Twenty Days a Lover
Before Lee-jin had a chance to react, his lips came down over hers.
He sucked deep on the soft plumpness of her mouth and released it, again and again, until a heated breath finally broke free of her.
Trapped between Kang-hyun and the kitchen sink, Lee-jin had nowhere left to retreat. His scorching heat poured into her so completely that her legs gave out almost at once.
The moment she swayed, Kang-hyun wrapped one arm firmly around her waist. Now there was truly no escape at all.
Lee-jin, at a loss for what to do with her hands as they wandered the empty air, carefully settled them on his shoulders. And in that instant, his tongue came in deep, tangling with hers.
A tingling rush of pleasure bleached her mind pure white.
"Hah... mmm......"
Unaware that those lewd little sounds were spilling from her own lips, she clung to Kang-hyun without thinking.
The hands that had only been resting lightly on his shoulders somehow wound around his neck, gripping his collar as though she were holding on for her life.
"You...... damn it."
Kang-hyun growled low and pulled away from her.
He'd known that letting it go any further would lead somewhere dangerous. Already worked up past the point of reason, rough breaths escaped him.
Only then did Lee-jin open her eyes. When Kang-hyun met that gaze — dazed, hazy, steeped in pleasure — a curse rose in his throat.
No male alive could look at that face and keep his head.
But Seo Lee-jin had long since become something more to him than a body for chasing pleasure, so he summoned superhuman strength and forced down the urge to take things further.
Not that Lee-jin knew any of this.
"Oppa......"
She called to him helplessly, looking lost. It wasn't that she disliked the physical closeness with him — but neither was she ready to tempt him back to the bedroom.
"I won't ever touch you without your permission. Not ever."
What was she supposed to do with this? After wrestling with the question, Lee-jin finally managed a slow nod.
"Lee-hwan was right. Men really do have nothing but that kind of garbage rattling around in their heads."
At Kang-hyun's self-mocking murmur, Lee-jin let out a short sigh. He looked absolutely miserable.
"N-not tonight. When I'm ready......"
She couldn't meet his eyes, mumbling in embarrassment as her cheeks flushed red. Strangling down the urge to sink his teeth into those cheeks and that neck, Kang-hyun answered.
"If you keep leaving the door open like that, I'm going to fucking push my way through it."
The coarseness in his voice — rougher than usual — showed exactly how badly his composure had splintered.
With a long, slow exhale, Kang-hyun finally reined himself in and scooped her up into his arms. The floor dropped away so suddenly that Lee-jin let out a startled little yelp.
"I'll finish the dishes myself, so you go work. That's how it's going to be."
Striding to the workshop, he set Lee-jin down inside and shut the door as though quarantining a contagious patient.
Lee-jin stared blankly at the closed door, then touched her burning cheeks. She knew this was the best he could manage — which was exactly why she couldn't bring herself to go back to the kitchen.
What do I actually want from him? It had been barely twenty days since her brother's friend, Moon Kang-hyun, had become her lover. She'd known even before they started dating that plenty of couples slept together early on.
But the brainwashing lectures Lee-hwan had drilled into her from childhood — standing in for the father they'd lost so young — chose this of all moments to prove their worth.
"Somehow, somewhere along the way, I've become a Confucian girl to the bone."
The lament that left Lee-jin's lips was a tangle of longing and resentment. If Lee-hwan were still alive, she would have cursed him out for it — but now she could do neither.
After hesitating at the workshop door for a while, Lee-jin finally began kneading clay, if only to shake the thoughts from her head.
After surviving a weekend he couldn't decide was hell or heaven, Kang-hyun accepted Cheon Eun-jung's invitation and attended Ohsong Group's new product launch party.
The party, held at a hotel in Gangnam, had drawn crowds of business figures hoping to lay eyes on the new product Ohsong Group had been so tight-lipped about.
"It's an honor to meet you. I'm Moon Kang-hyun."
At Kang-hyun's greeting, Cheon Ji-yong — chairman of Ohsong Group and Cheon Eun-jung's father — wore an oddly complicated expression.
Cheon Eun-jung's eyes bored into her father, silently pleading: Do not say 'why on earth is such a fine young man stuck with my daughter?'
Fortunately, Cheon Ji-yong was the head of a premier corporation and sharp as they came. He caught it instantly.
"Good. We'll be seeing plenty of each other from now on."
With a warm, genial laugh, he drifted off into the crowd of people vying for his attention. Cheon Eun-jung let out a long breath of relief.
"Well, the fire's out. For now."
"That so? I doubt it."
While Kang-hyun answered with a cynical curl of his lips, Jin Ae-ran spotted the two of them and closed in quickly.
"Oh my, the two of you look wonderful together."
She seemed genuinely moved that her son had shown his face at a corporate event at all.
He hadn't been publicly announced as Moonseong Group's third son, but simply appearing at a gathering like this was enough to fulfill a long-cherished wish of hers.
Not that she was in any hurry — once the marriage to Cheon Eun-jung was all but settled, she could parade her perfect son before the press and the business world at her leisure.
"Thank you, Mother. Though I have to say, you look absolutely radiant today."
Hearing Cheon Eun-jung address Jin Ae-ran as Mother, Kang-hyun's eyebrows twitched.
He'd had no idea the two of them were on such close terms.
"Don't you talk sweet. You're the pretty one, dear."
"Oh no, Mother. You're far prettier than I am."
Watching the two of them giggle and trade compliments, Kang-hyun sighed quietly. Merely standing in their midst was raising his fatigue levels.
"My son can be a bit blunt. I do worry whether he'll give you a hard time."
"Not at all. Kang-hyun is remarkably considerate."
A hairline crack ran across Cheon Eun-jung's smiling face, but thankfully Jin Ae-ran didn't notice it.
"People keep staring at us now that you're here. That's more than enough, so go on."
Kang-hyun delivered his dismissal like an eviction notice. Jin Ae-ran glared at her heartless son, then flashed Cheon Eun-jung a bright smile.
Too proud to trade barbs with Kang-hyun in public, she simply squared her shoulders and bowed as though this had been her intention all along.
"Let's have a nice meal together sometime. Call me."
"Of course, Mother."
Her haughty heels clicked away into the distance. The show of pleasantries before the truly important players was complete.
Cheon Eun-jung looked at Kang-hyun — who wore the expression of a man being suffocated, as if events like this made his skin crawl — and spoke without mercy.
"Your face has 'I want to go home' written all over it, but no. Not yet. We're not done here."
"Figures you'd say that."
Kang-hyun drawled back. What Cheon Eun-jung wanted from this event was so-called price-tag inflation — parading Kang-hyun around like a charm dangling from her handbag, announcing her own market value to the room.
"I think I finally get why my mother likes you."
"Is that an insult or a compliment?"
Like a pair of ventriloquists, the two of them bickered with barely moving lips. The moment anyone drew near, they sensed it with uncanny instinct and snapped on their smiles.
They'd kept this up for a good while when someone who recognized Kang-hyun finally appeared.
"Huh? Moon Kang-hyun? What are you doing here?"
Do Hyun-soo. A classmate from high school.
Second to no one in arrogance and unpleasantness — not even to Moon Kang-hyun — Do Hyun-soo had a genuine talent for saying precisely the things that got under people's skin.
"Weren't you two on terrible terms back in school?"
"What, we hated each other then so we're required to hate each other forever?"
When Cheon Eun-jung snapped at him with visible irritation, Do Hyun-soo tilted his head and changed the subject.
"Anyway, you've heard too, right? About Seo Lee-hwan getting wiped out in that accident. Who figured the cocky bastard, all cheek and that pretty face, would go that young? Moon Kang-hyun, you two were close, weren't you? Then you've got his little sister's number, right? Give it to me if you do. Every time that bastard Seo Lee-hwan so much as mentioned his sister, he'd foam at the mouth and go off like a lunatic — couldn't even say hi to her back then. She was already gorgeous, so you know she's gotten way better looking by now."
He couldn't listen to another word of it. He knew this was no place to cause a scene, but he had no hobby of standing there patiently absorbing that kind of filth.
Kang-hyun's hand shot out for Do Hyun-soo's collar. But a hand even faster than his had already seized it.
"Hey, are you even human? You can't even mourn a dead man, and now you're going to slither up to Seo Lee-hwan's sister? Ha, a guy who gave up on being human — why do you even bother eating? Why do you keep breathing?"
Cheon Eun-jung, her face contorted with fury, grabbed Do Hyun-soo by the collar and shook him back and forth.
"Hey, when did I ever say I'd go after her! Let go of me!"
Do Hyun-soo shook off her hands, rubbing the back of his neck and wheezing in outrage.
Even though Cheon Eun-jung had beaten him to the punch, Kang-hyun had no intention of standing by from the moment that filthy mouth had put Lee-jin in it.
"Lusting after Seo Lee-jin. You must have two lives to spare."
Kang-hyun snatched the hand Do Hyun-soo was using to straighten his clothes and clasped it like a handshake. From the trapped grip came a nasty, grinding pop.