Three Sisters?
Three sisters?
Junyoung went rigid as a statue.
They weren't standing close, but there was no mistaking it — she was looking at him, and she wasn't taking her eyes off him, either. Had she recognized him? Only hours ago, the two of them had been wrapped around each other with nothing between them. Had she sensed something strange about him?
No way.
His heart pounded like mad. He couldn't have torn his gaze away if he'd tried. Unless she'd seen through him, no one would hold eye contact with a stranger this long.Had he been caught? A single bead of sweat rolled down from his temple.
At that instant, her face went flat with disinterest and she whipped her gaze away.
Right on cue, a sedan glided up in front of her. Nawol opened the rear door and slipped inside, and with a low rumble, the car carrying her pulled off the estate grounds. So that had been her commute to work.
"God, I panicked over nothing."
Junyoung let out a hollow laugh and set down the broom he'd been clutching.
When their eyes had stayed locked that long, he'd been certain he'd been found out. He'd assumed Nawol had recognized him — but no. She'd simply been staring because someone happened to be standing there.
"Seriously. What the hell."
He felt utterly deflated.
Yesterday she'd hauled him off the second their eyes met; today she looked straight through him as if he were livestock. Honestly, it stung. Not that he wanted her to recognize him — quite the opposite. If she had, far bigger problems would have followed, and he would have had to explain how a man had turned into a woman overnight.
Even as his brain insisted it was a blessing she hadn't known him, the disappointment wouldn't quite fade.
"Well, at least I got one night with her."
With a woman he'd only ever watched from afar, for a single day, he'd been able to tangle their bodies together. Better to let it pass as a good memory than sulk over not being recognized.
"Yeah. This is how it should be."
And with that, he swept up the leaves that had fallen overnight.
Absorbed in the work, he caught sight of the hand gripping his broom — a distinctly masculine hand. No one would ever guess that just hours ago, it had belonged to a woman.
"How is something like this even possible?"
Only today had it finally become certain: come nightfall he became a woman, and when morning broke, he turned back into a man.
"I used to see this stuff only in comics. And now it's happening to me."
Turning into a woman was astonishing enough on its own — but the fact that he'd spent a night with her, with Lee Nawol, was harder to believe still.
"It was good. God, it was good."
Her bare body from yesterday kept flashing back into his mind. Undressed, she was even more staggering than she was clothed. Breasts that had to run past a D-cup, an hourglass waist, wide hips, and a rear that sat high and full — a figure that wrung admiration out of him without even trying.
The true showstopper, though, had been the cock hanging between her legs.
"But seriously — why does she have a dick?"
Who could have guessed Lee Nawol was carrying a secret like that? Then again, he himself had gone from man to woman overnight, so who was to say a woman's body couldn't come with a cock attached?
Pfft. A self-deprecating laugh slipped out of him.
"So that's why she's never been with anyone."
With a secret like that buried inside an otherwise flawless body, she could hardly have dated just anyone.
"Fascinating, honestly."
He was still cleaning when a car he'd never seen before came rolling up the estate's entrance drive.
"What's that...?"
The car emerged from between the rows of trees and drew closer. Something about it felt decidedly out of the ordinary, and Junyoung held his breath without meaning to. Before long, it rolled to a slow stop in front of the main house.
Click. The door swung open, and an elegant black high heel touched the ground, followed by a leg sheathed in sheer silk stocking.
Gulp. Junyoung swallowed without realizing it.
A woman stepped out of the car and stood there.
She was the kind of beauty who seized your attention in an instant. Lee Nawol was a considerable beauty herself, but this woman was every bit her equal. Both were stunning — it was simply the air they carried that differed. Where Nawol's beauty was all elegance and intellect, this one radiated something loose and unbound, a freedom that refused to be fenced in. If Nawol was a beauty made for the hours before dawn, this one belonged to the morning sun.
Unlike Nawol, who favored tailored suits, this woman wore a crop top and a short skirt — and from the outfit alone, the difference between the two couldn't have been clearer. What they did share was a chest so heavy it seemed ready to burst free of her top, and hips so wide her skirt clung tight around them.
Where's she headed?
The beauty who'd stepped out of the car walked into the main house.
But the mistress just left. What business could bring her here?
He was staring blankly after the woman when someone tapped him on the shoulder from behind.
"What are you doing? It's time to eat."
He turned to find Sangwoo standing there, a coworker like him here at the estate. They'd joined around the same time and were close in age, so the two of them got along well.
"Oh — right. Yeah, let's go now."
Before he could be caught peeping, he hurriedly turned and made for the cafeteria.
Inside the staff dining hall, they collected their food and took their seats. Junyoung was absently shoveling rice into his mouth when Sangwoo struck up a conversation.
"What were you staring at so hard earlier?"
"Someone I'd never seen before walked into the main house, that's all."
"Ah, so it was your first time seeing Lee Chaeeun?"
"Lee Chaeeun?"
"Yeah, the mistress's younger sister."
Junyoung's eyes went wide. This was the first he'd ever heard of Lee Nawol having a sister.
"So she's her sister."
He thought back over the woman he'd just seen. Now that he heard they were family, their features did seem to resemble each other here and there.
"Chaeeun used to live in this mansion too, but once she left to shoot photos, she's only come home every now and then."
"Photos? She's a photographer?"
"Yep. A pretty famous one, from what I hear."
A photographer, huh. It suited that unrestrained air of hers, somehow. Sisters after all, he supposed — their charms were similar yet distinct, and his interest was piqued in spite of himself. If Lee Nawol was a futanari, might her sister be something similar too? Maybe it was because of everything that had happened yesterday, but his thoughts kept sliding that way.
"What, you interested?"
The sly remark jolted him wide awake.
"Wh-what? No! It's not like that."
His face burned scarlet. Obviously Sangwoo couldn't know about yesterday, but he found himself glancing around guiltily all the same.
"Why are you so shocked? Any man working for this family is going to be into those sisters — that's just a given, no? Gorgeous faces, incredible bodies."
Put like that, he couldn't argue. He'd overreacted like a guilty thief flinching at his own footsteps, and the embarrassment stung.
Junyoung hastily changed the subject.
"So why did she suddenly come back to the estate?"
"Beats me. Ran out of money, maybe?"
The two of them talked about the Lee sisters — Nawol and Chaeeun. Compared to Junyoung, still groping in the dark about the estate, Sangwoo had it all down pat, down to information ordinary hired hands were never supposed to know.
"You heard about this one?"
Sangwoo lowered his voice as if about to share something serious. Junyoung found himself leaning in, face drawing close without thinking.
"I heard it from someone else, but... apparently you can only inherit the family fortune if you continue the bloodline?"
"Continue the line? You mean they have to marry and have children?"
"Exactly. That's one of the conditions of the inheritance, or so I heard. But the mistress won't so much as look at a man, let alone marry one."
"That much is true."
It was already well-worn gossip around the estate that Nawol kept no lover. But for the inheritance to hinge on producing a child...
Junyoung thought back to the Nawol he'd seen yesterday. She had borne, unmistakably, the body of a futanari. Could a body like that conceive a child? Or would she need to impregnate another woman to sire an heir?
He was still lost in the question when Sangwoo spoke up again.
"Honestly, I don't think Lady Nawol has any plans to marry."
"Why not?"
"Nobody's ever seen her with a man, have they? So how would a marriage even happen? Even setting dating aside, you'd think she'd at least sit through a few matchmaking meetings before anything got arranged."
"I suppose."
"Which is maybe why her sister Chaeeun came back to the estate."
"To have a baby?"
"Right. Her sister does nothing but work and won't even consider kids, so she came home out of frustration, didn't she?"
It made a certain sense. Lee Nawol was in her late twenties now; it wouldn't be strange for family to start worrying and come home.
"At this rate, the youngest might turn up next."
"The youngest? Don't tell me there are three of them?"
"Yep. You didn't know?"
He hadn't been at the estate long, and from the day he'd arrived, he'd plugged his ears against the gossip and done nothing but work — so of course he wouldn't know.
"Man, you really don't know anything, do you?"
"Nope, so tell me. What's the youngest sister like? Is she pretty too?"
"Never seen her face myself. But with older sisters that beautiful, she's bound to be pretty too. They say the third daughter was taken away without anyone ever even seeing her face."
That stoked his curiosity about the youngest sister. What sort of person was she, and what did she look like? He caught himself wondering, then let out a hollow laugh at the pointlessness of it all.
"Not like any of it has anything to do with me."
His appetite suddenly gone, he set his spoon down. He'd simply had a stroke of luck and crossed paths with Lee Nawol for one brief moment yesterday. Her frigid attitude today made that much plain. It had been a fleeting connection, nothing more.
Just like always, she won't even know I exist. She'll live her life in this mansion, and I'll live mine. Even if her sisters came home for a while, they'd return to wherever they'd come from once their business was finished. Better not to get interested.
Junyoung made up his mind, there and then.
As of this moment, Junyoung truly believed he would never be entangled with the three sisters of the estate.
But fate has a habit of arriving at the most unexpected moment of all.