Damn It, Paragon

Enri folded his arms. His clear green eyes had gone serious, none of the usual clowning in them.

“Sure, the Captain could go and fall head over heels for that woman. Didn’t I tell you before? The Captain acts like he doesn’t, but he’s f**king all about a pretty face.”

“…”

“But what about the woman?”

“Pai.”

“Right, what about Miss Pai, then? Why did she accept the Captain’s confession? From what I saw talking with her before, she didn’t strike me as somebody all that keen on power.”

Keith fixed Enri with a look that said, ‘You’re talking sense for once.’ What it meant was, ‘You’re not wrong, but how about you drop it.’

Undeterred, Enri went on laying out his logic and his theories.

“Let’s grant every point. You can’t see inside a person, so suppose she really was someone who cared for honor and power. A maid catching the eye of the master of the house is a classic love story, sure, but pick it apart and the man’s terms are almost always the same.”

“Terms?”

“A standing of about a count, and the title has to be hereditary, naturally. Quite apart from a gleaming town house in the capital, the domain has to lie somewhere warm. And it’s no good if the land is stupidly large, either; it should be just about the size where hiring one capable steward is enough.”

Th-there were terms as detailed as that?

Keith had never once read a romance novel in his life, and it was a tale out of another world to him.

“But the Captain’s the Regent Duke.”

“…”

“The title’s on a time limit, and the domain’s the vast, barren North. Not so much as a town house to go and hole up in alone.”

“…”

“So the notion that Miss Pai accepted you for the terms doesn’t quite sit right either. That’s my point.”

The observation was quietly sharp and practical. Enri was like this often, offering an angle Keith had failed to consider.

“Now then. Unburden yourself to Enri here and be done with it. Are you by any chance being blackmailed by Miss Pai? If it’s hard to say out loud, you’re welcome to blink twice.”

Keith took the matter rather seriously; having the very premise of their courtship doubted was a problem. After turning it over and over, he decided to put Enri to use outright.

“Is it so strange? That she accepted my feelings and decided to look after the young lady.”

“The nanny contract isn’t strange in the least.”

“No?”

“She seems to get on well with the young lady and she’ll be paid well, so where’s the harm? But playing the part of a lover isn’t something you take money to… Gah. Don’t tell me, Captain. Wi-with money?!”

“Don’t be absurd.”

In fact that was precisely it. He had bought the relationship with money.

Catching a mouse by walking backwards, honestly.

He mastered the cold sweat that had sprung out of him in an instant and took his own measure.

My terms aren’t so wretched as all that.

He might be no great prospect as a husband, but as a lover, was he not perfectly acceptable? The title he would have to hand back one day, granted, but he could provide an allowance for keeping up appearances at any reasonable level.

Then, all at once, ‘time limit’ snagged at him.

If I said I was going back to being a mercenary… would that be the end of us?

Only when he reached a question that carried, somehow, a trace of regret did Keith come sharply back to himself. Emotion was seeping into his thinking.

“…tain. Cap-taaain!”

“Ah.”

Enri was watching him with an expression of profound dissatisfaction shot through with suspicion. Keith cleared his thickened voice and said,

“In any case, it’s enough if there’s a sound reason for her having accepted me.”

“Enough or not, it’s already done and dusted, mind.”

“It’s the face.”

“Sorry?”

However hard he racked his brain, this was all he had.

“Miss Pai said my face was to her taste.”

“…”

Will it work?

At the end of a suffocating silence, Enri broke into a beaming grin, the corners of his mouth hauled up so far they were on the verge of meeting the corners of his eyes.

“Weheey, our Captain’s come up in the world!”

“…”

“Regent Duke, and courting a beauty besides!”

He swallowed that on the spot?

“So that’s how it is, Miss Pai goes by looks as well. Well, it stands to reason when she’s that much of a beauty herself, hah! You may not have my all-round range, Captain, but you’re easy enough on the eyes.”

Subjected out of nowhere to an appraisal of his own face, Keith frowned. Every so often Enri behaved like a man who would drop dead if he failed to get through his daily allotment of sentences.

At any rate, he had turned up a serviceable excuse, so there was no reason to keep the chatterbox in the room.

“Enri.”

“Yeees.”

“You’re a distraction.”

“Meaning shut up and clear off, is it? Understood. The capable adjutant will be clocking off now.”

Snickering, Enri stopped halfway through turning the door handle and looked back.

“May I say just one more thing?”

— Whoosh!

Rather than answer, Keith snatched up one of the boots he had set down in a neat pair and hurled it. Enri dodged the incoming object with thoroughly practiced ease and whipped himself out through the door.

He did not, of course, forget to get in the one more thing he had not been given leave to say.

“Bashful, aren’t we.”

After Elrod Paragon’s will was made public, the inheritance candidates hurried back to their own castles as though they were racing one another. They had gone to confirm what reward or punishment Elrod had left them.

But some dug their heels in at the White Castle, and one of them was Count Luigi Husslix.

There was no chance this personage had been treated the same as the rest of that lot.

He counted himself a cut above the common run of relations, which was why his pride had been wounded on the first day he came to pay his respects and was shown to a guest room in the annex rather than the main keep. He had not troubled to hound the underlings only because he believed the White Castle would fall to him in the end regardless. Once he inherited, he would sweep this incompetent staff out and replace every last one of them, so why exhaust himself in advance?

But from the moment the heavy study door swung open and that fellow stepped through it, the mood had begun to turn strange.

Damn it, Keith Paragon.

After Elrod’s daughter was born and the duchess died, Luigi had glimpsed a certain possibility. He had clung to that one uncertain chance and nothing else, and had spent seven long years flat on his face.

But what came back to him was betrayal. Elrod Paragon had handed the office of Regent to the younger brother who had walked out on the family. And the damned straitlaced greenhorn, after squandering a whole week making a great song and dance of finding a young lady no bigger than a pea, had come back and said only, ‘I will carry out my brother’s last wish.’

“Damn it, damn it, Paragon!”

Bellowing it out did nothing to spend his temper, so Luigi snatched up a flower vase and hurled it. It struck the wall with a dull thud and dropped, water dribbling out of it. Glaring at the carpet as the stain darkened and spread, he got his breathing back under control.

“Haaah…”

When he swept back his disordered fringe, a pair of bulging, glaring eyes came into view, crawling with murderous intent the way maggots swarm in rotting flesh.

He set off for the main keep to have it out with his nephew. There he was told that Keith had already taken receipt of the jewel, the one made by fusing Elrod’s remains with aurorastone, and gone to the study.

“Hmph. He has a guilty conscience of his own, that’s why he creeps about like a rat.”

Stamping up to the second floor without a moment’s hesitation, Luigi came face to face with that same maid.

“Ohhh…”

Into his vision came a sight lovely enough to make him forget the rage that had been scorching his fuse black.

Her platinum-blonde hair, gathered high in a single tie, glittered like sunlight on rippling water in the morning light through the clean-lined window. Her healthy, translucent skin shone too, as though it had been dusted thickly with powdered jewels, and her full, rose-colored lips looked as if they had been wetted with dew.

— Gulp.

The flames of his rage flipped over into lust in no time at all. As a heaviness settled low in his belly, he even felt smug that his virility was still in working order.

“Right. There’s no hurry…”

A bit of fun with a maid was not going to change the situation.

He strode across the corridor and snatched the maid by the wrist.

“You… hrrgh?!”

In that instant, he could not register what had happened. His great body floated up into the air, hung there only a moment, and the next it was driven headlong into the stone floor.