DH ✦ Ch 26

✦ Chapter 26 ✦

Lowering his lips to her tear-stained eyes, Hyun-jae licked away the tears.

“What are you going to do if you cry this much?”

It was no comfort to Ga-young at all. Even while he was tasting the salty tears with his tongue, his fingers hadn’t moved from their spot.

Hyun-jae stared intently at her delicately sobbing face. “Do you usually cry this easily?”

From the full-fledged handplay that followed, Ga-young could roughly guess what state she was in. “Ah, p-please stop…!”

The fingertips rubbing against her tender flesh felt slick. At a certain point, a wet sound echoed.

The man was toying with Ga-young’s private parts as if they were his own—parts Ga-young had never even touched. And her body was responding honestly to the stimulation, leaking shameful, heated fluids.

“Crying looks good on you, too. Cry a little more.”

“N-no, h-hng…”

She didn’t want to whine, but she could do nothing against the tears welling up even thicker. “Then smile instead.”

The man’s eyes, curved seductively, never left Ga-young’s face.

Her expression changed endlessly following the touch teasing her flesh: flinching, wincing, opening her mouth in a gasp before biting down hard, a tearing sound echoing from her vocal cords…

Enjoying it like a monodrama, Hyun-jae even more persistently stimulated the exact spots that drew out violent reactions. Ga-young twisted her hips relentlessly, trembling all over.

The moment an unknown, hard little bundle was pressed firmly under his fingertip, a sob burst out.

“Huk, h-huhu…”

Not even knowing what it felt like for her blood to rush backward, she simply wept.

With her clear eyes pinned beneath Hyun-jae’s placid gaze, she collapsed disgracefully. Was it because she hated this kind of act? She didn’t know. The feeling of a man doing wicked things to her? Not that either. With childish absurdity, the reason she had burst into tears was simply because she was startled. She was so shocked by her very first experience of climax that nothing came out but tears.

Hyun-jae was watching the woman’s utterly disheveled face in real time.

From the exact moment he began to stare deep into her amber eyes, which were streaming with water, his expression turned serious.

After Hyun-jae’s focus drifted as if in thought before gathering again, a long finger traced back against the watery path, pushing deep into her intimate crevice.

“Ah, haah, uh-huhu…”

Ga-young panted out a dizzy, feverish breath and cried out brokenly.

Her reason wasn’t functioning at all. Her mind seemed to have snapped from the shock of the foreign object invading and scraping against an area she hadn’t even known existed, stirring her up.

Yet, unbothered, Hyun-jae moved his fingers like an explorer.

His eyes steadily and calmly gazed at Ga-young’s face. At her delicate, fluttering fingertips; at the wet, sticky sounds; at the current piercing through her entire body all the way to the roots of her hair—and at the face of a woman reacting powerlessly to all of it.

“You’re going to break at this rate.”

Muttering those incomprehensible words to himself with a trace of self-mockery, Hyun-jae finally withdrew his hand.

Hah-ack! Gasping out a breath, Ga-young was in a state where half her soul had left her body. Her torso was freed from Hyun-jae’s arm, and she couldn’t even accurately register the rolled-up T-shirt being pulled back down by his hand.

Only when his tear-soaked, damp hand blurred across her tear-filled pupils did her reason kick in just a fraction. “Was it too much for you?”

Hyun-jae’s kind question only served to amplify her humiliation.

Ga-young jumped up and ran away.

This flight wasn’t because of the shock of the lewd acts. Being reduced to weeping like a child right in front of Hyun-jae was far, far more humiliating than that.

“What must the employees think of us? Thanks to the Chairman’s overstepping measures, they’ll see us as a married couple bound solely for reproduction. If you don’t put things back where they belong, I’ll consider moving out.”

The moment he arrived at work that morning, Hyun-jae issued a stern warning to Kwon Seon-jin over the phone. Even after dragging an affirmative answer out of him, he kept huffing in irritation for a while.

How could he even think of removing the bed from Ga-young’s room?

Even if they slept in separate rooms, it was none of Kwon Seon-jin’s business. The issue wasn’t that the bed had been taken out, but rather Kwon Seon-jin’s intent to control the couple’s intimate private life.

After hanging up the phone, Hyun-jae propped his chin on the back of his hand and fell into deep thought.

He had visited Ga-young’s room before coming to work. When knocking brought no response, he had opened the door slightly to find Ga-young curled up and sleeping in a single armchair.

The bed had vanished. And it didn’t take a genius to figure out who had ordered it.

“And here I was, not knowing a thing…”

Reflecting on last night—which had been somewhat one-sided—left him feeling uneasy.

He had interpreted Ga-young lingering in the study as an invitation. He had blindly concluded that because she was a shy woman, she had chosen the study over the bedroom. It was confirmation bias: after a deep kiss, he had grown hungry for sex, assuming her desires matched his own.

He had claimed he wasn’t drunk, but truth be told, he had been a little tipsy. He had put on a calm front, but his mind had completely flipped. He had already been behaving like a beast in heat.

That was why he had almost pulled off that act in the study instead of the bedroom. Under the guise of kindness, thinking he should warm her up slowly, he had reached out. If Ga-young hadn’t cried as if she were suffering some heinous atrocity, if the tight, narrow space hadn’t forcefully proven that she had zero prior sexual experience, he wouldn’t have been able to stop.

“I went too far.”

Just as he was about to clutch his head in frustration, Secretary Gil Byeong-su signaled over the intercom that he wanted to come in.

Entering the office shortly after, Byeong-su greeted him with a bright smile. “Executive Director, good morning.” “Yeah.”

Still with his mind entirely full of stray thoughts, Hyun-jae could only respond perfunctorily.

Approaching the desk, Byeong-su pulled the tablet in his hand up to eye level. “Regarding the investigation into Yoon Ga-young—meaning, the Madam—that you ordered some time ago. The results from the US that arrived early this morning have been compiled with domestic information. Since it’s personal content, I wanted to report it before work hours.”

It was an order he’d given a week ago; what took him so long.

Frowning in displeasure, Hyun-jae cast his gaze diagonally toward empty space. He still hadn’t managed to sever his thoughts from the previous night. “Report.”

Responding offhandedly in banmal, Byeong-su chuckled with a look that said, look at this guy. Then, he pulled a chair away from the conference table and sat down in front of the desk. “First, though it’s just a formality, her date of birth…”

Listening to the basic profile being recited, Hyun-jae could barely focus. “Graduated from OO Elementary, Sseususeo Middle, and DD Foreign Language High School. From middle school straight through to high school graduation, she never missed a top-student scholarship. Class president consistently from the first year of middle school to the second year of high school. In her third year of high school, her mock exam scores put her in the top 0.1 nationwide, early admission acceptance to Seoul National University’s College of Law—wow, she was a prodigy right up there with our Executive Director Shin, huh?”

Well, of course she went to Columbia, then.

Hyun-jae’s brain occasionally chimed in on Byeong-su’s report while continuing its own loop of thoughts about Ga-young.

What is she doing right now? She must have cried all night. Is she still crying? “However, she gave up her enrollment at Seoul National University. She got accepted into Columbia University’s Department of Business Administration, receiving a full government scholarship, and has currently completed her junior year.”

Information on near all-A-plus grades, part-time jobs, dormitory life, and peer relationships tumbled out in fair detail from Byeong-su’s mouth.

It was stuff he already knew roughly or could easily guess.

A student whose daily life was packed tight with nothing but studying and part-time jobs. A girl who had never even been in a relationship, let alone had sex with a man. Yoon Ga-young was unequivocally that kind of person.

Was I her first kiss, too?

It certainly seemed like it. Remembering how hard Ga-young had trembled when their lips brushed a year ago, how she had curled her tongue back like she’d been struck by a bomb—yes, that had definitely been her first kiss.

“Raised by a single father, at age nine her aunt, Yoon Soon-hee, became her legal guardian. Judging by the fact that their resident registrations shared the same address from then until she went to study abroad in the US, her aunt and uncle raised Yoon Ga-young all this time.”

And what did I do to a girl like that?

Chaining her down with a few hundreds of millions in pocket change as if bestowing a massive favor, turning her into a married woman, trapping her in a mansion swarming with strangers, letting her be called a surrogate breeder, driving himself crazy because he couldn’t just strip her bare… “There’s a record of an application for stepchild adoption that was abandoned, likely because Yoon Ga-young’s father is still alive. To abandon such a pretty and brilliant daughter… I just don’t get it.”

Byeong-su muttered, tilting his head in self-questioning wonder.

Hearing that as mere background noise, Hyun-jae berated himself internally.

Biting her lips, sucking on her breasts, toying with her bare flesh, almost taking her raw…Just acting like an absolute beast in heat last night. If you were drunk, you should’ve just gone to sleep.

“Let’s see. Yoon Ga-young’s father’s name is the same as someone very famous. That’s gotta feel bad.”

The more he thought about it, the more Shin Hyun-jae was nothing more than a merciless villain to Yoon Ga-young.

“Executive Director Shin, are you listening to me?”

Byeong-su tapped lightly on the desk. Hyun-jae replied with a hollow soul. “Yeah. Investigate further.” “Into what?” “Everything. Details later.”

He spun his chair around completely, turning his back to him. Byeong-su tactfully cleared out of the room.

Light leaking through the gaps of the blinds covering the floor-to-ceiling window drew thin gold stripes across Hyun-jae’s face. With rays of light cutting precisely across his pupils, Hyun-jae narrowed his eyes slightly and continued his thoughts.

Regretting acting on my dark desires toward Yoon Ga-young? He wasn’t enough of a moral saint for that. It was just the fact that the normal, proper process had been skipped that bothered him.

Hyun-jae let out a dry, incredulous snort.

“Well, look at that. I was a highwayman.”