Chapter 22
“Does that even make sense? How does someone sit on Your Majesty’s knee without permission? Letting her sit there quietly while she did that is permission!”
At her uncharacteristically logical rebuttal, Laegar paused briefly, then explained in a deeply subdued voice.
“She didn’t do… that.”
But his clumsy counter only made Lucy angrier.
“I saw that woman sitting on Your Majesty’s knee, fawning all over you! How could you do that in front of me? You said I’m your lover! If you have a lover, you’re not supposed to do that!”
Truthfully, Lucy’s sense of common sense or customs had all gone blurry in her head, so she couldn’t really discern them well.
But on this matter, she felt she ought to act this way, so she was getting angry according to her feelings.
Seeing Laegar looking slightly cowed, she even grew certain she was right.
When she pounded on his chest with her fists this time, Laegar grew anxious.
If the Haldegard royal family’s demonic power were to unexpectedly manifest from Lucy, she would start paying attention to it and questioning him again.
If her mana channels happened to fully open in the process, she might even remove the thing suppressing her power by herself.
Laegar cast a furtive glance above her head.
The sleek, jet-black feather remained firmly embedded in Lucy’s head. It was a fragment of his own demonic power, invisible to most eyes.
He had thought that when her memories returned, he would meet the death he so deeply envisioned through her hand.
But now, it suddenly felt too soon. Dying at this moment, when his heart was tingling just a little, would be no fun.
He caught Lucy’s fist in one hand and muttered.
“…I was jealous.”
Only then, a beat late, did Lucy’s resistance stop.
“…What?”
Watching Lucy’s dazed face gradually flush pink after some time passed, Laegar elaborated.
Cruel and infamous as he was, in this moment he felt he had no choice but to confess his true feelings.
“So I… tried to make you jealous too.”
At the confession that had come at her head-on, Lucy could only open and close her mouth for a moment, at a loss for words.
She still felt a chill from him, but she boldly shot back.
She had already struck him in front of everyone, after all—she had nothing left to fear.
“But it was Your Majesty who opened the ball for me.”
“…Exactly.”
Laegar softly lapped at Lucy’s earlobe and conceded willingly. Only then did she grumble in a slightly softened tone.
“Still, Your Majesty was in the wrong. If you were jealous… you should have come out and danced with me. Why call over some lewd woman and do bad things…! She was just lewd and uglier than me.”
Lucy didn’t relent right away, dissatisfied with Laegar who only kept lapping at her nape like a cat. So she asked again, sharply.
“Why won’t you answer? She was uglier than me, right? Nothing but an absurdly huge bottom…!”
But Laegar, scattering deep, hot breaths across the nape of Lucy’s neck, had no time to agree with her words.
Without hiding his increasingly ragged breathing, he was lengthening his strides.
All the way to their nest—the bedchamber—Lucy didn’t stop grumbling.
“Anyway, be honest. You enjoyed it, didn’t you? You enjoyed it, didn’t you, huh?”
“I didn’t enjoy it.”
Laegar inwardly resented Igor for the unexpectedly sharp and persistent attacks from Lucy.
Yet overall, he was deeply satisfied with having carried out his nephew’s advice.
The displeasure that had spiked to an extreme—especially when Lucy had been with that eldest son of the Iantz Count’s house or whatever he was, the one now torn to death—was subsiding in his chest the more she rampaged now.
How long had it been since he had felt such vivid, three-dimensional emotions, so alive and stirring?
Entering the bedchamber, Laegar laid Lucy down on the bed in a considerably satisfied mood.
Though his thick chest was covered in scratches from the rose thorns, it was nothing. His confession on the way—instinctively grasping a path to survival—had kept things to just this much.
‘…No, I didn’t even see that woman as a woman. I was just about to throw her aside when you arrived.’
‘But you didn’t throw her, did you! You must have stayed still and let her touch you because you liked her hands on your chest!’
‘…….’
Lucy’s grudge was a long one.
For someone supposedly touched with naivety after her memories were sealed, she argued with remarkable clarity, flustering Laegar.
Set down on the bed, she sat with her knees drawn up and her lips jutting out in a pout.
Laegar quietly looked down at her as he unbuttoned his top.
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