[Alluring, pleasure-loving heiress × possessive wife-devoted man]
1.
They first meet at a bar, amid glittering lights and decadent revelry.
Jiang Ni is trapped in the hallway outside a private room by a persistent suitor. Bored out of her mind, she glances up with a look of utter disinterest.
Lu Yuzhou is delivering drinks to the SVIP room. Their eyes meet, and he mistakes her look for a plea for help, so he steps in to uphold justice.
In the end, one sentence from Young Master Xu gets him fired from his well-paid part-time job. Jiang Ni, watching from the sidelines, doesn't say a word.
The next day, she gets his complete file.
Lu Yuzhou, a second-year foreign languages student, an orphan, and the sole support of his younger sister, who has uremia. He works all over the place to pay for tuition and medical expenses.
Poor but beautiful, kind and strong, chaste and upright.
After dating her fill of domineering rich boys who insisted on a suitable match, Jiang Ni finds herself intrigued by this poor student, who is exactly her type: a gentle, delicate white-lotus sort.
On a cold, drizzly winter night, he stands by the roadside handing out flyers in his thin clothes.
A Rolls-Royce slowly pulls up beside him. Through the half-lowered window, Jiang Ni smiles and offers him an olive branch into high society.
"Come with me. Will you?"
2.
The night she asks to break up, rain pours outside the window.
Eyes red, he asks what he hasn't done well enough, saying he can change anything.
But Jiang Ni falls in and out of love just as quickly. She says he's too restrained, too stiff, a perfect gentleman with no sense of fun.
Even for a kiss, she has to make the first move before he slowly responds.
From beginning to end, their relationship is on her terms. He has neither the standing nor the right to accuse her of being heartless or beg her to stay.
3.
During her years abroad, Jiang Ni lives recklessly, treating life like a game.
Then her parents back home start pressuring her to marry, and she is forced to return for a blind date.
She hears that the match her parents approve of for a business-political alliance is a Foreign Ministry interpreter who has become famous over the past two years.
At a romantic French restaurant, candlelight flickers at the window-side table. She raises her eyes and unexpectedly sees the old flame she hasn't met in years.
The man walking steadily toward her is tall and straight, with a handsome, strikingly sculpted face and a mature, extraordinary air. It's hard not to feel her desire to rekindle their relationship stir.
Still, ending up in bed with her ex-ex-ex-boyfriend and blind date on the very first night they meet again happens much sooner than she expected.
With desire mounting, Jiang Ni uses what little reason she has left to push him away.
In the suite on the hotel's top floor, Lu Yuzhou is disheveled, his gaze dark. Looking at her lips, swollen from his kisses, he calmly takes off his tie and binds her wrists to the headboard, leaving no room for refusal. "Isn't this what you like?"
*
Lu, the Chief, fails to tie up his wife and instead gets kicked in the gut. His inner monologue: She used to complain he was too stiff, and now she says he's too wild. This heiress is so hard to please.
"She doesn't like him refined and gentlemanly, treating her as though she were a treasure to be handled with care? Then she can get ready to face the full force of his fierce love.
All the power and prestige in the world: once he had them, he found them worth little. He finally realized that all he'd ever wanted was a little of her genuine affection."
[Reader's Guide]
◎ Happy ending. The female lead isn't a virgin; the male lead is.
◎ The male lead is no angel, though his husbandly virtues are perfect. He has a hidden, unhinged side.
◎ The female lead is a hopeless face-con; she wants to give every handsome man a home, but she'll settle down for true love.
Theme: Independence and self-reliance
