The Lady Teacher

Xie Changwei first saw Wen Tan on a dim, rainy evening. She was holding books in her arms, squeezed in with others beneath the eaves to shelter from the rain.

When he learned she had been hired as a tutor for the household, he couldn't help taking a few more looks at her.

The woman's features were as cool and proud as a handful of snow on a mountaintop, or a white plum branch steeped in snow.

He couldn't help wanting to trample the snow and crush the plum blossoms, just to indulge his wicked tastes.

Whenever she encountered him in the residence, she would lower her eyes and greet him as "My Lord."

She seemed to know and observe the rules, but Xie Changwei could see the distant indifference she felt toward him deep in her bones.

She inevitably reminded him of the last time he had seen her with her husband on the street.

Scolding, laughing, and expressing annoyance, she had been so full of life. When she praised him, by contrast, she was always composed and unruffled.

Looking at the woman who met him with nothing but distance and coldness, Xie Changwei suddenly wanted to see her make some other expression when she faced him.

Perhaps crying softly, or with the corners of her eyes reddened.

Surely that would be fascinating.

He had rarely wanted anything in his life. But if there was something he wanted and couldn't have, he would take it by any means necessary.

So what if he knew she and her husband were childhood sweethearts, perfectly in tune with one another?

If he wanted her, she could only be his.

My next book will be The Matriarch Wants a Divorce

Blurb: The twentieth year of their marriage.

Ming Zhi looked at her husband, still incomparably handsome as he slept beside her on the pillow. She thought of their son and daughter coming to pay their respects in the morning, then her mother-in-law finding fault with her, the jabs from her sisters-in-law, and the same breakfast and chores as always.

Once again, the thought of divorce came to her mind, more intensely than ever before.

If anyone found out she wanted a divorce, they would probably tap her on the forehead and call her a fool who didn't know how lucky she was.

After all, her husband was a Grand Tutor, handsome as a tree of jade. He neither took concubines nor visited brothels, and their son and daughter were both very filial. Even her mother-in-law only made the occasional snide remark.

But she couldn't go on living like this.

If she had to name a reason,

it was probably that her husband had a white moonlight in his heart, and even their children had not been raised at her knee. They treated outsiders far better than they treated her, while she had always felt like a stranger, adrift in someone else's home.

First she had been her parents' daughter, then a man's wife, then the mother of her children. At no point in her life had she ever been herself.

She didn't want to spend the rest of her life trapped behind these high, square walls, living a life whose limits she could see at a glance.

She wanted to see the beacon fires of the northern frontier, flowers in the desert, and the misty rain of Jiangnan.

[Note: When the romance between the two leads begins, the heroine will already be divorced from the second male lead. There is no moral impropriety.]

Theme: Striving toward your goals