The kiss over, Cheng Yao soothed her startled heart while sneaking glances around to see if anyone had noticed. After all, kissing in the middle of a Starbucks was a little embarrassing.
Now it was Qian Heng’s turn to stare openly at her.
Cheng Yao gave him a shove. “Stop looking at me like that.”
Qian Heng laughed and leaned in even closer, his warm breath brushing against her ear. “Looking at you like what?”
He kept his eyes on her. “Did you actually study law properly? Thoughts and eye contact don’t count as a violation—only actions do.” He glanced at her lips. “You did that to me just now, and did I say anything? And here you are, playing the victim first.”
“…”
Cheng Yao bit her lip, about to fight back, when Qian Heng said calmly—
“Starbucks coffee is, I suppose, reluctantly drinkable.”
He looked at her, and after only a moment, revised his answer—
“Actually, more than reluctantly.” His expression didn’t so much as flicker as he changed his tune. “Fairly and objectively speaking, I suddenly find it quite good. Not inferior to freshly ground coffee at all.”
Cheng Yao was a little surprised. “Really?”
“Hard to say for certain.” He looked thoughtfully at her lips. “One sip was too little to judge properly. I should have another.”
Before Cheng Yao could react, Qian Heng gently tilted up her chin and gave her a second kiss, slow and lingering.
This kiss went deeper than the first, and made her heart race even faster. Cheng Yao nearly forgot to breathe. By the time Qian Heng let her go, she was gasping for air, staring at him wide-eyed on reflex.
Her boss, however, showed not the slightest shame. His beautiful eyes tilted up faintly as he delivered his verdict with total seriousness: “The fact that Starbucks can run so many stores worldwide does say something about their strength. The flavor—not bad, I suppose.”
“…”
“Oh, right. There’s something you never told me about.”
Seeing the serious, solemn look on his face, Cheng Yao tensed up. “Huh? What thing?”
Her heart began to race with unease as she frantically ran through every bit of mischief she might have gotten caught for.
Was it that time she’d complained to Bao Rui that Qian Heng seemed so cold he needed some kind of tonic, and Bao Rui had ratted her out? Or was it the time she’d gossiped with Tan Ying that Qian Heng probably couldn’t find a partner and would end up marrying himself, and somehow he’d found out?
The more she thought about it, the more she felt that the list of things she’d said behind his back was endless…
Just as she braced herself for his final judgment, Qian Heng finally spoke.
“Last time you tricked me into livestreaming under your account. You got quite a few tips, didn’t you.”
“…”
“I heard from Bao Rui it might have been forty or fifty thousand.”
“…”
Qian Heng smiled faintly. “That counts as pre-relationship income. Comparable to premarital assets—it should belong to me.”
“…”
“So, hand it over.”
Cheng Yao was absolutely furious! What kind of unromantic man was this! She’d assumed he’d found some kind of leverage over her, that he’d threaten her into signing some unfair agreement, giving her a sweet little “punishment”!
In this moment, Cheng Yao was once again certain: Qian Heng did not deserve a partner! He was built for a life of solitude!
She retorted indignantly, “Fine, take it! I haven’t spent a cent of that ill-gotten money anyway! And what do you mean I ‘tricked’ you into livestreaming—I clearly taught you how to set a room password, you just failed to set it up!” As she spoke, her tone couldn’t help but turn sour. “And I didn’t even want other people looking at you! With all that ‘marry me, little brother’ and ‘date me, little brother’ nonsense! Hmph!”
At that, Qian Heng laughed, then reached out one long finger and poked her cheek a few times.
“You’ve got yourself pegged pretty accurately—possessive, jealous.” He pinched her cheek again. “Fine, I was joking. I’m not asking you for the forty or fifty thousand. It’s all yours.”
Cheng Yao refused with great dignity. “No, I don’t want it! It’s your premarital property!”
“Consider it your allowance,” Qian Heng said generously. “Forty or fifty thousand is a drop in the bucket to me. If someone stole that much from my bank account, I probably wouldn’t even notice.”
He said this as though it were the most natural thing in the world. “I generally only pay attention to figures with seven digits or more. What comes after the first million, I honestly can’t be bothered to remember. It’s not enough money to be worth remembering.”
“…”
“Also, I’ll transfer you another hundred and fifty thousand.”
“Huh???” Cheng Yao was stunned. “We’re just boyfriend and girlfriend, not some kind of arrangement. Why would you send me that much money?”
Qian Heng looked a little awkward. “That gift box last time—the one that got sent by mistake. You should pay them back for it.”
Now it was Cheng Yao’s turn to be baffled. “But didn’t you say you hadn’t even opened that bottle of Lafite? Can’t we just send the whole thing back as it is? Why spend over a hundred thousand on it…”
“I don’t want to give it back.” Qian Heng turned his head aside. “Even though it wasn’t a gift box you sent me, I’ve come to think of it as a token of our relationship, in a way. It means something to me.”
He glanced at her. “Anyway, it’s only just over a hundred thousand.”
How could anyone be so infuriatingly nonchalant about a statement like that?
Cheng Yao thought, if this weren’t my boyfriend, I might just jump up and hit him!
Just as she was silently fuming, she heard Qian Heng add—
“Because that hundred-odd thousand, through some twist of fate, led to me being with you. It was more than worth it.”
With just that one simple sentence, Cheng Yao no longer wanted to hit him. She wanted to kiss him again instead.
Before she could act on the impulse, Qian Heng’s phone rang.
Starbucks was somewhat noisy, so Qian Heng frowned slightly and stepped outside to take the call.
Through the glass window, Cheng Yao watched him.
He had returned to his composed, self-possessed self, listening to the call with few words, his handsome features carrying a cool sharpness—serious enough, professional enough.
Yet when he pushed the door open and came back in, though his face was still the same cool, handsome one, something in his expression seemed, Cheng Yao thought, a little gentler than before.
“There’s a case.” Qian Heng glanced at her. “To be precise, two cases, but their schedules happen to overlap. I’ll respect your wishes—you can choose either one to take on.”
The moment she heard “case,” Cheng Yao snapped to attention. “So what kind of cases are they?”
“One is a new client referred by an old client of mine—a family insurance dispute involving roughly ten million yuan in claims. It’s a field you haven’t handled before, worth the challenge, and the income is guaranteed. The other is a legal aid case the bar association just assigned. The client’s situation is…”
Before he could finish, Cheng Yao cut him off. “I want to take the legal aid case.”
“Mm.” Qian Heng nodded. “I’ll send you the case file in a bit.”
His calm acceptance actually surprised her. “I thought you’d try to talk me into the ten-million case. After all, we don’t charge fees for legal aid cases—there’s only a small case subsidy, and most of the time that doesn’t even cover the basic expenses. Taking this kind of case contributes nothing to the firm’s revenue…”
Qian Heng said nothing, only looked at her with a certain restraint. Yet the expression on his face might as well have carried a subtitle reading “that revenue of yours was never worth mentioning anyway…”
“…”
In that moment, Cheng Yao suddenly understood why people online always advised against dating your boss. Because right when you want to hit him, you also have to remember he’s the one paying your salary!
Still, aside from her genuine passion for public interest work and some vague realization she’d drawn from the Li Mengting case, Cheng Yao had her own reasons for wanting this case.
“I want to handle this case entirely on my own. I want it to be my first fully independent case.”
Qian Heng didn’t seem to think much of that. “Didn’t you already handle the Li Mengting case independently?”
“That’s different.” Cheng Yao was firm. “You were secretly helping me the whole time on that one. You had it under control the entire time—like learning to ride a bike while someone’s holding the seat the whole way. It might look like I was riding on my own, but deep down I knew there was never any real danger.”
She looked him in the eye. “I want to know what it’s like to do this without anyone protecting me from behind.”
Qian Heng instinctively turned his head aside. “You’ll fall.”
“Huh?”
“Learning to ride a bike with no one holding on—you’ll fall.” He kept his gaze fixed on some point in the distance, his tone somewhat awkward. “It’ll hurt a lot.”
“I’m not afraid of it hurting!”
Qian Heng finally glanced at her—the briefest, most fleeting look—before quickly looking away again. “I’m the one afraid of you getting hurt.”
Cheng Yao felt something catch in her chest. Damn it, hadn’t they agreed to keep work and personal life separate?!
Even as she inwardly railed against him, that inner rage had somehow turned rosy pink, and just because of that one sentence, her face began to burn again.
She was actually blushing.
Still, principles had to be upheld. Fighting the heat in her cheeks, Cheng Yao tried to hold her ground. “Some lessons and experiences only come from failing, falling, and getting hurt. I have to be able to handle cases independently eventually. If I never risk stumbling now, and always have you shielding me and keeping everything smooth, then eventually I’ll lose the ability to handle cases on my own—like a tiger raised in a zoo. Release it into the wild later, and it’ll only starve to death.”
“Then the tiger can just stay in the zoo forever, can’t it?” Qian Heng said, as though this were obviously reasonable. “You can just stay at Junheng forever, can’t you?”
Cheng Yao nearly lost the argument to his sheer nonsense. “Even if I stay at Junheng forever, you can’t possibly shield me forever. What if someday…”
“What’s not possible about that?” Qian Heng snorted. “Forget shielding you forever—with my ability, I could shield Bao Rui too, no problem.”
Cheng Yao was about to feel touched on Bao Rui’s behalf, when Qian Heng continued, “But I can’t be bothered to shield him.”
“…”
“He’s not you. Let him crawl and stumble through it himself.”
“…”
How could anyone say something so unapologetically, so movingly unfair? She wondered if Bao Rui would still be able to worship Qian Heng as his personal ray of sunshine after hearing this.
“Though I don’t personally want this, since you want to handle a case independently, I respect your decision.” Qian Heng looked slightly uncomfortable. “When you fall and come find me, I suppose I can reluctantly comfort you a little.”
Cheng Yao couldn’t help but laugh. A man like Qian Heng really was the reincarnation of tsundere itself.
Still, she took the chance to lay down the terms. “This time, you have to swear you’ll let me handle it completely alone. No secret help, no interfering with my strategy.”
“I earn 166.66 yuan a minute, converted, and you think I’d bother secretly keeping tabs on some unpaid legal aid case?!” Qian Heng scoffed. “Dream on.”
“Well, if I catch you—or Bao Rui acting on your orders—secretly helping me, then I’ll… I’ll stop seeing you after work on my own time!”
“Cheng Yao, you’re pushing your luck! Is this how you treat your boyfriend?” Qian Heng said, displeased. “Threatening to cut off contact over the smallest disagreement—your attitude is completely wrong.”
“But didn’t you just say there’s absolutely no way you’d bother with a legal aid case like this? Then my threat is empty anyway, isn’t it.”
“…”
However it was framed, the matter was settled. Cheng Yao followed Qian Heng out of Starbucks. To avoid suspicion, she insisted he leave first, saying she’d go upstairs after a while.
Just before leaving, though, Qian Heng paused and said, as if it were nothing, “If the case subsidy isn’t enough for the legal aid case, I can cover the rest of the expenses for you.”
Cheng Yao brightened with surprise. “Does our firm actually have a subsidy for this kind of case?”
“The firm doesn’t. It’s a personal subsidy from me to you.” He glanced at her and added, “In my capacity as your boyfriend.”
Having said that, he seemed a little embarrassed, and without even waiting to see her reaction, he lifted his chin and walked off with practiced composure—though his slightly unsteady footsteps gave away exactly how he felt.
Cheng Yao waited downstairs another five minutes before heading up as though nothing had happened.
Back at her desk, Bao Rui handed her a document. “Case file Qian Par just assigned you. Here you go.” He sighed, his eyes full of pity for her. “I just came out of Qian Par’s office—he assigned me a case too. A family insurance dispute worth over ten million.”
Cheng Yao looked at him expectantly, waiting to hear more.
“Ugh! Honestly, compared to me, you’ve really got it rough!” Bao Rui said sympathetically. “How have you been playing this, Cheng Yao? Sure, you haven’t been at Qian Par’s side for years like I have, but you’ve been at Junheng for a while now. How do you still not know how to read the boss’s mind? Even the money that slips through Qian Par’s fingers is still money—you could pick up scraps and still land a case worth tens of millions. But look at you. He’s got so many case sources, and all he gave you was a legal aid case!”
Bao Rui looked at her, practically mourning her wasted potential. “And you’re pretty good-looking too—how do you not know how to cater to what he wants!”
“…”
Cheng Yao’s silence only emboldened him further. He began pontificating. “Let me teach you. Qian Par values people like me who are perceptive and emotionally intelligent. You should learn from watching how I communicate with him. Also, even though Qian Par doesn’t say much, you have to read the endless subtext in his limited words, and then subtly voice your requests to him.”
“…” Cheng Yao asked humbly, “For example?”
The moment the words left her mouth, Qian Heng pushed open his office door and stepped out. Bao Rui shot her a look. “Watch closely!”
He then sauntered over behind Qian Heng as if by chance. “Qian Par…”
Qian Heng turned around. “Mm?”
Bao Rui shifted awkwardly. “I wanted to specially thank you for making an exception this year and giving us a second team-building trip.”
Qian Heng: ???
Bao Rui, however, interpreted the confusion on Qian Heng’s face as bashful pretense, and pressed on with his hint. “But Japan is so expensive, and I’ve been so many times already. Plus, out of national sentiment as a Chinese citizen, I’m honestly not that keen on going anymore…”
Bao Rui’s plan was simple—having said all that, surely Qian Heng’s next line would be to ask where he’d like to go instead, at which point Bao Rui would casually suggest cheap and cheerful Thailand, and the matter would be settled.
Flawless!
Sure enough, Qian Heng studied him for a moment. Then, in the midst of Bao Rui’s expectant gaze, he finally spoke—
“Oh, all right. Then you don’t need to come on the second team-building trip. Stay behind at the office and work overtime.”
“…”
Not just Cheng Yao—even Tan Ying couldn’t help bursting into laughter.
Bao Rui stood there, utterly stunned by this unexpected turn of events. It took him a moment to realize Qian Heng had already walked off, at which point he sprinted after him, leaving only his trembling voice echoing through the office—
“Qian Par, that’s not what I meant, let me explain, I can go to Japan too…”