Chapter 083: Fake! It’s Fake Again!

Chapter 083: Fake! It’s Fake Again!

Su Qingying truly could not follow Wu Chen’s thinking. From the moment Wu Chen had held her, that had become leverage against him. Each of them held something over the other; each would keep the other’s secret.

Which meant this whole matter had never been a threat to her from the start.

She also understood that a woman as proud as Li Ruobing, genuinely wronged by her own boyfriend, would take her revenge on him and then kick him out of her life.

She would be clean about it. She might not even bother going after the woman who’d taken her man.

Because she was a very forceful, controlling woman. Her man was either held tight under her hand or, the moment he disgusted her and wronged her, thrown out like garbage.

A woman like that had nothing but contempt for messy entanglements.

So… what was Wu Chen thinking? Had he lost his mind?

Su Qingying stared at him, wide-eyed, waiting for an answer.

“Actually…” As he spoke, Wu Chen reached over, pinched her cheek, tugged it gently, then let go. “Li Ruobing and I aren’t boyfriend and girlfriend at all. That’s a secret between the two of us.”

Su Qingying’s eyes widened further. Then she lifted a finger and waved it, understanding breaking across her face. “Ah… I know. You two are fake as well!”

“Correct.” Wu Chen smiled and nodded.

He explained nothing further. There was no need. What he’d said was the truth, and Su Qingying would believe it the instant she heard it, without a shred of doubt or any lingering confusion.

Because Li Ruobing had a record. Three times over.

Everyone in Donghai’s business circles knew that Li Ruobing had once been pushed toward marriage by her family, and had come to Donghai to hide and start a company of her own. Three separate times she had run the fake-boyfriend trick. That way she wasn’t single, and a fake boyfriend made a serviceable shield.

But her fake-boyfriend performances had been so thin they were painful to watch.

At banquets those fake boyfriends trailed behind her like flunkeys. If Li Ruobing didn’t introduce them, everyone assumed they were her assistants. That was how bowed and careful and deferential they were.

If that was them in public, they were certainly worse in private. They likely treated Li Ruobing like an empress, an ancestral tablet to be worshipped.

That was a boyfriend?

Would Li Ruobing want a man like that?

All of them were fake.

So this time, when Su Qingying learned that the man who had texted her was Li Ruobing’s boyfriend—and set that against the rumors running through Donghai these past few days about Li Ruobing’s boyfriend—she had naturally concluded what everyone else had. That it was real.

Far too real.

She had never imagined it was fake this time as well.

“Only Li Ruobing and I know about it. To play the part properly, even her younger brother doesn’t know. You have to keep the secret. Understood?” As he said it, Wu Chen reached out and struck her.

Smack! Very crisp.

It landed on Su Qingying just below the small of her back.

“Of course I won’t say anything. I’d only be making trouble for myself.” She shifted a little closer to him as she said it. Li Ruobing’s relationship with Wu Chen was bound to her own relationship with Wu Chen, and that was bound to her own secret. She wouldn’t dare speak even if she had a hundred times the nerve.

Besides, she was not the kind of person who leaked secrets.

“Oh… so in that case, you lied to me!” It came to her all at once. She had settled onto her knees beside him, and now she narrowed her eyes at him. “The leverage you handed me was fake! You aren’t afraid of Li Ruobing at all!”

“Didn’t you already know that I knew your secret, and came to upend your life on purpose? Do you regret it?” Wu Chen smiled, and didn’t deny a word.

Su Qingying’s eyes narrowed further. Then, suddenly, she smiled.

She twisted around and lay across his lap, arms circling his waist, chin lifted, and answered obediently, in two words. “I don’t.”

She didn’t regret it.

Not only did she not regret it, she seemed… happier for it.

She felt she ought to thank Wu Chen. He had helped her take this one step, and given her the courage, at last, to begin resisting her mother.

And those four hours with him today had been, without exaggeration, the finest four hours of her life. Today could fairly be called the most relaxed, most comfortable, most self-determined, most at-ease day of her twenty-seven years.

She was an M, and the skill Wu Chen had shown across those four hours had genuinely conquered her. It had left her extraordinarily, extraordinarily pleased.

The truth was she had already found it hard to leave him.

Her original plan had been to let go completely today and make it the most precious day of her life. Tomorrow she would go home and meet the storm. In the end nothing much would happen to her. She would still inherit the family business. Her life would fall back into its order, back onto its proper track.

She had intended to break off all contact with Wu Chen after today.

Even though everything he had shown her suited her exactly, even though it made her feel that Wu Chen was the “Master” fated to hold the whip over her, she still could not contact him again.

There were many reasons. The most important was that Wu Chen was Li Ruobing’s boyfriend. She couldn’t do that. She couldn’t stay tangled up with him.

But now she knew Wu Chen was a fake boyfriend too.

She really was rather pleased.

Because it meant that in the future she could still be with him in secret, and do certain things.

“Get up and get dressed. Li Ruobing will be here soon. Half an hour, maybe forty minutes.” Wu Chen pinched her cheek.

“She’s coming?” Su Qingying sat straight up, tensing without meaning to. “What’s she coming for?”

“To look at you, obviously. She and I are fake, so it stays out in the open. You and I are real, so it has to stay hidden. She needs to be at ease. You follow?” Wu Chen smiled.

“Then…” Something seemed to click, and she loosened. “Then I just behave normally, right?”

“Right.” Wu Chen nodded.

“And could you not tell her my secret? Just say the two of us are dating in secret. All right?” Su Qingying pleaded.

“All right.” He nodded again, smiling.

“Love you, Master. Muah!” She threw her arms around him, kissed him, then got up and began dressing.

Su Qingying’s love life was a secret too, something the Su family would never permit, but she wasn’t afraid of Li Ruobing knowing.

Back when she’d accused him of lying, she had already worked it out: the original leverage was fake, but Wu Chen had handed her new leverage in its place—the secret between him and Li Ruobing that could never, under any circumstances, get out. Their fake romance.

So now it wasn’t only that she and Wu Chen held each other’s leverage in a new balance. Li Ruobing was inside it as well. The three of them formed a delicate structure of mutual restraint.

With her intelligence, Su Qingying was entirely capable of seeing that she may have fallen into a trap Wu Chen had laid with great care, an abyss of a quagmire that was swallowing her whole.

And she not only didn’t resent it, she rather enjoyed it.

Wu Chen was controlling her, an M, in a way that felt good. She was willing.

All her life she had hoped some powerful man would come and conquer her.

Wu Chen was that man.

She was even looking forward, a little, to seeing Li Ruobing. It felt to her as though the three of them had formed a very private circle, with the sense of being one of us. She could talk to Li Ruobing in a relaxed state, without holding herself up, without keeping the performance running.

What she didn’t know was that although Li Ruobing and Wu Chen’s relationship was fake, it had already… begun moving in the direction of the fake becoming real.

A little over half an hour later.

Knock, knock, knock!

Someone knocked at Wu Chen’s door.

He went over to open it.

Li Ruobing, of course.

The instant the door swung wide, she stood there and stared at him, unblinking, with a truly bizarre look in her eyes.