Page 58 of The Scholar's Improper Wife

Her head lifted. Not anger in her eyes, but a hollowed-out devastation that stole his breath. The manuscripts lay scattered like fallen leaves between them—The Scholar’s Wicked Proposal,Beneath the Willow’s Sigh, all bearing his seal.

He reached for her, instinct overriding thought. “Let me explain—”

She flinched back as if burned. “Explain what? How you watched me praise your stories? How you kiss me as one person, and wrote to me as another?” Her knuckles whitened around the page. “Is this another one of your pranks? Did you mock me and think I am a joke?”

Her quiet accusations felt like a slap across his face. She pushed back the chair, the legs scraping harshly against the floorboards. “All those research notes,” she whispered, staring at the ink-stained manuscripts. “Our boat. The moonlight. The kisses.” Her gaze finally met his, shattered. “Was that research for you too? Material for your next bestseller?”

“No!” The word tore from him, raw. He moved around the desk, blocking her path to the door. “No I did not! The huabens were imagined.Youare real to me.”

Her laugh was a thin, brittle thing. “Real? Or just another character for Moonlit Brush?” She gestured at the damning pages. “You turnedusinto ink and profit without my permission!”

He caught her wrist, trying desperately to hold on to something slipping uncontrollably out of his hands. “I wrote the huabens because I couldn’t stop thinking about you in the south—”

She looked down at his hand on her wrist, then back up at him, her eyes swimming with a betrayal so deep her voice broke. “I trusted you, Zhi-zhi. With everything.” A single tear traced a path down her cheek as she wrenched her hand free and walked away. “I do not think I wish to speak to you now.”

Chapter 27

The white fog curled around Yun-si’s ankles, cool and insubstantial, like the edges of a half-remembered thought. She recognized this place, not just by the fog, but by the way the air hummed with quiet, the way the mist swallowed sound until all that remained was the faintest echo of her own breath. She had been here before, in the worst of the fever, when the world had dissolved into fragments of heat and delirium. And then again, in fleeting glimpses and half-remembered moments.

A dream, then. Again.

She tilted her head back, letting the weight of her hair brush against her shoulders, and exhaled slowly. At least here, there was quiet and calm to rest the anguish of her soul...

Thenhestepped through the mist.

He stood ten paces away, turning his head as he looked around. He wore loose white inner robes, disheveled as though he’d spent the night tossing and turning. His long hair hung loose down his back, slightly tousled.

The usual smirk, that infuriating, knowing curve of his lips, was gone. In its place was an expression of sadness. The sight of him here, inherdream, sent a sharp pain through her chest.

“You,” she hissed, glaring at him.

Ting-zhi exhaled, long and suffering, as if he’d been dragged into this against his will. “Oh. This is going to be one of those dreams.”

Yun-si’s gaze narrowed. “Thosedreams?” she asked suspiciously.

He tilted his head, studying her with resignation, as though she were a particularly stubborn plot point he couldn’t quite smooth over. “Some dreams,” he began, counting off on his fingers, “I am already inside you. Some, you are on top of me. But this kind—” he gestured vaguely between them, “this is the kind where you talk a lot, and I have to seduce you.”

Yun-si’s face burned. “Wha—”

Her protest died in her throat as the implications of his words crashed over her. She stumbled back a step, arms crossing over her chest as if that could shield her from the sheer audacity of him. “Thisismydream!”

“Is it?” Ting-zhi took a step closer, his boots making no sound on the fog-dampened ground. The mist swirled around his ankles, clinging to the hem of his robes. “Mmm. Funny.” His voice dropped to a soft murmur that made her stomach flip. “I was just thinking about you.”

She stuttered, “Tha—that doesn’t mean—”

“—doesn’t mean I conjured this?” He spread his hands, palms upturned, as if presenting the endless white around them like evidence. The fog shifted at his movement, coiling and uncoiling like silk between his fingers.

Before she could gather her thoughts, Ting-zhi snapped his fingers.

The mist parted.

And there, where there had been nothing but emptiness, stood a bed. Not just any bed, but abed—wide and inviting, draped in red layers of silk and piled high with embroidered pillows that promised impossible softness. The frame was carved with intricate patterns of mountains and clouds, the kind of craftsmanship that belonged in a noble’s chamber, not in the middle of a dream.

Yun-si stared agape.

Ting-zhi didn’t hesitate. In one fluid motion, he closed the distance between them, his hands finding the curve of her waist as if he’d done it a thousand times before. And then he swept her off her feet, lifting her as easily as if she were made of paper, not bone and flesh.

She gasped, her hands flying to his shoulders for balance, her fingers curling into the fabric of his robes. “Gu Ting-zhi!”