Chapter 1

Ever since I was little, I’d had the feeling I was a prop in someone’s erotica.

More than one story, at that.

As a child, I’d been the sleeping daughter.

My parents both had affairs, cheating on each other with perfect impartiality. Naturally, they had little love left over for me.

They left me emotionally impoverished, with nothing but money.

Rich and spoiled, I paid the most gorgeous guy at school to be my boyfriend. He was so gentle that I thought I’d found true love and brought him home to meet my parents.

They barely glanced at me before heading out in separate directions to enjoy themselves.

Only my brother remained, lounging on the sofa in an impeccably tailored black suit, watching us with dark, unreadable eyes.

“The house is up in the hills, and it’s pouring outside. You should both stay here.”

My boyfriend frowned, looking troubled, but finally had to agree. He picked a room at random.

My luck at gacha games was abysmal. His was phenomenal.

That night, a gacha video popped up on my feed. Feeling lucky, I decided to go downstairs and find my boyfriend.

Instead, I crept down and heard unmistakably illicit panting from the other side of a door. My young mind was blown.

“Don’t… You’re Pei Xue’s brother. We can’t do this.”

“I could be your lover, too. You’ve been looking distracted ever since we met. Were you thinking about…”

So now I was the sleeping girlfriend?

I dumped him the next day. I could always pay for another man, but I only had one brother making money for me to spend, damn it.

Later, I entered a business marriage with Xie Ting, my current husband.

He was a friend of my brother’s, mild-mannered and refined, always wearing gold-rimmed glasses that made his emotions impossible to read.

Even in bed, he was unfailingly polite.

Well, well, well. He certainly wasn’t treating my adopted daughter that way now. With her, he was wild.

Perhaps I’d grown so used to the universe making a fool of me that I accepted the news without a hitch.

And drifted peacefully off to sleep.

No. Wait.

I shot upright like a dying patient given one last jolt of life.

In a marriage of convenience between families like ours,

having no feelings for each other was normal.

Doing our own thing was normal.

But my adopted daughter, Su Tao—I had brought her home from the mountains, raising that timid, dark, skinny little monkey into the bright, poised girl she was today, with skin fairer than snow.

Anger twisted painfully in my chest.

I didn’t care who Xie Ting used to satisfy himself. My adopted daughter was the one person he couldn’t touch.

Did those two think I belonged in some Japanese porn plot?

I sprang up and flung the window open.

The suggestive sounds outside instantly faded to almost nothing.

Into that silence, I cupped my hands around my mouth and called weakly toward the light in the garden below:

“Honey? Is that you down there so late?”

Of course, no one answered.

I gave a soft scoff. A nasty little smile curved my lips as I grabbed my phone and called Xie Ting.

The comments exploded:

[Holy shit, seriously? If his phone rings in the garden in the middle of the night, won’t the sleeping wife go straight down and catch them?]

[Hnnngh~ Phone play at last! Don’t panic. His wife won’t suspect a thing. She’ll just worry her darling husband has caught a chill and developed a fever. Heehee~]