Chapter 5 My breath caught, but I forced myself to act completely normal. As I settled into the armchair across from him, I even managed a playful tone: “What are you doing with my recipe book? Don’t mind getting your hands dirty?” When Alex first brought me into this arrangement, I could barely cook. I mean, I could make stuff that filled you up, but it wasn’t exactly fine dining. I was just some country girl with nothing going for me. No education, not particularly smart, couldn’t even sing or dance to entertain people. All I had was a face that turned heads. noveldramaBut that wasn’t nearly enough. The other girls who got picked around the same time all said I’d definitely be the first one kicked to the curb. རྟ་ འ་ཆ་ཇ་ད བ ་ I couldn’t go back to barely scraping by, so I had to get creative. I needed Alex to see I had more to offer than just looks. Lucky for me, I had some natural talent in the kitchen. Any dish I wanted to learn, I could nail it after just one or two tries. This recipe book had been through hell and back. Covered in grease stains and sauce splatters that had long lost their original colors. Once I’d really mastered cooking, Alex kept telling me to throw the damn thing away. I refused. To me, this book represented my whole journey. It meant everything. So I hid it, and he hadn’t found it for years. Thinking about all this, I felt the knot in my chest loosen. Whether Alex had seen what I’d written or not, I had my story ready. “What do these notes on the last two pages mean?” Of course Alex wouldn’t let me deflect. He flipped to the back and pointed at my writing. I put on my most embarrassed expression: “A friend recommended this novel to me. The heroine dies because she gets too obsessed with love, and the author made her story so tragic. I got emotional while reading and just… wrote down some thoughts.” In Alex’s mind, I was neither particularly bright nor good at lying. So he usually believed everything I said. But this time, he wasn’t ready to drop it: “Which novel? I want to check it out.” I froze for a few seconds, then smiled. I pulled up my phone and found some reincarnation romance I’d read before. I even helpfully found the chapter that had made me cry and showed it to Alex. Just as I expected, he scrolled through a few pages and handed both my phone and the notebook back. Then he said quietly: “It’s late. Go get ready for bed.” The next day, I deliberately slept in a bit. After Alex left for work, I asked the maid who’d cleaned yesterday. “Mr. Winters called around noon looking for some missing paperwork. He had me search everywhere. When I was cleaning your bedroom, I found that notebook under the bed. I mentioned it when I called him back, and he told me to leave it in his study.” The maid glanced at me nervously: “Ma’am, did I mess up?” In this house, only the head butler knew the real nature of my relationship with Alex. The other staff were hired from out of state, and they’d been calling me “Mrs. Winters” since day one. I’d never paid attention to this detail before. But now that Victoria was back, I had to be careful about everything: “No, it’s okay. I was just curious. Oh, and when you get a chance, let the others know they shouldn’t call me Mrs. Winters and I aren’t married.”