The Fiancé Realized
The fiancé realized it.
After fleeing the Grand Duchess's chamber as if in escape, I wandered the Valencia Ducal Mansion with no particular destination in mind.
The servants of House Valencia, whom I ran into here and there, kept glancing at me oddly as I drifted about with a dazed look on my face, but whenever their gazes became too much to bear and I sat down somewhere for a moment, the scene from just before would come flooding back in vivid detail.
Those pink lips, smacking and moving as she ate the cake I had fed her—they kept surfacing in my mind no matter what, and I found I simply couldn't sit still.
After wandering around like that for a good while, a thought occurred to me.
— Why couldn't you say anything just now? Have you truly fallen for me?
Those were the words the Grand Duchess had said that very morning, provoking me the way she did.
I hadn't given them much thought when I first heard them. So why were they coming back to me now?
Could it be…
"…Have I really fallen for her?"
No matter how I turned it over in my head, that was the only answer I could arrive at.
That I had genuinely fallen for Lady Rebecca.
Even now, with her not standing before me, her image kept rising up in my thoughts, and my head was filled to the brim with nothing but Rebecca. It was an inescapable situation, through and through, wasn't it?
I was currently denying it, insisting there was no way it could be true, but honestly, there wasn't a single reason why an ordinary man wouldn't fall for Rebecca.
Rebecca's beauty was such that the original novel went out of its way to call her the most beautiful woman in the Empire.
Rebecca's background was the Valencia Ducal Family—one of only two ducal houses in the entire Empire.
And on top of all that, Rebecca's own abilities were so outstanding that she was lacking in no area whatsoever.
How could any man resist falling for a woman like that?
And yet the reason I was so reluctant to admit I'd fallen for her was simple.
'If that personality of hers ever realizes I've fallen for her…'
Rebecca herself finding out that I had come to like her—I could predict, start to finish, exactly what would follow from that.
— You like me? …Oh, really?
I could already picture it clearly: Lady Rebecca hearing my confession and flashing that infuriating little smile, as if to say gotcha.
In love, the one who likes the other is always at a disadvantage—and there was no chance that Rebecca, sharp-minded and sharp-tempered as she was, wouldn't know that.
The moment she realized she held all the cards no matter what I did, my fate would be sealed: I would be dragged around at her whim for the rest of my days.
Me, being led around by the nose, exactly as Rebecca had declared. The mere thought sent a chill down my spine, and I shook my head quickly.
"…Absolutely not. Not happening."
That above all could never, ever be allowed to happen.
On the very first day I met Rebecca, I'd already failed to hold back when she provoked me, and I'd extracted an apology from her with a staring-contest bet.
Living the rest of my life staring at that insufferably smug expression of hers? Utterly unthinkable.
So, determined that that alone must never come to pass, I racked my brain desperately—but the reality was that no particularly good ideas were forthcoming.
No matter how hard I ground my gears, nothing brilliant surfaced.
I let out a deep sigh.
"…This is bad."
This was not an ordinary problem; it was a serious one.
In The Crown Prince Holds the Sword, Rebecca Valencia was even given the setting of being exceptionally perceptive.
If I didn't come up with countermeasures, it was only a matter of time before Rebecca caught on to my feelings.
Of course, I would do my utmost to hide the fact that I'd fallen for her—but by the very nature of being human, I was bound to slip up and let it show once or twice.
And the moment I slipped, Rebecca would inevitably notice. Which would lead, naturally, to that future I had just sworn could never happen.
…Horrid to imagine, even a second time.
Shaking off the dreadful thought once more as I walked on, I found—before I knew it—that my feet had carried me right back to the door of Rebecca's room.
"…"
I fell into silence for a moment, my hand resting on the door handle.
Should I go back in? Or shouldn't I?
Going back into Rebecca's room meant risking exposure of the feelings I had only just become aware of myself—and that frightened me.
But not going in made no sense either, given that I had walked all the way back here.
After standing there deliberating for a long while, my thoughts finally tipped toward the side of going in.
'…I do owe her an apology for just walking out like that, after all.'
I had left the room without so much as asking her leave, carried away by the strange atmosphere in the air and a heart hammering away as if I'd caught some wretched disease. Given such discourteous behavior, going back in to apologize seemed the right choice.
Even if I avoided meeting her here, we were still bound by our engagement—we would inevitably meet again. Dodging her now seemed rather pointless.
Creak—
Having finally made up my mind, I opened the door to her chamber—forgetting entirely that I ought to knock first.
"…Oh."
What greeted me there was Rebecca, caught mid-reach for the last slice of the strawberry cake I had brought her.
The one sitting on the bed, trying to eat her last piece of cake. And the one who had just walked into the room.
An awkward silence hung suspended in the air between the two of us, filling the Grand Duchess's chamber.
"…You finished all of it?"
"…"
It was my exclamation that broke a silence which had seemed destined never to end.
No note of reproach, no trace of a curse—just pure, unfiltered astonishment.
'I did think that was rather a lot for one person to eat alone.'
If I recalled correctly, the Rebecca Valencia of the novel was supposed to have a modest appetite.
Was my memory wrong? Or did the setting simply cease to matter in the face of strawberries—her favorite food of all? There was no way to know for certain. But one thing was certain.
"…"
Rebecca was, at this very moment, utterly mortified.
Was it embarrassment at having devoured all that cake by herself? Or was it shame at having been caught in such an ungraceful state, with whipped cream smeared all over her mouth? I couldn't tell which.
But watching her face grow redder and redder by the second, it was plain enough that the situation was an embarrassing one for her.
And seeing that look of mortification on her face…
"Was it delicious?"
…I wanted to tease her again.
Every worry I'd been laboring over just moments ago—how to keep my feelings from being discovered—vanished entirely from my mind.
By this point, I began seriously to wonder whether I might have some sadistic streak in me, some latent urge to torment people.
'But how am I supposed to resist that?'
Rebecca—who wore that insufferable, punch-me-if-you-dare expression—was now blushing and squirming with embarrassment over nothing more than having finished a strawberry cake.
Even the author of this novel, were she to descend from heaven itself, would not have been able to hold back.
"…"
At my question, Rebecca's face flushed an even deeper crimson.
"Come to think of it, I'm fairly certain I told you that you were only allowed to eat what I fed you myself…"
"…You're the one who suddenly walked out on me—"
Rebecca shot back with her own brand of logic, as if refusing to lose ground: You left on your own, didn't you?
It was a fairly decent attempt. But I was not the sort to lose a war of words over a rebuttal of that caliber.
"So you secretly ate it all?"
"…That is—"
"And with whipped cream smeared all over your face while you were at it."
"…"
Rebecca, apparently having failed to account for the cream on her mouth, hurriedly turned her head away and began hunting for her hand mirror.
I watched her scramble about in flustered search for a moment, then drew a single tissue from the ones I had prepared alongside the cake.
"What would you have done without me?"
And I wiped the whipped cream from the corner of her lips.
"…"
Was Rebecca ashamed that I had wiped her mouth for her? Or was she embarrassed by the strange atmosphere settling over this moment?
I couldn't say.
But her face had turned so much redder than before that it had become indistinguishable from the color of her hair.
'…There it is.'
Watching her like that, I finally hit upon the answer I had been racking my brain for all this time.
The fact that I liked Rebecca was now beyond denial. And keeping that fact from her was quite the difficult mission.
But what if I simply never gave her a situation in which she could catch on?
If, just like now, I kept outwitting her—teasing her, flustering her, mortifying her at every turn—then surely Rebecca would come to believe that I simply enjoyed playing with her, without ever realizing that I had truly fallen for her.
Given her personality, she would no doubt bury herself entirely in the single-minded desire to beat me at all costs, without once stopping to consider why I did the things I did.
The Grand Duchess was sharp-eyed, yes—but her competitive hunger to win far outstripped even that sharpness.
'…Though if I ever do get caught, it's straight to the abyss.'
If I lost to Rebecca even once and she discovered the truth, there was no telling how many tens, hundreds—perhaps thousands—of times over she would repay me for every jab I'd ever made at her expense.
'But I won't lose. Not ever.'
I was confident.
Confident that I would not be defeated by Rebecca.
Because the Grand Duchess standing before me now—Rebecca Valencia—was the character I had loved longest and most dearly in all my years reading this novel.
"As promised, I shall feed you the rest of the cake myself."
"…Yes."
And because she was real, standing right in front of me—the person I had come to love.
And therefore.
The Grand Duchess would lose to me, today and every day.
And so, three years passed.