Chapter 027: You Slept with That Con Artist?

Chapter 027: You Slept with That Con Artist?

None of Li Ruobing’s trusted bodyguards were ordinary men—all retired special forces. Their salaries alone ran into the millions each year, though the money came from the Li family, not from Li Ruobing personally.

However deep the rift with her family ran, Li Ruobing remained a core descendant of the Li family.

Eldest granddaughter of the eldest branch.

The family might tear at each other’s throats behind closed doors, but that was family business. When it came to the safety of a Li, toward outsiders, no one ever cut corners.

Wu Chen wasn’t the only one who’d noticed the tail.

Li Ruobing’s bodyguards had caught it too—they weren’t without counter-surveillance instincts of their own.

The difference was that Wu Chen had already pinned down exactly who’d sent the car. Her bodyguards had no way of knowing that.

“Lose them.” Li Ruobing said only that.

She was used to this.

Given who she was, being followed was nothing new—especially these past four years, with that bastard Ding Ruilong forever sending people to trail her, particularly whenever she went out alone, as though he needed to account for her every movement.

The man had a genuinely intense need for control.

Bordering on pathological.

The convoy picked up speed.

Li Ruobing’s brows knit faintly. She felt a flicker of irritation—being followed brought Ding Ruilong to mind, which brought the pressure from her family to mind, which brought the five-year wager to mind.

If she was honest with herself, she didn’t have absolute confidence she could outdo Ding Ruilong in business.

She’d considered other paths, other ways out. None of them looked easy either.

Wu Chen suddenly reached over and took her hand, lacing his fingers through hers.

Li Ruobing turned to look at him. Irritated as she was, the smile from earlier had drained away, her gaze gone dark and distant. But Wu Chen only smiled back, and seeing her eyes on him, he said, “Ruobing. Don’t worry. Nothing’s going to happen to your brother. I’ve got it handled.”

The name—Ruobing—landed like a cue.

A signal that he was performing.

The driver and bodyguard were still in the car. All of them were her people, true, but she’d made clear they needed to fool everyone, so a little theater in the car cost nothing.

Still, something about the timing, the way he’d chosen to say it just then, felt oddly precise.

I’ve got it handled.

Something in her eased.

Wu Chen wasn’t a god. But he understood her—understood well enough, it seemed, to guess exactly what had been running through her mind a moment before.

He’d known, for instance, that she’d likely mistaken the tailing car for something Ding Ruilong had sent.

Half an hour later.

The convoy arrived back at Huancai Fashion’s offices, Tower 7 of the CBD.

Wu Chen formally completed his onboarding, becoming the company president’s assistant at a monthly salary of twenty thousand yuan. Afterward, Li Ruobing personally walked him through every floor of the building—ostensibly to familiarize him with the place, but really to announce, to everyone who cared to notice, that Wu Chen was her boyfriend.

She kept her arm through his the entire time.

She no longer seemed like the cold, imperious CEO everyone knew. Beside Wu Chen, the smiles came far more easily.

—

South District, Qinghe Courtyard villa complex, Villa 5.

“You absolute traitor—finally picking up, huh? You had the nerve to turn your phone off! Ditching your best friend for some guy, and after everything I’ve done for you—” Mu Qianqian stood by the window, shouting into her phone.

She was genuinely furious.

She’d spent all morning failing to reach her best friend. She knew, of course, that the friend’s boyfriend had come back into the picture, which meant the two of them had almost certainly been up to no good. But arranging for someone to mess with her one day and going dark the very next was too much.

“Qianqian, let me explain—I didn’t turn it off on purpose. It just died. I forgot to charge it last night and slept clean through to noon. How was I supposed to know—”

“Save it. Get over to my place right now. I’ve got questions.” Mu Qianqian hung up.

A little over twenty minutes later, her best friend showed up.

The housekeeper downstairs let her straight in—everyone knew each other by now—and sent her up.

Knock, knock.

Curled up in her room, Mu Qianqian called back, tone anything but friendly. “Come in.”

The door opened. A girl stood in the frame.

Plain-featured, but with beautiful skin, dressed head to toe in gleaming luxury.

Mu Qianqian’s best friend—Wan Li, also seventeen. Her father, Wan Jianmin, ran Donghai Wanmin Biochemical Group.

A rich man’s daughter didn’t keep company with just anyone. Only people from the same world could really play together.

The Mu and Wan families were old friends, and Mu Biopharmaceutical and Wanmin Biochemical had a long history as business partners besides. Mu Qianqian and Wan Li had known each other since childhood—same elementary school, same middle school, same high school—closer than most sisters.

“Qianqian, don’t make that face. You’re really mad?”

“Hmph! Ditching your best friend for some guy!”

“Oh, come on. Didn’t I ditch him just to come keep you company? So what’s so urgent?”

“I have a question for you.” Mu Qianqian’s tone turned deadly serious. “Yesterday—did you set someone up to approach me, put on some act with me? Was that you?”

“Someone? What someone?”

“Don’t play dumb!”

“I’m not playing dumb—what person?”

“That… that Wu Chen. Wasn’t that you?”

“What Wu Chen? What did I supposedly arrange?”

Mu Qianqian knew her friend well enough. Wan Li loved to joke around, sure, but when Mu Qianqian pressed this seriously, she wouldn’t have denied it if it were true.

So Mu Qianqian laid out what had happened the day before.

She left a few things out, of course, but she covered the essentials—Wu Chen claiming to be stuck reliving the same day, correctly predicting the exact moment Wan Li’s call would come in, and the trouble that followed, which she summarized simply: Wu Chen had made one phone call and scared the men off.

“Qianqian? You actually believed a con artist like that?” Wan Li’s face filled with disbelief once she’d finished, as if she couldn’t quite process how her best friend had fallen for something so absurd. “And you stole a car with him too?”

“So it really wasn’t you?” Mu Qianqian asked instead.

“Of course it wasn’t! Do I look that bored to you?” Wan Li tossed her bag onto the cabinet and dropped into a seat.

Then she frowned, catching sight of a box of medicine on the table.

She picked it up for a closer look. It looked freshly bought, already opened—Mu Qianqian must have taken some.

The label read: Jin Yuting.

Wan Li lived even wilder than her friend—first boyfriend at fifteen, and she’d cycled through more boyfriends these past two years than outfits. She’d taken this medicine herself before. She knew exactly what it was.

Emergency contraception.

“Give that back!” Mu Qianqian snatched it away the instant Wan Li looked up, visibly on edge.

Wan Li turned, eyes going wide, and shot to her feet. “You slept with that con artist?”

“Y-yeah,” Mu Qianqian stammered.

Wan Li knew her friend well—Mu Qianqian liked to have fun, sure, but she wasn’t like Wan Li. Her father kept her on a tight leash. She’d never had a boyfriend, had always said she’d wait until eighteen.

Truthfully, Wan Li didn’t care much either way. If her friend had gotten herself a boyfriend, so what.

But from what Mu Qianqian had just described, it sounded less like a boyfriend and more like a con man who’d talked his way straight into her bed.

“You—are you an idiot?” Wan Li’s frustration boiled over. Mu Qianqian herself didn’t seem especially troubled, which only made Wan Li angrier on her behalf. “What’s his number? Call him. Set up a meeting—I want to talk to him myself!”

Mu Qianqian blinked and said nothing.

Wan Li stared. “You don’t even have his number, do you?”

“Forgot to ask,” Mu Qianqian mumbled.

Wan Li pressed a hand to her forehead.

Her head was pounding.

—

Wu Chen spent the entire afternoon at Huancai Fashion. Though his position existed in name only, with no actual work required, the first day still called for the motions—getting familiar with the office, meeting people, even sitting through a company meeting.

A little past five in the afternoon.

The two of them left together. This time, not the Maybach—Li Ruobing had plenty of cars, and she’d switched to a Bentley Continental, driving herself, Wu Chen in the passenger seat. Only a handful of bodyguards followed, trailing in a Mercedes G-Class.

CEO or not, she still needed a life of her own.

“Where should we eat?” She buckled her seatbelt and glanced over.

“Let’s…” Wu Chen actually gave it real thought before turning the question back on her. “Do you mind more people knowing about me?”

“The more, the better.”

“Lao Pinxuan, then.”

Lao Pinxuan—Donghai’s finest Cantonese restaurant, bar none.

An extremely high-end establishment, the kind where reservations usually had to be made well in advance, and sometimes couldn’t be secured at all. Wu Chen chose it for two reasons. First, Li Ruobing was a regular there, a top-tier member—the place she favored whenever she entertained important clients.

Second, it was a place only the wealthy could afford, a favorite among businesspeople especially, which made it easy to run into “acquaintances”—Donghai’s biggest names, the sort with real money behind them.

They drove over together.

Private rooms were available, but they skipped them, choosing instead a window seat on the ground floor.

Not because the private rooms ran too large. Rather, Li Ruobing wanted more eyes on them, wanted the fact of Wu Chen’s existence cemented as her boyfriend beyond doubt. If they wanted to be seen, they needed to sit somewhere visible.

They ordered.

They waited.

Sure enough, it didn’t take long before someone came over to say hello.