The Alluring Beauty's Escape Plan

[Upcoming: Unferryable, Trapped by Spring Mountains]

A carefree short sweet romance, complete at 30,000 words.

In the tenth year of the Zhaoge era, the Chu family had a daughter. When she came of age, a guest caught a fleeting glimpse of her and spread word that the youngest Chu daughter was a peerless beauty.

Chu Yueyi was still unmarried and living at home. When she heard people talking about her beauty, she held up a bronze mirror and studied her face, wondering what they were talking about.

That night, Chu Yueyi was peacefully reading in her study when a sudden noise made her look up, instantly on guard.

“Who’s there?”

She called out, and the person immediately fled. Even when Chu Yueyi hurried to the window, she couldn’t see who it was.

Chu Yueyi had heard her mother say that the Gu family’s great general, Gu Chenshang, had returned victorious and arrived at court that very day. Apparently, he had ridden back the night before.

She couldn’t help thinking that the intruder must have been Gu Chenshang.

The Chu and Gu families had arranged a childhood betrothal between Chu Yueyi and Gu Chenshang when she was very young. It was said that their mothers had met while boating together on an outing.

The Gu family’s first madam, who was also Gu Chenshang’s mother, had taken Chu Yueyi’s mother by the hand and said that if one had a boy and the other a girl, they would become husband and wife when they grew up. If they were both boys or both girls, they would become the closest of siblings.

More than ten years later, when Chu Yueyi learned that she had such a childhood betrothal, she was so astonished she hardly knew what to do.

It wasn’t until they finally met that Chu Yueyi discovered her betrothed was Gu Chenshang. She had assumed he would be one of the other young masters in the Gu family.

When she thought of Gu Chenshang, Chu Yueyi could still remember that incident as if it had happened yesterday.

Whenever she recalled that accident, her teeth itched with irritation at Gu Chenshang. Who would have thought that the culprit was Gu Chenshang himself?

[Little Scene]

One day, Chu Yueyi pointed a whip at Gu Chenshang and asked, “When you returned victorious that day, was it you who came to my room, opened my window, and peeked at me?”

“Yueyi, I had to see who my betrothed was, didn’t I?”

As it turned out, the two mothers had made a blunder. The Gu family’s madam had assumed that Chu Yueyi, the youngest daughter of the Chu family, was the same age as Gu Chenshang. In fact, Chu Yueyi was exactly five years younger than Gu Chenshang, the eldest grandson of the Gu family.

So when Gu Chenshang came home, he snuck another look at his little bride-to-be.

A flirtatious beauty x a dark-skinned great general

Blurb screenshot taken at 9:30 p.m. on August 8, 2023.

[Reader's Guide]

1. The hero has a secret crush and has known about the heroine for a long time.

2. They have a past connection, but it stems from a small misunderstanding.

3. The heroine is seventeen, and the hero is twenty-two.

4. There’s a height difference and a skin-tone difference. The heroine is a tease, and the hero is happy to let her tease him.

5. A slice-of-life short story.

Theme: Wherever you are, you are one of a kind.