Chapter 5

“What is this?”

His slightly frowned eyebrows were cold.

Whether he was sitting with his slender legs crossed or crossing his arms as if he didn’t like what he saw, everything looked cool when it was him who did it.

“It’s a hotcake made by Princess Peony.”

As the maid answered his question politely, I was hiding behind the door, nodding my head.

I shouldn’t have said it was just a plain hotcake, it would have been better if I told her it’s a hotcake with plenty of honey from our Garten!

I was frustrated by the lost opportunity and regretted it in my heart.

My favorite character likes Garten’s delicious honey.

He also likes Garten’s strawberries and tea.

All three of them were the finest products of its category in the whole continent, so they were often used as expressions that reflected our favorite character’s luxurious taste.

“Are you saying that the princess made it herself?”

He said with a look of doubt on his face.

Well, it would be strange if a country’s princess was touching a frying pan in the kitchen.

However, if it’s for the person you like, not just a princess but even a queen, would enter a kitchen and bake hotcakes.

Even more so if you can bake hotcakes like me!

Richt kept looking with suspicion at the plate on which the hotcake was placed.

It was a hotcake that I had just baked, and the maid brought it to him quickly, since I told her that, “He should eat it while it was warm.”

The fluffy hotcake was also topped with butter which was made from the milk squeezed from the cows grown in the rich green areas of Garten and sprinkled with plenty of honey.

The savory aroma and the sweet smell, made my nose flutter as I was looking inside the door. It’ll be even stronger to Richt who’s near it.

“Leave it and go out.”

He turned his head as if it were nothing and looked back at the book he was reading.

“But your highness······.”

As if he had not forgotten my request, the maid opened her mouth carefully.

Then Richt, who was looking at the book, glanced at her.

It was such a gaze that’s telling the maid that if she doesn’t listen, it would be her greatest mistake, and if you were not yet scared, he would give him something to be scared of.

As if frightened by the glint of his eyes, the maid quickly shut her mouth.

“What?”

“That, it’s just······.”

Hurry up! Tell him to eat now! Say that it’s good to eat it while it’s still warm!

“N-Nothing your Highness.”

However, a simple maid with no status or power could not dare to catch the eyes of the Grand Duke of the North.

Frightened by Richt’s eyes, she couldn’t pass on what I had said and just turned her back to get out of the Grand Duke’s parlor.

······Oh no, wait! I haven’t run away yet······

“Oh, my goodness!”

When the maid opened the door, I was caught standing in front of it in a very awkward way.

“Princess Peony?”

“Ahahaha······. Hello, Grand Duke.”

I hurriedly made a curtsy and said hello. The maid, who opened the door and made me get caught, stepped aside, wondering what to do.

“Why are you here?”

“Uh, it’s because······.”

I couldn’t bear to answer the polite words of Richt.

That I was peeping at you······.

“I was just passing by.”

“······.”

Oh, was it too obvious?

“So, after I baked the hotcake and gave it to the maid, I was on the way back to my room······.”

“Neither the kitchen nor the princess’s room is this way.”

“······I guess I’m lost because I’m not used to this castle yet.”

I decided to be shameless.

A shameless woman would be better than a peeping woman.

“Excuse me, Grand Duke.”

“Say it.”

“You should try it now.”

I glanced at the hotcake.

“It’s delicious when it’s warm.”

Since I was already being shameless, let’s just be brazen even more.

I’m going to feed my favorite character his favorite food! And stay here to see the sight!

Heh~ the mere thought of it makes my heart flutter······.

“No, thank you.”

······Huh?

With words that shattered my excitement, Richt looked at me with an insensitive look on his face.

“I don’t like sweets.”

It’s a lie.

With a manly face that looks like he would only eat meat and nothing else, I know that he actually likes sweet things.

“I don’t like hotcakes either.”

This is also a lie.

He loved hotcakes. I know that he ate enough hotcakes made by the Heroine to even get a stomach ache.

“I don’t like hotcakes, and you also sprinkled it with honey that I hate······. I hate everything sweet.”

Without changing a single expression, Richt lied.

“But······.”

I wanted to refute. Don’t you actually like it?

But I couldn’t.

I couldn’t say that I knew that he liked hotcakes, that he really liked honey and all sweet things.

“I’m thankful for the princess’s sincerity, but please take it back.”

Richt glanced at the plate on the table and even gestured to the maid standing by the wall.

“G-Grand Duke Richt. “

“Say it.”

His face was very calm.

His deep, dark black eyes were still, and his sexy red lips were firmly shut.

His face seemed to have no expressions, no emotions.

I couldn’t even tell if he was really looking at me.

“I-It’s······ nothing······.”

“Then, take it with you.”

I picked up the plate of hotcake from the maid who was trying to follow me.

So I quietly looked down and stared at the floor.

The plate was still warm so the hotcakes must have been warm still.

But strangely, my hand in contact with it was getting colder.

Richt’s nose still smelled sweet.

He didn’t taste it one bite, but by the smell alone he knew it was Garten’s honey.

He knew that it was not just any honey, but the best honey there was.

It was Richt’s favorite honey.

The same was true of the hotcakes. It was Richt’s favorite food.

But he couldn’t eat.

“Hestia······.”

Richt quietly called the name of the person he loved the most and who had now become another man’s woman.

She was extremely beautiful.

For him who was called the stupid prince, she was the only one who treated him warmly.

She was a woman who showed him what motherly love is instead of his mother who had been obsessed with love, and who could only tell him that he should become the next emperor.

And she was a woman who chose another man rather than him.

“Hestia······.”

Once again, the voice sounded more mournful.

It was a love he became more obsessed about, the more he couldn’t have it.

Because it was not his, he became more greedy.

The hotcake that came out today was also something with such memories with her.

So he couldn’t eat it.

The soft hotcake would stab the throat more painful than thorns.

The sweet honey would feel bitter than poison.

Like all the things that remind him of Hestia.

“Hmmm······.”

Richt breathed in the sweet scent that was still lingering in the air.

It was a sweet fragrant smell.

It was the scent of the honey he liked.

It faintly reminded him of the princess who had made it.

Was her hair blonde?

Did she have blue eyes? Or is it green? He couldn’t remember.

What about the nose? He couldn’t remember it also.

The lips? It seemed that he can’t remember a single thing about the princess at all······.

“It was red.”

He thought she was only a hazy memory, but suddenly he remembered her red lips.

It was a small, red lip.

The princess’s lips were red, like the strawberries of Garten, his favorite.

The eyes that gazed and looked at me were probably blue.

“A stupid woman trying to curry favor with the wrong person.”

Unfortunately, that was Richt’s first impression of Peony. (Michael: rip girl. That burns…)

The purpose was obvious.

It was just Garten’s gamble, a rich but small country next to the Fairsprene Empire.

The present emperor already had a beautiful and perfect empress. It was also a marriage between lovers who love each other fiercely, which was celebrated as the romance of the century.

There was no place for Garten’s Princess to intervene.

That’s why they turned their eyes to the north, even though he must have been the half-brother of the emperor, who became Fairsprene’s enemy, he was still the first in line to succeed the throne.

Like she said, the emperor forgave his sin of rebellion.

But what does she expect?

That maybe the emperor might call in his brother from the north and put him in an important position in the Empire?

Or, if the emperor doesn’t have a successor, he might take my child as the one to succeed the throne?

The princess or the king of that small country would have proposed to me with that intention in mind.

Indeed, they were as cunning as mice.

‘Well, you’re handsome!’

I remember the voice of the Princess of Garten, who talked with a slight blush on her face.

When I looked up in surprise at the unexpected reply, I immediately turned away.

Even now when I think about it, I think that it was too much.

The first thing you say when you first see someone is, “You’re handsome.”

“Tsk-“

Richt unknowingly clicked his tongue .

The sweet scent was gone.

It was all useless thoughts. The hotcake of his memories, the princess of the cunning Garten.

Marriage or anything, how long will a princess from a warm country last in this cold place?

Even a maid will not last long in this humble place, and it is rumored that she is a princess raised by the king of Garten like a doll of glass.

Just a little girl stashed in a room in the castle, and if I ignore her, she won’t last long and will leave for Garten, Richt thought.

Although I offered to be engaged with her because it was not acceptable to refuse a matrimony request from a princess of a friendly country, that delicate princess would definitely not be able to last long in the freezing cold of Stern.