A Misty Wedding in the Capital

[Ambitious heroine + powerful hero + redemption + both leads are devoted only to each other + regretful pursuit]

In the summer she turned nineteen, Qiao Li failed in her ninety-ninth attempt to escape an arranged marriage.

On the eve of being forced to marry an old man, she climbed into the bed of Jin Mingji, a down-and-out heir who had exiled himself from the capital to a remote border town.

Qiao Li knew he had once loved someone else, but she didn’t care. She only wanted to attach herself to him and use his power to escape the abyss.

Their relationship began with raw desire. After months of entanglement, he finally took her back to the capital, that glittering world of excess.

No one knew that Jin Mingji, the heir to the Jin family who had grown up with every privilege, had spent month after month with her in a rented room in the border town.

She sat her exams again, reclaimed her title as top scholar, and moved step by step toward the life she had once imagined. But on the eve of Jin Mingji and his first love’s engagement, she was forced to leave the capital and lost everything she had gained.

Years later, the two met again in Hong Kong.

She walked past him with another man’s arm in hers.

That night, a Maybach sat parked below her apartment building while the man sent her message after message.

He said, “Xiao Li, it has always been you, from beginning to end.”

-

Qiao Li was born poor, but never believed her fate was set. As she transformed her life, she seized every chance to change her destiny.

From the moment they first met, Jin Mingji was drawn to her irrepressible drive to rise. Their relationship was a sticky, tangled push and pull, and a clear-eyed surrender to love.

She was a cactus climbing ever higher in the desert, a wild rose he had nurtured with his own hands, and the woman in his heart.