The lighting in Jun Yi’s hotel suites was always meticulously designed—bright spotlights on the wine cabinet and bookshelves, LED ring sensor lights on the bathroom mirror, and beside the bed, a bamboo floor lamp emitting soft, warm yellow light that seemed to filter through gaps. When their eyes met in the surrounding silence, the quietness seemed to add a gentle, ambiguous intimacy to the atmosphere.

The two grew closer, their heartbeats audible.

As adults of opposite sexes, what might happen next seemed only natural.

—If only Ji Mingshu’s stomach hadn’t growled from hunger.

Even the next day, as she got up to continue recording the show, Ji Mingshu was still thinking about last night.

Her mind was filled with images of their eyes meeting, about to kiss. She unconsciously regretted her stomach’s ill-timed growl, and couldn’t help mentally reconstructing the intimate scene that should have followed.

“Mingshu, Mingshu?” Feng Yan called her name twice. “What are you smiling about? We’ve arrived.”

Yan Yuexing followed his gaze and looked at her, her expression somewhat contemptuous. Seeing that the cameras weren’t rolling yet, she didn’t bother to act, saying sarcastically: “Spring fever!”

After speaking, she got out of the car first, calling for the makeup artist to touch up her makeup while anxiously glancing back, pretending to casually look into the car.

These days, Yan Yuexing had been so suppressed by Ji Mingshu that she was filled with anger. Yet as a teen idol, she couldn’t express the thousand or ten thousand swear words in her heart as fearlessly as Ji Mingshu did on camera.

Moreover, Ji Mingshu was particularly wicked, with inexplicable confidence, not knowing how to be humble or patient, charging ahead with everything she did.

Having fully experienced Ji Mingshu’s arrogance lately, Yan Yuexing immediately regretted her loose tongue, anxiously fearing that Ji Mingshu would react, rush out of the car, and slap her twice. She believed Ji Mingshu was capable of doing such a thing.

However, Ji Mingshu, having just emerged from her fantasy, didn’t have time to settle accounts with Yan Yuexing for her loose tongue. She was quickly immersed again in the shock of “actually having inappropriate thoughts about Cen Sen,” unable to recover for a long time.

Too shameful!

Too unreal!

Ji Mingshu patted her face, constantly telling herself to wake up.

How could she possibly feel regret about nothing happening with Cen Sen, and even fantasize about it?

No, impossible! It must be because she hadn’t had sex for too long that she was so desperate!

Besides, she could never like a man like Cen Sen, whose zodiac sign had been incompatible with hers since childhood—it was simply ridiculous!

She simply and purely liked his money, that’s all!

Yes, that’s right.

Having convinced herself, Ji Mingshu nodded solemnly.

Yesterday had been chaotic, and her sleep at night was light. Cen Sen hadn’t even adjusted to the time difference yet.

Early this morning, he had called a meeting with the branch’s senior executives. A group of normally well-dressed people sat there, blaming and shirking responsibility, arguing heatedly for three full hours.

With Cen Sen, a living, breathing person, sitting in the main seat, they still argued with red faces and uncompromising attitudes, creating the atmosphere of a heated inheritance dispute.

After the meeting ended, Cen Sen’s head still echoed with the clamor of the quacking crowd.

He entered his office alone and instructed Zhou Jiaheng not to let anyone in. He leaned back in his office chair, listening to piano music for half an hour before slightly recovering.

People say women are noisy, but compared to these men, he felt Ji Mingshu could almost be described as gentle and considerate.

Thinking of Ji Mingshu, he picked up his phone, opened WeChat, and accepted her friend request.

Cen Sen rarely browsed Moments, but noticing that Ji Mingshu had photos in her album section, he casually clicked in for a glance.

Unexpectedly, that glance turned into half an hour of browsing.

Ji Mingshu’s Moments were more or less as he had imagined, but besides presenting herself as an elegant socialite and wealthy wife, there were also many posts full of everyday life vibes, even exuding a bit of silliness.

When Zhou Jiaheng called on the internal line to remind him of afternoon engagements, he had just reached Ji Mingshu’s New Year photos from the beginning of the year.

She was building a snowman with the younger members of the Cen family, wrapped in a fluffy coat, wearing a little red hat on her head, her eyes curved in a smile, both radiant and adorable.

He saved the photo while calmly giving work instructions.

Meanwhile, Ji Mingshu, eating a hotel-delivered lunch box while browsing her phone, was so shocked she almost dropped her food container.

She had just opened Moments to find multiple notifications. Checking them, she discovered that Cen Sen had liked over a hundred of her posts.

And just as she suspected, the app might be glitching, Cen Sen continued liking in real-time.

One notification after another kept popping up, the liked content becoming increasingly ancient, and comments began to appear.

Cen Sen: [Photo isn’t focused.]

Cen Sen: [Clothes color too bright.]

Cen Sen: [Wrong tense used.]

Cen Sen: [Idiom misused.]

Ji Mingshu stared directly at the comment notifications, her head full of question marks. Did he think he was a class teacher, reading and correcting as he went?

Ji Mingshu: [?]

Ji Mingshu: [What are you doing?]

Cen Sen: [Looking at your Moments.]

Although she had always shared her Moments publicly, Cen Sen wasn’t actually within her expected audience.

And what was with this man? If he wanted to look, fine, but why did he need to like and comment, as if saying “the emperor has read this”? It was too bizarre!

Ji Mingshu didn’t want to argue with him and went straight to the source, changing her Moments visibility to the last three days, then sent a smug tongue-sticking-out emoji.

Unexpectedly, Cen Sen didn’t follow normal rules. He suddenly sent her a candid photo of her building a snowman during the New Year, with a personal comment.

Cen Sen: [This one looks best.]

Ji Mingshu: […]

Cen Sen: [Rather cute.]

Ji Mingshu: […]

Her ears turned red.

This, this scoundrel, was he trying to seduce her? What was with this sudden direct approach?

She felt strangely guilty and quickly hid her phone in her bag.

After absent-mindedly finishing her lunch box, she went upstairs and happened to run into Feng Yan and Pei Xiyan sawing wood.

Most of the wood they were sawing had no real purpose, only to enhance the show’s watchability, making viewers believe the guests had contributed to the custom furniture.

With cameras off, the two were just practicing, since having an awkward sawing posture during actual recording could easily invite criticism.

She squatted down to watch them, cupping her face, but her thoughts were still wandering in outer space.

Feng Yan casually asked, “Mingshu, what’s wrong? You seem a bit off today.”

Ji Mingshu came back to reality, “I’m fine, I was just thinking… how to specifically enhance the practicality of our design plan.”

Neither Feng Yan nor Pei Xiyan could speak to this issue.

They were celebrities, mostly pampered in life, able to appreciate Ji Mingshu’s high-end designs, but not understanding how to make designs more practical.

When Cen Sen said last night that Ji Mingshu’s design lacked practicality, she had seriously thought about it for quite a while.

But with the renovation period already half over, there wasn’t much room for changing the hard furnishings; she could only focus on the soft furnishings.

She felt the root problem of insufficient livability was the lack of storage space. When she came today, she had visited neighbors in this building, and based on her observations, temporarily modified several custom furniture designs.

Take the sofa, for example.

Star City is in the south, without floor heating in winter, so most households use electric heaters for warmth.

At the neighbor’s house, she saw they had placed an electric heater under the coffee table. But since heaters are usually large, placing them under coffee tables first takes up space at the bottom of the table, making it inconvenient to stretch legs when watching TV, and second, it’s not aesthetically pleasing.

So she modified the custom sofa design, leaving a rectangular space under the long sofa base to store the electric heater, with small wooden doors that slide up and down in front, while the bases of the side sofas were turned into storage cabinets.

Of course, more specific changes would have to wait until she got back to make overall revisions to the design drawings.

Ji Mingshu squatted a while longer, watching them change the wood’s direction, then suddenly asked out of nowhere, “Let me ask you something.”

Feng Yan: “What is it?”

Ji Mingshu: “Would you suddenly give a girl many likes, then save a photo from her Moments, send it to her, tell her the photo looks nice, and even call her cute?”

Feng Yan and Pei Xiyan paused slightly, exchanging bewildered glances, then both shook their heads.

It made sense that young Xiyan didn’t have dating experience, but Feng Yan wasn’t that young—what was he shaking his head for?

Ji Mingshu pressed him: “Then what do you think such behavior generally means?”

Feng Yan: “This… maybe he likes her?”

“What like? Isn’t it just flirting?”

Yan Yuexing rolled her eyes, feeling particularly speechless about these three who, combined, were over sixty years old yet pretending to be innocent.

Feng Yan, afraid the two girls would start quarreling again, hurriedly shook his head slightly at Ji Mingshu, indicating she shouldn’t take offense.

During this time, everyone had seen Yan Yuexing’s true colors—a cute, moe girl idol on camera, but a little hooligan once the cameras were off.

Initially, she had wanted to maintain a good image to get close to Pei Xiyan, but with Ji Mingshu protecting the kid in front and Pei Xiyan’s evasion skills maxed out, she couldn’t get close or even say more than a few words while filming together, so she didn’t bother wasting effort anymore.

They were husband and wife who could go straight to bed, so what was there to flirt about? Ji Mingshu ignored Yan Yuexing’s nonsense, only pondering Feng Yan’s words with her chin in her hand. Did Cen Sen like her?

It was so strange; she couldn’t feel it at all normally, just this occasional gesture. Besides intermittent amnesia, was there also intermittent liking?

She discussed it further with Feng Yan.

Throughout this process, Pei Xiyan maintained a politely distant attitude, not participating in the conversation, though at one point he went out to take a call from Cen Sen.

Cen Sen called to ask if Ji Mingshu had modified her design plan. He had just sent Ji Mingshu a WeChat message asking about it, but she didn’t seem to check her phone and hadn’t replied.

Pei Xiyan responded briefly, then thought for a moment and added, “Brother Sen, it seems someone is pursuing Sister Mingshu recently.”

Cen Sen: “What?”

Pei Xiyan felt that as a man, he shouldn’t gossip like this, and simply told him to ask Ji Mingshu.

But when Cen Sen asked again, he couldn’t help it. Clearing his throat, he said briefly: “There’s a man who gave Sister Mingshu many likes on her Moments, even sent her photos of herself, calling her beautiful and cute. That’s all. Don’t say I told you.”

He coughed again, seemingly embarrassed about his act of informing.