Chapter 354: Why Should I Give Up?!

Chapter 354: Why Should I Give Up?!

Ordinarily Wu Yurong would never let an outsider learn about her relationship with Wu Chen. If word got out it would do terrible damage to her reputation. It would cause a sensation throughout the country’s wealthy circles.

But.

Wu Yurong was not afraid to let An Menglan know.

Because in time there was a very real chance the two of them would be calling each other sisters.

An Menglan stared, wide-eyed, her whole body seemingly incapable of movement. She even wondered whether she was dreaming, or whether she had drunk too much and was hallucinating.

Otherwise.

Had the world gone mad?

Her entire worldview came apart.

Wu Yurong had once been hailed as Donghai’s number-one beauty, and even now she possessed a beauty capable of stunning the whole city. She was a businesswoman worthy of respect, a formidable entrepreneur. Song Xuan’s mother.

And she.

She had just kissed her own daughter’s senior.

It was unbelievably abrupt.

Yet Wu Yurong behaved as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

The implications were enormous.

And it was not only Wu Yurong.

There was Li Ruobing too.

Another woman had kissed her boyfriend, and Li Ruobing’s expression had not changed in the slightest. She had merely glanced at Wu Yurong.

What kind of reaction was that?

How could that possibly be her reaction?

An Menglan’s eyes darted about as her thoughts fell into chaos. The shock was so great that for an instant she wondered whether she herself had gone insane.

“Sister Rong, what are you doing?” Wu Chen finally spoke, glancing at her.

“What? Am I not allowed to kiss you, darling?” Wu Yurong asked with a sweet smile, gazing at him with unmistakable affection.

Even the way they addressed each other had changed completely.

Before it had been Ms. Wu and Student Wu.

Now it was Sister Rong and darling.

An Menglan was beginning to believe she really was hallucinating.

Was there something wrong with the wine?

“Xuanxuan’s gone, hasn’t she? It’s fine. She won’t find out.” Wu Yurong spoke sweetly again.

Her words conveyed two things.

First, that she was hiding her relationship with Wu Chen from her daughter.

Second.

That she had no intention of hiding it from An Menglan, who was still sitting right there.

She wanted An Menglan to know that Wu Chen had another woman.

Li Ruobing suddenly understood.

Wu Yurong was doing this to get at her.

She wanted Li Ruobing to lose the wager.

“Wu Yurong, you’re doing this on purpose, aren’t you?” Li Ruobing said, cutting a cold sidelong look at her across Wu Chen.

With her temper she could not tolerate Wu Yurong deliberately making trouble.

“Doing what on purpose?” Wu Yurong asked.

“Don’t play dumb. You think I don’t know what you’re thinking? You’re trying to wreck this, aren’t you?” Li Ruobing stared into her eyes.

“How am I wrecking anything? Go on, Miss Li. Tell me.” Wu Yurong’s voice stayed soft and sweet, but her gaze yielded nothing at all.

“All right…” Wu Chen said at that moment, making a small gesture with his hand. “Shh. Stop arguing.”

And the two women stopped.

Li Ruobing turned her head away, muttered “psycho” under her breath with a hand on her wineglass, then lifted it and took a sip on her own.

She genuinely thought Wu Yurong was mad. She had thought so ever since the day Wu Yurong kissed her.

Wu Yurong looked equally uninterested in paying Li Ruobing any further attention. She let the argument go, lifted her glass, and gestured toward Wu Chen.

“Darling, Xuanxuan was here before, so we never had a proper drink together. Let me toast you,” she said in her soft, sweet voice.

Wu Chen smiled and raised his glass.

But as he did, Wu Yurong extended her arm and hooked it through his.

A cross-cupped toast.

This way of drinking.

One could only say that Wu Yurong certainly knew how to play.

With things already at this point, Wu Chen was hardly going to refuse her.

The two drank the cross-cupped toast together.

Li Ruobing glanced at them. Her expression still did not change. Beyond thinking Wu Yurong was unwell in the head, she had no particular reaction at all.

She had no interest in fighting Wu Yurong over a man. She simply could not be bothered.

An Menglan was practically stupefied.

It was as though she had suffered a mental attack.

Her mind could no longer manage any complicated speculation. She arrived at one conclusion only.

Wu Yurong and Wu Chen were lovers.

And Li Ruobing knew.

She could also feel, clearly, that Wu Chen was not remotely weak in Li Ruobing’s presence. Not only was he not weak, his words carried extraordinary weight.

Wu Chen told them to stop arguing.

And both women stopped.

What the hell was going on?

An Menglan felt as though she had been introduced to the world all over again today.

“Miss An… Miss An…” Li Ruobing called her twice before she came back to herself. She stared blankly at Li Ruobing, paused, then apologized on reflex. “Sorry. I drifted off.”

The apology was pure instinct.

Manners.

“What’s the matter? Does it strike you as strange?” Li Ruobing asked in a subtle tone. She glanced at Wu Chen and Wu Yurong, then looked back at An Menglan. “Didn’t I tell you? My Mr. Wu is very popular with women.”

An Menglan could barely take the words in.

This had gone far beyond anything “popular with women” could explain.

Who was Li Ruobing?

And who was Wu Yurong?

“So… Ms. Wu is also Mr. Wu’s… girlfriend?” An Menglan finally asked in a very strange voice.

She felt she had to confirm it.

“No,” Li Ruobing said at once.

“Not his girlfriend,” Wu Yurong said as well. She glanced at Li Ruobing but did not contradict her. Instead she told An Menglan openly, “We’re lovers.”

How could Wu Yurong say something like that so openly, without the slightest burden on her conscience? Willingly serving as the lover of a young man who already had a girlfriend?

An Menglan took another blow.

Wait.

No.

Li Ruobing and Wu Yurong were both exceptionally outstanding women. If one of them had some psychological problem, perhaps that could be understood.

But both of them having problems, and both of those problems happening to gather around the same man?

There could be no such coincidence.

So.

The problem had never been Li Ruobing.

And certainly not Wu Yurong.

It was the man sitting between them.

Wu Chen.

An Menglan’s gaze swept back and forth and finally settled on him.

She began to reassess him.

Wu Yurong had produced exactly the effect she wanted.

She was making things harder for Wu Chen, but in essence she was not out to trouble him.

She was out to trouble Li Ruobing.

She wanted An Menglan on her guard so that it would take Wu Chen longer to win her over.

Exactly as Li Ruobing had guessed, Wu Yurong wanted Li Ruobing to lose the wager and kneel to apologize to An Menglan.

Li Ruobing had once made Wu Yurong kneel, after all.

Women could hold grudges.

Dinner had already run more than an hour, so it was nearly over in any case.

For the rest of the meal An Menglan remained in a daze. She could barely remember afterward how she had finished eating.

An Menglan had an excellent tolerance for alcohol. She was free-spirited, and she even had a habit of writing music after drinking.

It was not the wine making her head swim.

It was everything she had witnessed today.

All of it felt like a dream.

At ten minutes to eight in the evening, dinner ended.

They dispersed.

—

A new day.

July 25, 2020.

Jiazhong International Hotel, Donghai. Fifteenth floor. The presidential suite.

An Menglan had come back to the hotel a little after eight the night before. Because she had been drinking, and although her thoughts were still in disorder, she had gone to bed early. And because she slept early, she woke early too, shortly after six that morning.

Her female assistant prepared a nutritious breakfast for her.

Afterward, still in her pajamas, An Menglan sat at the desk in the suite with her laptop open before her, a document waiting.

She wanted to write something with love as its theme.

She could not produce a single word.

Again and again she typed a few and deleted them immediately.

So it went until past eight in the morning.

After a full night’s sleep the previous evening should have faded.

Instead An Menglan kept returning to that dinner, and the more she turned it over the more tangled her thoughts became.

All of it had been far too bizarre. Far too impossible.

What kind of magic did this Wu Chen possess?

An Menglan lifted her hands from the keyboard, picked up the coffee that had gone cold, took one sip, and set it down.

She checked the time on the screen.

Half past eight already.

She thought for a moment, then picked up her phone.

And stopped.

She wanted to call Wu Chen.

So far as the collaboration went, she certainly needed to speak with him alone. There were concrete details the two of them still had to work out.

But now An Menglan no longer knew whether she ought to contact him at all.

Li Ruobing’s hostility, together with Wu Yurong’s relationship with him, had made one thing perfectly clear.

This young man named Wu Chen was anything but simple.

Music was far from the only talent he possessed.

And she had made that wager with Li Ruobing.

Wu Chen really did seem as though he might be.

Dangerous.

So should she give up the collaboration?

An Menglan thought about it for a long while.

Then she decided.

No.

Why should she give up?

Her conscience was clear. What did she have to fear?

If Wu Chen’s private life was a mess, that was his own affair. It had nothing to do with her.

All she wanted was to work with him in music.

Whatever magic this man possessed.

What did that have to do with her?

An Menglan succeeded in talking herself into it.

What she did not dare admit, even to herself, was that she had already developed an intense interest in Wu Chen.

She unlocked her phone and opened her contacts.

Then An Menglan called him.

She was going to ask him out.