a long while after hearing why she had come. He merely plucked a hibiscus flower and rolled its stem between his fingers, his expression unreadable.

At length, he walked slowly over and tucked the hibiscus into her hair.

He bent close, his breath brushing her ear, and spoke in a voice as faint as mist: "Have you really forgotten how you used to coax me, little sister?"

He still looked like a lofty, moon-bright gentleman, yet Pei Qingfu felt a chill run down her back. She looked up sharply and met his deep gaze, only then realizing:

The story she thought had ended long ago had never been over for him.

-

Everyone in the capital knew Chief Minister Pei Shuyue as a dignified man of restraint who valued rules above all else.

No one knew that in his heart he kept a hibiscus flower hidden away from the light.

When he was seventeen, the quiet hibiscus in a corner of the rear courtyard blushed an alluring red, inviting him to pluck it. So he indulged his timid, illegitimate younger sister as she deliberately drew close to him.

He waited for her to come of age, planning and dreaming about how to keep her by his side forever.

Instead, he watched her happily marry another man.

While he defied his elders and knelt in punishment at the ancestral hall, while he was branded with scar after burning scar, she was plotting her escape. She slipped away so easily, abandoning him and leaving him alone to drown in his feelings.

Later, the hibiscus fell into his hands once more.

He stroked the nape of her trembling neck, his laughter steeped in a possessive tenderness. He tempted her to divorce, and when her eyes were blurred with tears, kissed away the blood at the corner of her lips.

"You chose him over me back then. Now... it's time you came back to my side."

-

In Mu Zheng's eyes, his friend Pei Shuyue had always been quiet and reserved, but also open and straightforward in everything he did. At some point, however, his friend became dark and unfathomable.

Later, the two ended their friendship and went their separate ways after a conflict. But since Pei Shuyue was his wife's elder brother, Mu Zheng swallowed his resentment and continued to show the man the respect due to a brother-in-law.

Then, after divorcing his wife and regretting it terribly, he had nowhere else to turn. He barged into Pei Shuyue's courtyard, but just as he was about to ask for help, he caught sight of the wife he missed every day, curled in the arms of her pure and moonlit elder brother, letting him do as he pleased.

In a fury, he raised his hand to strike Pei Shuyue, only to see his wife's horrified expression, her eyes filled with concern for her elder brother and resentment toward him.

-A moon that seems to hang high in the heavens.

-But in truth, close enough to touch, willingly falling into the mortal world.

#Forbidden tension at first, then possessive pursuit.

Theme: To hold your hand and grow old together.