Chapter 036: No Privacy! No Secrets!

Chapter 036: No Privacy! No Secrets!

“Only ten years. I doubt you’ve really forgotten.” Wu Chen smiled and pressed on. “Her name was Peng Xiaoyun, wasn’t it? Seventeen—such a lovely age. Innocent, carefree, just starting to feel the first stirrings of—”

“That’s enough,” Li Ruobing cut in.

“You don’t want me to go on?” he asked, still smiling.

“How did you find out?” she asked instead.

“Trade secret.” He smiled.

He certainly wasn’t going to tell her the truth—that she’d told him herself, with her own mouth.

Over the thousand years of loops, Wu Chen had slept with Li Ruobing something close to a hundred times. His approach to winning her over within a single day had followed roughly the same pattern each time—but what they’d talked about afterward never had.

Say something different, and Li Ruobing would say something different back.

The story of that summer had come straight from her.

They’d just finished sleeping together, both of them relaxed, and Wu Chen had teased her—said a woman as beautiful and as forceful as she was probably didn’t only turn men’s heads. Women might fall for her too.

That had stirred something loose in her memory.

She admitted it, then. A girl had liked her once.

Seventeen, high school. A girl named Peng Xiaoyun.

Back then Li Ruobing had been the school’s reigning presence—cool, fierce, headstrong since childhood, the kind of girl who charged straight into the front line of any fight. In high school, she’d been the undisputed name everyone knew.

Peng Xiaoyun hadn’t been the only girl who’d liked her, either. Their school hadn’t had many girls who liked girls, but it had had a few.

What set Peng Xiaoyun apart was that she’d been the one who stirred something restless in Li Ruobing.

Maybe it was just adolescence. Maybe her own personality ran too hot and forceful for anything else. Maybe it was the pressure of that final year before the gaokao pressing down on everything.

She’d never dated a boy—and had nearly caught fire with a girl instead.

By her own account, she hadn’t understood what was happening to her at the time. The girl with the bun had been sweet, and they’d held hands, hugged—not the kind of hug that passed between close friends. And then Peng Xiaoyun had confessed, out of nowhere, and everything had taken on a different meaning.

It had left her uneasy.

Nothing came of it, in the end.

It had nearly happened. And then it hadn’t.

Li Ruobing, who’d briefly lost her footing, had come out the other side certain of herself—not bisexual, just straight, plain and simple.

None of it amounted to much, really.

She’d never taken that final step—couldn’t, not in body and not in mind. It was only that, among the girls at school, she’d carried herself with a kind of coolness that people misread. Her manner toward other girls had invited exactly the kind of misunderstanding that led to what happened.

But for a woman of twenty-seven, still unmarried, it was without question a chapter she’d rather keep buried.

Her family was pushing marriage on her now, hard.

She’d resisted every arrangement they’d tried to make, and had never once dated anyone seriously.

If word ever got out that she’d once had a confused, half-formed, unforgettable brush with something like that—it would do real damage.

She looked at Wu Chen, swept her hair back behind one ear, and let her hand rest there a moment. “Don’t you think you know a little too much? Even something that small, from when I was seventeen. I’d forgotten it myself until you brought it up.”

“Is that a warning?” Wu Chen asked, unbothered, then smiled. “Or should I just take another ten million as hush money?”

He could feel it—she was starting to grow wary of him.

Because what he knew truly was too much.

Not because of the thing itself, at seventeen. It was that the mere fact he could say it at all meant his reach into people’s lives bordered on the impossible. He really could know everything there was to know about a person.

That was a frightening thought.

It left her feeling almost as though she were standing bare in front of him.

No privacy. No secrets.

Wu Chen had done this on purpose. He knew her well enough to know exactly what saying such things would provoke.

With a woman like Li Ruobing, there were only two ways this could go—he conquered her, or she conquered him.

And Li Ruobing worshipped raw ability above almost everything else.

So he would let her see, little by little, exactly how formidable he really was.

It was a dangerous game. If she ever lost her sense of control completely, she wouldn’t show him any mercy. But Wu Chen had no intention of letting it go that far—he wouldn’t let her lose her footing entirely.

His love of money was the one thing he’d handed her on purpose, a rope she could hold onto.

Because Wu Chen loved money, and she had it, and he was the one actively courting the partnership between them, she would keep believing she held the leash—that money, or interest, gave her control over him.

He would let that belief stand.

Until the day her guard came down completely, until she recognized him as a man stronger than she was.

And then he would conquer her, fully.

Being stronger than her was only one condition among several, worth noting—not the only one. It wasn’t as simple as any sufficiently strong man automatically becoming her ideal match.

That was merely the baseline.

Winning her over completely, body and mind both, would be no small task.

“Is money all you ever think about?” Li Ruobing touched her glass, then turned, glancing around the restaurant as if idly taking in the room.

She was checking whether anyone had overheard them.

No one had.

The people dining here weren’t the type to waste their attention eavesdropping on strangers.

“If you’re not paying up, don’t. No need to mock me for it,” Wu Chen said. “Besides, you’re the one who kept digging. You wanted to know exactly what I know, and you made me say it. If you hadn’t asked, I wouldn’t have brought any of it up to anyone.”

“Do you know her?” Li Ruobing ignored that entirely and tilted her head toward someone.

Wu Chen followed her gaze to a striking young woman just coming down the stairs.

“Du Rou. Twenty-three. Youngest daughter of Du Feng, who owns Dongjiu Group. One hundred sixty-nine centimeters tall, measurements seventy-five, fifty-five, eighty-two. Wears a size thirty-eight shoe. Vegetarian. Keeps a blue British Shorthair named Ball. Had her appendix out at nineteen—there’s a faint scar on her abdomen, maybe two centimeters. Registered her marriage this past March, held the wedding in May. Her husband is—”

“And her?” Before he could finish, Li Ruobing gestured toward someone else.

Wu Chen turned. This time it was a striking, mature woman in a tailored suit, rising to offer a toast.

“Hao Lulu. Thirty-two. PR manager at Changxing Industrial. Married, one son, eight years old. She’s been seeing Yang Baowen, deputy general manager at the same company, for years. Every Saturday afternoon she goes for a skin treatment at Enting Beauty Salon on Wenshun Road, West District…”

“You win. Let’s eat,” Li Ruobing said, cutting him off.

For a woman with her temperament to actually say “you win” out loud was rare enough to be remarkable.

She stopped asking.

Whatever appetite she’d had for testing his professional reach had already burned itself out.

They ate.

She even set food into his bowl once or twice—still keeping up the appearance of a couple, since they were in public.

Most of the time, though, her eyes stayed low, drifting sideways across the table, her mind clearly elsewhere.

“What are my measurements?” she asked suddenly, without looking up, still picking at her food as she spoke.

She still hadn’t let it go.

“Eighty-two, fifty-six, eighty-five,” Wu Chen said, just as casually, eating as he answered.

“Is there anything… distinctive about me?” she asked again, quieter this time.

“You’re hairless down there,” Wu Chen replied quietly.

Clack.

The chopsticks slipped straight out of Li Ruobing’s fingers and hit the table.