The Heir Apparent Has Secretly Loved Me for Years

Ning Su and her childhood sweetheart had grown up together, innocent and inseparable, for more than a decade. When the Tao family fell into decline, she gave everything she had to help him place first in the imperial examinations. On the day of their wedding, the Princess Yongjia, who should have married the heir of a duke's household, suddenly intervened and went through the wedding rites with her childhood sweetheart.

Ning Su coldly watched the two people whom outsiders envied, then submitted a petition to the palace.

Unexpectedly, as she waited outside the hall with its jade-green tiles and vermilion beams, she heard the clear, resonant voice of the heir of the Prince of Xuanping, the man whose wife had cuckolded him for the princess:

"I have admired Miss Ning for many years and wish to marry her."

*

Later, when Ning Su married into the Prince of Xuanping's household in a soft brocade bridal robe and became its heir's wife, she was still thinking: It must be miserable for the heir to marry someone he does not love just because circumstances demanded it.

Until one day after their marriage, Ning Su ordered the servants to air out some old belongings. From a trunk, they pulled out a pile of familiar objects. She picked them up for a closer look: toys she had loved as a child, sachets she had given away years ago, and even a stack of exquisitely drawn portraits.

The person in the paintings smiled sweetly in a variety of poses. Who else could it be but her?

Watching the heir's expression gradually turn flustered as he faced these things, Ning Su slowly formed a question mark. Could it be... that the heir had truly loved her for many years?

*

Everyone knew that although the heir of the Prince of Xuanping was physically disabled, he remained extraordinarily elegant, a bright moon to countless women in the capital. Yet no one knew that Jiang Yun had loved one person since his youth, and that it had now been exactly thirteen years.

A brief glimpse in childhood, affection quietly taking root in youth, and deep love by the present day: Jiang Yun had never imagined that one day he could worship before the wedding hall together with her, spending year after year with their children gathered around them.