A Night I Couldn’t Be Honest - Chapter 2.2

Having taken a sip of his tea, he looked around at the maids and guards whose attention was rather fixed on their conversation and gently suggested they might leave.

It was phrased as a request for Rozalia’s permission, but the people who caught his gaze didn’t wait for it. They slipped away in a sensible hurry.

‘Did I just lose to his sheer intimidating presence?’

She should have been angry at them, but what Rozalia actually wanted was to beg them not to leave her alone. She couldn’t do that, though. He was her suitor, and the two of them had already agreed to a few private days together.

In the end, the Princess gave a belated, haughty nod of permission, watching their retreating backs.

An uncomfortable silence settled between them as the last sounds of people faded.

No, the awkwardness lay entirely with Rozalia. The beautiful man across from her was serenely examining the garden’s flowers and stonework with what appeared to be genuine curiosity.

When the sounds of everyone around them had completely receded, he leaned forward. Despite being seated, his height already loomed over Princess Rozalia. His face came close.

“This is interesting.”

“…..?”

“I was wondering why you were so rigid. Don’t tell me the great Rozalia is actually nervous, just because it’s been so long since we last met?”

The gentle warmth on his face shifted, spreading into a mischievous smile.

He studied her intently, with eyes full of easy mischief, then without hesitation reached out and cupped her cheek in one hand. His large palm cradled her small face with careful tenderness, and Rozalia held her breath against the sensation of her heart dropping.

“If I’d known you’d get this shy, I wouldn’t have gone to the borderlands. Now, I’m starting to regret it.”

Naturally, his fingers moved to softly brush her trembling lips. She tightened her throat muscles to keep an inappropriate sound from escaping between her parting lips.

His absolute lack of distance left her mind spinning helplessly, a high ringing seeming to start somewhere far away and not stop.

The unlucky heir to a ducal house, a family whose power rivaled the imperial household itself, whose face and name the world had never been properly allowed to know.

The son of Duke Baelic Iberos, the greatest war hero the empire had ever produced, the man said to have been cast out by his own father. The man now considered to have surpassed even that father.

“M-Marquis Calveron…”

“My, so you’re calling me that now too? That stings. I thought you, of all people, would continue to call me by my name.”

With his fingers still tracing her cheek and lips, the Marquis smiled, and Rozalia squeezed her eyes shut like an animal caught in a snare. The casual intimacy of his touch spoke volumes about the distance, or lack of it, between Rozalia and the Marquis of Calveron.

She knew how much a name meant to a man who had never been granted a proper one by his house, and how much more it carried than the title of Marquis that had been handed to him like charity. His expectant gaze was impossible to ignore.

‘But I don’t know his name!’

Rozalia knew the Marquis’s name, of course. She would. But she couldn’t answer.

Because she was not the real Imperial Princess Rozalia.

Azelin’s heart slammed against her ribs hard enough to break free, while she stood there wearing the Princess’s illusion over her own face.

Thud. The tender hand caressing her cheek was shoved away by Azelin’s rough push.

The Marquis’s eyes widened slightly, his gaze full of expectation as he waited for his name to come from the Princess’s lips.

“I have no desire to grant a favor to a man who can’t even keep a simple appointment, though?”

It was an irrefutable point. It was clearly his fault. The Marquis did not argue, and acquiesced, though he kept his eyes on her with a trace of longing as he straightened.

The distance that had narrowed to nothing opened back to the width of the table, and only then could Azelin let out the breath she’d been holding, very carefully.

“Still, you finally responded to a proposal you’d been ignoring all this time. Doesn’t that mean something changed for you?”

“I came out of curiosity, to find out what you were scheming after your continuous pestering me that many times. There’s no other reason.”

“I thought I’d already poured all my heartfelt sincerity into that proposal letter. It seems it wasn’t enough.”

The brief exchange was possible only because Rozalia had briefed her beforehand. But what little Azelin could manage ran out, and silence fell again when she closed her mouth.

“There’s this pest who keeps bothering me with a ridiculous marriage proposal. Go deal with him appropriately and come back.”

That one sentence was the sum total of the information Azelin had to work with.

Whether the marriage proposal the Marquis had sent was truly the nuisance and harassment Rozalia described, or a genuine love letter with his real feelings, Azelin had no way of knowing, which left her running out of things to say.