After a Night of Passion with My Mortal Enemy

[Complete] [High-spirited and ambitious × greedy and lustful] → Next up: "After a Whirlwind Marriage to My Fiancé’s Older Brother". Blurb at the bottom. [Blurb] Mu Zhao never thought he would come to detest a woman who was worlds apart from him. She pined for him so badly that she even wrote steamy stories about him and the noble young ladies of the capital, tarnishing his fine reputation as a man who kept his distance from women with a few scandalous rumors. What irked him even more was the woman’s name: Yue Sichao. Sichao? Was that meant to be “thinking of Zhao”? She was nothing more than an ordinary daughter born to a concubine in an official’s household. Under normal circumstances, he would never have had the slightest connection with her. But then came a palace banquet. While he was changing clothes, she barged in and threw herself into his arms. * Yue Sichao, however, had no interest in Mu Zhao. Her birth mother was timid and unloved, and the only way they could scrape by was for Yue Sichao to keep her head down and play the obedient daughter. By chance, she once wrote down a dream her cousin had had, only for the story to suddenly spread widely among the young ladies of the capital. Many daughters of influential families offered her generous sums for stories, and she accepted every commission. At last, she was able to make life a little easier for her mother. Who could have guessed that, at a palace banquet, Yue Sichao would fall victim to her stepmother’s scheme? She fought the effects of the drug, weighing the best way out, and finally settled on Mu Zhao, a man known for guarding his virtue. …A cold and arrogant man like him would surely push her away in disgust and find a physician for her, wouldn’t he? As her mind grew hazy, Yue Sichao thought so. When she awoke from her drunken haze, she looked up into a pair of picturesque eyes. Lowering her gaze, she saw that they were both in disarray. Mu Zhao’s eyes were icy, and he could barely hide his irritation. “Since things have come to this, I’ll give you a place in my household. As for anything else, don’t even think about it.” Yue Sichao weighed the pros and cons, then nodded obediently. “All right.” * Mu Zhao assumed that once Yue Sichao entered the marquis’s residence, she would never be content to keep to herself and would use every trick in the book to seduce him. Instead, she really did stay tucked away in her courtyard, rarely venturing out and spending all day playing with her brush and ink. Then one day, Mu Zhao happened to see her personal maid, blushing shyly, hand a stack of pages to a refined young scholar. After that, Yue Sichao felt that Mu Zhao had become inexplicably attentive toward her… #Hmph, she’s just playing hard to get. #What? My money-making tool is obsessively clinging to me 11, exclusive romance, happy ending, sweet story "After a Whirlwind Marriage to My Fiancé’s Older Brother" After learning that her fiancé had spent the night at a brothel, Qin Guanyao wanted to break off her engagement to the marquis’s second son. Who would have thought the marquis’s family would stubbornly refuse? Only then did she realize that the second young master had once doted on her because she was beautiful, mild-mannered, and came from a wealthy merchant family, yet her family held no real power. Marrying her would make it easy for him to bleed her family dry. …If she really married a man like that, her life would be ruined. Qin Guanyao locked herself in her room for a day and a night before finally making a decision that would have her ancestors turning in their graves: Even if it cost her reputation, she would break off the engagement! Summoning all the courage she had, she went to a brothel, pointed at its handsomest young man, and declared, “You! You’re spending the night with me!” The young man looked seven-tenths like her fiancé and was named Yun Jing. She barely remembered what happened after that. All she knew was that she poured out her grievances to Yun Jing, telling him that the princes and nobles of the capital were all sanctimonious bastards, that she would rather marry a butcher than join a powerful family, and then she passed out completely drunk. Imagine her shock when she woke the next morning and discovered that Yun Jing was not a brothel attendant, but an important court official. And that wasn’t all. He started pursuing her. “Miss Qin, since we shared a night together, I ought to make you my wife.” Qin Guanyao reasoned that he was an impressive man with an unlimited future, far better than that scoundrel. Only on their wedding night, beneath warm red candles and within their bridal canopy, when she rubbed her sore waist and tried to dodge him with tears in her eyes, did she learn that there had never been any night together at all. “Yun Jing, you liar!” He took hold of her ankle and leaned over her. “Wife, are you saying your husband hasn’t been taking good care of you?” Unfortunately, fate brought her face-to-face with her scoundrel of an ex-fiancé at a palace banquet after her marriage. He looked haggard, but his eyes lit up when he saw her. “Yaoyao, I know I was wrong. Please forgive me?” Just as she had nowhere to run, Yun Jing strode over and shielded her, then said coldly to her former fiancé, “Second brother, she’s your sister-in-law.” * Pei Jing had long been fed up with his flirtatious, unruly younger brother, who was nevertheless their parents’ favorite. At first, he only wanted to ruin his brother’s engagement, so he had someone reveal the younger man’s misdeeds to his fiancée. When he heard that the woman had gone to a brothel in a fit of pique, he immediately came up with the perfect way to get back at them: marry the girl they both wanted for himself. He would have to marry sooner or later, anyway. Giving her a respectable position was enough. Love was an elusive thing, and he didn’t take it seriously. Who could have guessed that amid the heady wine and flowers, he would meet a pair of eyes that made his heart stir? Theme: Love must be mutual