Previously
After clearing the air with Resurreccion, Dolores falls asleep and dreams of Empress Juliana's funeral, recalling the day young Resurreccion raged like a beast in grief and violently shoved her away when she attempted to comfort him.
Watching Dolores offer that radiant smile, Resurreccion let out a quiet sigh.
Even if they had to put on an act of being utterly smitten newlyweds, this was a bit much.
He had never imagined Dolores Rochester could be so shameless.
‘Still, if pressing my mouth against her gets that quacking duck off my back, it’s a small price to pay.’
He planted a light kiss on each of her cheeks.
First the left, then the right.
When he spoke his farewell, his voice sounded surprisingly tender.
“Have a wonderful day, then. Wife.”
Only the glint in his golden eyes betrayed his disdain, making it clear how ridiculous he found this entire farce.
Naturally, Dolores smiled brightly in return, entirely unbothered.
“May Your Highness have a wonderful day as well.”
Their tender parting proved remarkably effective.
The moment she returned to the sitting room adjoining the master bedroom to work on the salon invitations, an enormous fuss erupted.
“Oh my goodness, oh my word! Who knew the Grand Duke had such a side to him?!”
“…”
“Heavens! If he’d shown even a fraction of that in public! Lady Dolores, your eye for men is simply divine!”
Rachel’s shrill voice grated on Dolores’s ears, leaving her momentarily at a loss for words.
‘To be fair, being loud and talkative isn’t an unforgivable flaw.’
Those were merely personal quirks.
The real problem with this woman lay elsewhere.
A few hours later, Rachel had let her guard down completely and was gossiping even more boisterously.
“I was so sure you would become the Crown Princess, Lady Dolores!”
“Were you?”
“Yes! You only had eyes for Prince Adrian for ten whole years, didn’t you? That’s why you always carried yourself with such aloof dignity.”
“…”
She had a habit of carelessly crossing the line with her words.
‘Always with that completely innocent, smiling face.’
Right on cue, Rachel let out a peal of laughter.
“Then again, devoted women are out of style these days anyway. Besides, you and His Highness the Grand Duke are so passionately in love, aren’t you?”
“I’m glad it appears that way. He does indeed take great care to keep me pleased.”
Dolores deliberately left out the part about ‘through pinching and sharp-tongued sarcasm.’
Hearing that suggestive remark, Rachel’s eyes practically sparkled.
“Oh, my… Ahem, Your Highness the Grand Duchess.”
“Yes?”
“There’s just one thing I’m dying to know… I’ve heard men from the Aleister Fief are absolute beasts in bed.”
Rachel smothered a breathy giggle behind her hand.
“How was it? Is it worth procuring a slave from down there for myself?”
Dolores maintained a calm, serene smile.
‘It is truly astonishing how oblivious she is to the sheer danger of what comes out of her mouth.’
Rachel’s father was an imperial palace official, so she had never faced any consequences, no matter how outrageously she overstepped.
Later on, she would even ride Angelica’s coattails, making herself an unbearable nuisance…
For now, however, that reckless habit of sticking her nose into everything and wagging her tongue was precisely what Dolores needed.
“Heh.”
Dolores merely offered a sweet smile.
With people like Rachel, laughing and leaving things vague was often far more effective than offering a detailed explanation.
‘She’ll let her own imagination blow it out of proportion anyway.’
True to form, Rachel clapped a hand over her mouth, her eyes blinking in rapid excitement.
‘Goodness… It must be utterly sensational.’
After all, it stood to reason, considering Dolores had tossed aside Crown Prince Adrian to choose him instead.
Just then, a commotion arose outside the window.
Catching sight of a familiar carriage, Dolores lifted the hem of her skirts.
“Ah. It seems His Highness has returned.”
“Oh, then I should come out to greet him as—”
“No, I shall go alone. I need to assist him with changing, so it may take quite a while.”
“…You help him change personally?”
Rachel’s eyes widened with renewed delight.
Rather than answering, Dolores retrieved a jewelry box from the vanity and began adorning herself.
‘This should make me look like a wife desperate to appear pretty for her husband, won’t it?’
And in the mirror…
She caught Rachel eyeing the jewelry box with greedy fascination.
Feigning ignorance, Dolores smiled with graceful composure.
“…I’ll leave the salon RSVPs to you, Lady Rachel.”
“Of course!”
Dolores slipped into the master bedroom through the adjoining door.
The moment she was gone, Rachel crept over and eased open the jewelry box.
“Hehe. Let’s see what we have here.”
What kind of baubles did the Grand Duchess actually possess?
“Good heavens…!”
As expected, the dainty jewels within were dazzling.
Among them, Rachel pulled out an antique-looking ring.
A round ruby was set between two slender bands of woven gold wire.
She slipped it onto her finger, tilting her hand this way and that with a pleased giggle.
“Hehe. This looks rather lovely, doesn’t it?”
Its brilliant sparkle suited her perfectly.
‘Humph. Playing lady-in-waiting to Dolores Rochester isn’t half bad after all.’
She had thought Dolores was out of her mind for kicking away the position of Crown Princess, but sticking by her side promised plenty of perks to reap.
Just as she went to pull the ring back off, a heavy thud echoed from beyond the bedroom door.
‘…What was that?’
A dangerous spark of curiosity flared inside her.
She recalled what Dolores had said right before leaving.
‘I need to assist him with changing, so it may take quite a while.’
A noble wife personally undressing her husband.
It was the sort of shameless indulgence only newlyweds so utterly besotted with each other would attempt.
And what on earth could they be doing in the middle of undressing?
‘Goodness me. Is it true she acts like a wildcat behind closed doors despite that demure face?’
It would be a sin not to see something so delicious for herself.
Rachel muffled her footsteps and crept down the connecting hallway.
The closer she drew to the bedroom door, the more clearly the sounds drifted out.
Though the door was firmly locked, the keyhole offered a clear view inside.
Through the gap, she saw the couple clinging to each other in breathless disarray, as though they had just finished a fierce bout of kissing.
“Ah… Your Highness.”
Dolores was panting softly, clinging desperately to the Grand Duke’s shoulders.
A deep flush coated the cheeks that were usually frozen in an impassive smile.
“The servants will talk.”
“Let them.”
The man’s raspy, low drawl sent a shiver straight down Rachel’s spine.
If a man whispered to her in a voice like that, her knees would buckle completely.
“If the master and lady are mad for each other, what can they do about it?”
“Still—ah.”
The Grand Duke buried his face into the curve of Dolores’s neck.
Dolores blindly caught the edge of the side table to steady herself, but overwhelmed by his weight, she slipped toward the floor.
Together, the two collapsed onto the rug.
‘Heavens! Oh, my heavens!’
Holding her breath, Rachel voyeuristically watched the couple’s breathless intimacy.
When the Grand Duke roughly tore off his shirt and tossed it aside, she felt as if her nose were about to bleed.
‘Gasp…! Look at those muscles!’
Though the side table blocked part of the view, the twilight glow washing over the shifting planes of his back was dizzyingly intoxicating.
The raw, explosive vitality radiating from his masculine frame took her breath away.
“Oh, my word. Heavens above.”
Rachel mumbled under her breath without even realizing it.
At that exact moment.
Her eyes locked dead-on with a piercing golden gaze straight through the keyhole.
‘Ah!’
Had she been caught?
Yet he seemed not to notice her, simply burying his face back toward his wife.
‘I-I should go.’
Tempted as she was to keep watching, Rachel had grown genuinely frightened.
Clutching her burning cheeks, she scrambled away as fast as her legs could carry her.
Dolores stared up at the ceiling, blinking slowly.
Resurreccion had already pulled away and sat beside her on the floor.
“Why on earth did you take off your shirt?”
“To give our little peeping tom something to talk about.”
“It was excessive…”
Dolores had scattered plenty of bait for Rachel before entering the room.
Having swallowed the bait whole, she would soon produce the exact result they wanted.
‘After this, we can finally go back to sleeping in separate rooms.’
Yet as Dolores attempted to push herself up, her strength gave out, and she sank back down.
“Ugh.”
“What is it?”
“Ah… I suppose I tried to stand up too quickly.”
In truth, her head was spinning, and her stomach roiled with a familiar nausea.
The urge to vomit, which had briefly subsided after seeing Angelica, had begun striking without warning at all hours.
‘Is it because my nerves are frayed?’
When her anxiety flared, merely holding a calm smile exhausted all her energy.
Naturally, her appetite had plummeted.
‘If my stomach is empty, at least there will be nothing left to throw up.’
Since the Grand Duke spent his days at the imperial palace and only shared dinner with her, there was little risk of him noticing.
She climbed back to her feet as though nothing were amiss.
‘I cannot afford to show any weakness here.’
She had already scraped dangerously against the Grand Duke’s volatile temper once before.
A bit of physical distress like this was nothing more than a tiny pebble in her path.
The invitation to the imperial salon finally reached Madame Rouare’s hands.
The moment she laid eyes on it, she crumpled the fine, gilded stationery in a vicious grip.
“Ha. So the little wretch dares to host a salon, does she?”
She was burning with a frantic urge to ruin it.
She wanted nothing more than to watch Dolores Rochester crumble in humiliation, that smug face turning deathly pale in helpless panic.
‘But what if she actually exposes my past deeds in retaliation?’
Madame Rouare had recently scrambled to scrub away every trace of her prior schemes.
Surely no evidence remained.
Even so, an uneasy gnawing lingered in her chest.
Soon, however, a confident smirk spread across her lips.
“…Hmph. It doesn’t have to be me who ruins it.”
She would stay perfectly still.
All she had to do was lend a quiet hand to her enemy’s enemy, and let them destroy it for her.