He kept me pinned against the wall, the familiar scent of cedar wrapping around me like a trap. I glared up into his eyes.

“What’s left to talk about with an ex-sugar daddy?”

“Sugar daddy?” Lu Yanbai’s lips twitched into a dark, half-amused smile. “Didn’t you just broadcast to the entire world that we were dating? Sugar daddies don’t come with actual feelings.”

He scoffed in sheer disbelief, leaning down until his eyes were leveled directly with mine.

“Lin Wanxing. Could you do me a favor and remember… I’m your boyfriend?”

I turned my face away coldly, laying into him for vanishing without a word for two straight days. Only then did he let out a soft sigh and offer an explanation: his company had a mole, and the negotiation site had been hit with a complete signal blackout. He owned up to his mistake, apologizing sincerely for forcing me to cancel my work gig earlier.

Honestly, I’d already had a nagging suspicion it was work-related, but being completely cut off without a trace of news still left a sour taste in my mouth. Reasonable explanation or not, I wasn’t about to hand over forgiveness that easily.

I brought up the whole “childhood sweetheart” situation to confront him. Lu Yanbai pinched the bridge of his nose in total exhaustion.

“I’m three years older than her—how does that even qualify as a childhood sweetheart? Our families floated the idea of an arranged marriage once, but I turned it down flat. Besides, she had zero interest in marrying me anyway.”

I let out a cold snort and shoved him toward the front door. But halfway there, the realization hit me… he had literally taken the door off its hinges!

I lost it. “Lu Yanbai! Are you insane?! There’s no door left—how the hell am I supposed to live here?!”

He cast a cool glance sideways, his tone infuriatingly calm.

“Lin Wanxing. Do you really not know yourself by now? If I hadn’t ripped that door off, I wouldn’t have gotten to see you for an entire week.”

Me: “…”

With my apartment door thoroughly broken, Lu Yanbai and I had no choice but to relocate to his luxury penthouse downtown. Despite my grand declarations of kicking him to the sofa, when I woke up the next morning… I found myself comfortably curled up in his arms like a cat.

Current status of our relationship: “Not officially reconciled, but cohabitating.”

Before heading out for work, he demanded a kiss; I answered with a light slap to his face. Thus began my forced vacation—sprawled out like a lazy dead fish, completely ignoring the outside world speculating on when I’d be blacklisted.

Idle hands lead to trouble. Wandering into his study to poke around, I stumbled upon a small velvet box tucked away in a drawer. Inside was a ring—and a meticulously planned proposal itinerary.

Turns out that trip to Northern Europe in April he’d kept pushing wasn’t just a regular vacation. He’d planned to get down on one knee under the Northern Lights.

No wonder he’d been so furious when I turned it down that day. A sudden wave of guilt and confusion began to knot tightly in my chest.

I sat there frozen, my mind drifting back over the past three years. People said I’d slept my way to the top, trading my body for high-tier resources. But if it were purely about money, I would never have stayed by his side for this long.

Lu Yanbai had never acted like a typical sugar daddy. I remembered a high-end charity auction where a man threw filthy, suggestive remarks my way. Lu Yanbai didn’t hesitate—he splashed a glass of champagne straight into the man’s face.

On the drive home that night, instead of comforting me, he scolded me:

He even forced me to take karate lessons just to ensure that even without him around, nobody could step on me. From day one, he never viewed himself as my patron. He viewed himself as my man.

Right in the middle of my spiral, my manager called, practically shrieking into the phone:

“Open Weibo right now!! Mr. Lu is trending at Number 1!! The sheer aura, the main character energy!! You two are literally a match made in heaven!!”

I listened in silence, then quietly hung up. Today, I didn’t want to digest another byte of noise from the outside world. I needed time to face my own heart.

Weibo had completely crashed. The top ten trending topics were burning bright like fireworks. The celebrities who had been threatening to sue me just yesterday were now getting systematically exposed—everything from private videos to histories of emotional abuse, with a few even facing potential jail time.

I knew better than anyone that nobody besides Lu Yanbai had the balls—or the sheer power—to land a single, lethal strike that wiped out every target in one clean sweep. He hadn’t just scrubbed my scandal clean; he had publicly stepped out to back me up before the entire nation.

I tuned into a live video interview Lu Yanbai was conducting. When asked about the nature of our relationship, he replied with total composure:

“She’s my sugar mommy.”

The host and the audience froze in unison. He let out a low, smooth laugh.

“She manages the household finances. She holds all my bank cards. Calling her my sugar mommy… isn’t inaccurate.”

He went on to state with iron conviction that we had never broken up; he’d simply made me mad and was currently stuck in the stage of… “groveling for forgiveness.”

When asked what kind of person Lin Wanxing was, Lu Yanbai’s tone shifted, becoming unusually earnest. He spoke of a girl who fought for every inch of her ground:

A serious actress who threw herself into roles regardless of the pain.

A girl raised in an orphanage who quietly gave back to charity to return the world’s kindness.

And finally, the line that made my heart skip a distinct beat:

“She is Wanxing. The evening star. No matter where she is, she will shine on her own.”

The interview clip rocketed straight to the top spot on Trending. The comment section went into absolute meltdown:

Staring at the comments lowering the market value of romantic devotion, I closed the app with a heavy sigh. That man and his mouth… he was truly unbelievable.

I sat still for a long moment, covering my eyes with my hands to hide the heat rising to my face. A few words… and he actually managed to make my heart flutter.

After a long pause, I softly declared my final verdict on this cold war:

“Fine. He gets to sleep in the master bedroom tonight.”