Chapter 95.2

Chapter 95.2

“If you’re done eating, shall we get up? Let’s take a walk.”

Smiling warmly, he mentioned that the weather was nice today, showing no hint of regret or bitterness. Jasmine, observing his neat and courteous demeanor, sighed softly. Richard gently took her slowly rising hand and smiled.

The two of them, without fully revealing their hearts, looked into each other’s eyes and held hands tightly.

***

The two walked along the riverside in a more relaxed atmosphere than before. The yellow ginkgo leaves carpeting the ground looked like a shower of gold coins. As she took in the fragrant autumn scent that brushed her nose, Jasmine murmured.

“I love autumn because the foliage is so beautiful. The crisp blue sky and the cool weather are nice too.”

Richard, carefully watching her as she stepped on only the diamond-shaped tiles among the red ones, replied. His eyes were slightly squinted as if looking at something dazzling.

“Yes. It’s beautiful.”

“Isn’t it?”

Jasmine said in a bright voice. Richard thought, as he looked at her radiant face, that she had always been someone who could keenly and vividly appreciate the beauty around her.

“Winter will come soon, won’t it? I don’t like the cold, but I do love seeing the snow. The coachmen and the servants who clear the snow have a hard time, but it’s something you can only see then. Everyone feels excited and thrilled when they see white snow.”

“Do you like snow?”

“Yes. Don’t you, Duke?”

‘I wish she would call me Richard.’ He steadied her to prevent her from falling and replied.

“Well, I don’t think I’ve ever really thought of it as something I like.”

“Wow, no sense of romance. Not even when you were a child?”

“Back then, I don’t really remember.”

“You must remember making snowmen or having snowball fights.”

“I didn’t like making snowmen because they would just melt away.”

“So you did make one.”

Jasmine felt a surge of curiosity. The image of a young Richard, the little duke, rolling snow with his tiny hands like autumn leaves to make a snowman seemed somehow fascinating, amusing, and even cute. She chuckled and touched her cheek.

“I can’t quite imagine it. The Duke making a snowman.”

“It was when I was a child.”

He replied matter-of-factly.

“True, it is really sad when you put all your effort into making a beautiful snowman, only for it to melt or get ruined by someone. It feels like saying goodbye to a friend. Once, Caras accidentally damaged one side of my snowman’s face during a snowball fight, and I was so heartbroken.”

“Ah, that must have been frustrating.”

Richard, for once, showed a serious face and empathized intensely. Jasmine glanced at him playfully, surprised by his clear emotional reaction.

“Why? Do you have a similar experience?”

“I didn’t have time to make snowmen because I was always training with my father. Occasionally, after sword training, I would make a small one, like a little handcraft, and hide it in a corner of the garden. But Risha often ‘accidentally’ ruined them, saying it was a mistake, countless times.”

It was a bitterly cold winter day. As the heavy snow fell and the sky sparkled silver, a young boy whose heart thumped with excitement secretly peered out the window. He shovelled snow for his snowman, he put buttons for its eyes, then placed it in a corner of the garden. Every day, he would check on it, and if it was still there, he’d return to his room with a blissful heart. He watched it from the window until he fell asleep.

He wished the snow would keep falling to prevent the snowman from melting.

However, his snowman was destroyed before it even had a chance to melt. Risha was fussing around in the garden with her snow measurement experiment when the machine exploded, knocking down the wall right where Richard’s snowman stood.

Seeing his snowman crushed under the rocks, a surge of emotion welled up inside him, and for once, he let his feelings out, and smacked Risha’s head.

His parents, who had come running to his sobbing sister’s aid, scolded him for hitting his sister over a snowman. But that time, Richard refused to apologize readily as he usually did.

He still felt resentful and wronged. He hated his sister who always broke and ruined things without a care, yet was praised by their parents or forgiven as a genius.

He resented his parents for always siding with his sister and being strict with him. He couldn’t stand when Risha hovered around him, and didn’t even so much as glance in her direction.

The cold war between them ended when he found a note with crooked handwriting under his door that read, “Look out the window,” and saw a perfectly shaped snowman standing in front of his window, looking almost artificially precise.

Even now, thinking back on it, Richard sighed in disbelief.

“Who in the world invents a machine to make a snowman just to apologize? She’s always been strange.”

“Pfft! Haha! That’s adorable. What kind of sister goes to such lengths to cheer up her angry brother? You are really loved.”