Chapter 2: Please Show Some Restraint!
This headline was far more sensational than simply "The Mysterious Eldest Son of the Gu Family Returns Home."
Gu Zhenzhi suddenly felt a soft, delicate girl clutching tightly to his leg. In the next instant, she burst into tears, sobbing uncontrollably, her tears falling like broken pearls, pattering onto his custom-made black leather shoes.
He frowned, his expression exceedingly unpleasant, his gaze cold and detached as he cast a glance at his assistant nearby.
Assistant Chen Yan was equally stunned by the scene before him. But the moment he caught Gu Zhenzhi’s frosty glare, he immediately stepped forward and grabbed Ruan Cha’s arm. “Miss, please don’t interfere with our gentleman’s schedule.”
Ruan Cha felt the man’s grip tighten painfully around her slender arm. Her cheeks puffed out in irritation, and after taking a deep breath, she raised her voice, making it even clearer and sharper as she cried out, “Dad! How could you just abandon us because Mom fell terminally ill? Now she’s dead, and I have nowhere to go. I can only come to you—sob, sob, sob…”
Her cries were heart-wrenching, her frail shoulders trembling as she sobbed beneath the streetlights. Her lips had turned pale and shivered with the intensity of her grief.
The reporters nearby went wild.
Abandoned a terminally ill wife! Deserted a helpless child!
The mysterious eldest son of the Gu Family seemed to outdo himself with scandal after scandal.
Seeing the predatory gleam in the reporters’ eyes, Chen Yan felt his own head teetering on his shoulders.
In his panic, he tightened his grip. With his years of training, lifting such a seemingly fragile and slender girl should have been no problem at all.
But there was something odd—
The girl clung to Gu Zhenzhi’s leg as if she’d grown roots there.
Her arms wrapped around his leg in an impossibly tight grip, and no matter how hard he pulled, he couldn’t pry her loose.
Gu Zhenzhi’s glacial gaze settled on him, and Chen Yan felt as if the back of his head were about to be scorched through.
Cold sweat slid down his cheeks.
“Miss, please have some self-respect!” he finally managed, standing up in frustration. “Our gentleman has always kept himself above reproach, never dallying with women, much less fathering a child this old!”
At Chen Yan’s words, Ruan Cha finally stopped sobbing.
Her large, innocent eyes blinked up at him, her head tilted slightly.
Of course she knew.
But how else could she get close to him?
She couldn’t just climb into his bed and kick off the plot like the villainesses in those novels, could she?
Ruan Cha was unwilling—she’d rather claim an extra father.
“He’s so handsome yet so old. He’s either into men or impotent,” she thought, her bewildered gaze making Chen Yan’s heart skip a beat.
He felt as if all the air had suddenly been sucked from his lungs.
As if in the next moment, the specter of death would descend.
“Dad, just stop lying to me. I really have nowhere to go now. Please, I’m begging you—take me home,” Ruan Cha pleaded, her tears brimming once more, her fragile expression stirring pity even among the onlookers.
“Gu Zhenzhi really is heartless, treating his own daughter like this.”
“He gets a woman pregnant and just leaves her to fend for herself? What a scoundrel!”
“I thought the Gu family’s mysterious eldest son was something special, but this is it?”
…
Ruan Cha heard their whispered discussions, and she lowered her gaze, her delicate face brimming with pride, her eyes glinting slyly.
Gu Zhenzhi was emotionally deficient, with almost no capacity for empathy. She knew her theatrics wouldn’t earn his sympathy, but they were more than enough to threaten his interests.