Why Did You Choose Me?

He had probably done it without a second thought—just the barest parting of fabric, a silent invitation for her to step free. It wasn’t as if this were the first time he had helped her out of her clothes.

Even so, Yuju felt something strange settle over her at the knowledge that Seo-won had undressed her. He, meanwhile, read that subtle current in an entirely different direction.

“That’s why I told you to go wait in the suite first.”

He seemed to think she was tired, not out of sorts.

That wasn’t it.

But calling him on it felt awkward. How was she supposed to say she was sulking because of the women flocking around him?

Yuju kept her mouth shut and endured the silence while Seo-won guided her into a nearby chair and took the seat beside her.

“You handled yourself better than I expected.”

“……?”

“You looked used to this kind of gathering.”

“Ah. If I don’t do it properly, Dad scolds me…”

Only then did Seo-won understand why she had seemed so composed earlier.

He had already heard that Beom-su dragged his children into high society at every opportunity. Right before news of her marriage to him had broken, Beom-su had even brought Yuju to events like this one to introduce her to eligible prospects.

There was no single word that could capture what kind of man he was. Someone who cared nothing for his children’s happiness so long as it served his own gain.

“Are you afraid of your father?”

The mere mention of Prosecutor Han Beom-su was enough to drain the color from Yuju’s face.

So when he asked the question, she clamped her lips together. There was no answer, but the silence itself was as good as a yes.

She was afraid—though not for the reason Seo-won meant.

It wasn’t the occasional blows that had made her fear her father. Being hit would have been far easier. What tormented her most was watching her mother and her older brother suffer because of him.

And so she had learned to obey. If even a small mistake of hers might splash onto the two of them, she would rather never make one. Her brother had probably followed their father’s orders for the same reason.

Come to think of it, I have a lot to talk about with Oppa.

Belatedly, Yuju remembered the purpose of this marriage—securing her brother’s freedom. She hadn’t seen him since confessing the fake relationship; she would have to meet him soon.

There was a mountain of things she needed to do. But her thoughts drifted almost at once. Something had been nagging at her since earlier—an old, lingering question that had surfaced even before they arrived at a place like this.

“Why me, of all people?”

“Why what?”

“There were so many pretty women around you.”

“Pretty women?”

Seo-won echoed her, as if he genuinely didn’t understand. But Yuju was serious, almost solemn. A firm resolve had settled in both eyes, as if she would not leave without an answer.

He studied the situation in silence before the meaning finally clicked. He had crossed paths with dozens of women that evening alone. She seemed to be asking why, with all of them available, he had chosen a fake marriage with her.

It was far too abrupt a question to dismiss as mere curiosity. What puzzled him more was the sense that, for some reason, Yuju looked sulky right now.

“From what I saw earlier, the place was crawling with beautiful women. Good families, too, and clearly interested in you…”

She never finished. The end of the sentence frayed and dissolved. She couldn’t even explain to herself why she was pressing him like this.

Of course, he had said a safe younger sister of a friend was better than someone who might become a liability. But that alone didn’t account for everything.

Not when she could still remember the way those women had looked at him in the hall.

“Why…”

Choked with a frustration she couldn’t name, Yuju tried again. And again she couldn’t finish. Her eyes grew wet, as if she might burst into tears at any second.

Caught off guard, Seo-won simply watched her, lips sealed. All the while she kept turning the matter over, a thousand words spinning uselessly inside her mouth.

All at once she felt wretched. Hurt.

She didn’t understand why any of this should hurt, but it did.

And so she had blurted out something this absurd—exactly as if she were jealous.

“…….”

Seo-won listened to the sudden outburst with quiet seriousness, the same way he had once sat through the drunken rambling of a man who had proposed marriage to him mid-binge.

It wasn’t simply that he was a good listener. The way Yuju behaved when she was wounded set too many thoughts in motion.

Back then, they had chosen each other because it served both their interests.

Yuju had needed to move fast if she wanted to escape a forced marriage. The rumors that had reached him were already more than one or two; she would have felt the pressure far more keenly.

He, too, had already learned of that incident. On top of which, word had reached him that his grandfather was carefully vetting candidates for a bride.

But if someone asked him now whether those were still the only reasons, he could not readily say yes.

Even though the feeling was his own, Seo-won could not tell what it meant.

“Because that was the best path for both of us.”

In an instant he cut off the cascade of questions, severing the chain of doubts that had begun to multiply, and delivered the rational conclusion.

Yuju’s mouth tightened. The reaction looked faintly wounded—something she had no reason to feel.

Today, Han Yuju was truly strange.

Seo-won focused every sense, trying to dig into thoughts that no longer read as simple, that no longer matched the woman he thought he knew.

And then—

Thud.

A heavy sound flipped their world. In the next breath Seo-won realized that, while his guard was down, Yuju had seized his necktie and hauled him toward her. That he was now braced over her where she lay on the sofa.

“…….”

“…….”

Even with how abruptly it had happened, Seo-won did not panic. As if under a spell, he simply looked down at her.

They had been intimate a few times already; a scene like this no longer felt foreign. The first time she had come at him with desperate urgency; the second, he had failed to rein in his desire under the influence of drink. Today, both of them were sober.

And yet neither of them registered anything wrong with the situation.

“You’re pretty.”

After staring at her for a long while, Seo-won murmured the words under his breath. At the sudden remark Yuju’s brow furrowed—the reaction of someone who didn’t realize he was echoing what she herself had said moments before.

He saw the question in her eyes and offered no explanation. Holding her gaze, he reached back through the women he had seen in the banquet hall. He hadn’t paid close attention; the faces refused to surface.

Yuju was wrong.

Tonight, in Seo-won’s eyes, there had not been a single beautiful woman at that event.

Except for Han Yuju.

The way she looked up at him—so piteous—somehow struck him as heartbreaking. Those deer-like eyes, so full they seemed ready to spill over even if she didn’t move.

Knowing he had already made her cry in bed more than once only made them more enthralling. She was the kind of woman who forced him to confront, anew, just how terrible a person he could be.

“Ah—!”

Unable to master the impulse of the moment, Seo-won wrapped a hand around the back of her head. Their mouths met as if he had slammed into her. His tongue slipped into the parting of her lips and tangled with hers at once.

This wasn’t what I reserved the suite for.

Yuju had created the situation, but Seo-won was the one driving what followed. The hand that had been braced firmly against her back so she wouldn’t fall slid away.

“Hah—slowly…”

His mouth left the lower lip he had been biting and traveled to the side of her neck. At the impatient urgency of it, Yuju tried to steady him.

She had noticed it since the last time. At first he had held back. But the more time passed, the more clearly she adapted, the more Seo-won let his true nature show.

It was almost uncanny—how someone so upright, so proper, could bare a face like this.

“Hh…”

The knowledge that she was the one making him impatient sent her heart racing. In that same moment the dress slipped down along the line of her shoulder.

It was the gown that had been cinched so tight she could barely breathe. She was finally free of it—and somehow felt even more breathless, for reasons that had nothing to do with fabric.

So when she instinctively shrank, curling her upper body in on itself, Seo-won pressed her.

“Open up.”

Yuju flinched at the iron edge of excitement in his voice. When she looked up a beat late, his eyes had already changed.

Disheveled, he looked all the more dangerous. Overwhelmed by the current of him, she felt a dry swallow slide down her throat.