When we got home, Lin Chaowan kept casting nervous, fidgety glances at Pho Dinh, looking like she was desperate to say something. She made a move to approach him, but the second her eyes met his icy, frost-bitten glare, she chickened out completely and didn’t dare breathe a word.

Dinh seemed to have run completely out of patience for this uninvited guest. He turned sharply and walked straight into his bedroom. I quickly used the excuse of following him to escape the suffocating atmosphere in the living room.

The moment I pushed his door open, I happened to catch him taking off his coat. I hurriedly averted my gaze, muttering under my breath:

“Uncle Dinh, you don’t have to look like a debt collector all the time. You scared Wanwan half to death. She just wanted to stop and thank her savior.”

Dinh was pulling on a fresh dress shirt. As his long fingers slowly worked down the buttons, he stepped toward me, one deliberate stride at a time.

“Thank me?” He let out a dark scoff, blatant disdain flashing in his eyes. “Her intentions are definitely not that simple.”

I looked up at him, my mind still a bit blank.

“Your roommate… she likes me.”

I froze for a couple of seconds, then couldn’t help but let out a soft giggle.

“Pho Dinh, you are way too full of yourself. Wanwan is just genuinely grateful that you saved her life. You’re overthinking things.”

He smirked, not bothering to argue with my naive optimism, and immediately shifted gears:

“Come over here and help me button my shirt.”

With that, he grabbed my hand and pressed it directly against his firm chest, his voice dropping into an intoxicating rumble. But what Dinh called “buttoning his shirt” was anything but simple. He leaned down, burying his face in the crook of my neck, dropping soft, feather-light kisses that sent ticklish sparks across my skin.

My fingers trembled violently, completely failing to thread a single button through its hole. Hearing his low, playful laugh, a shiver ran down my spine, and my knee-jerk reaction was to step back and escape. But he was faster—his massive hand slammed against the small of my back, cutting off my retreat.

“Where are you running off to? Feeling guilty?”

By the time there was only one button left, I had turned completely to mush in his arms, helplessly leaning against his chest.

“Be a good girl… Can I sleep in your room tonight?” Dinh let out a raspy sigh, his voice heavy with coaxing temptation.

Before I could even nod in agreement, he suddenly pulled his hands back and let me go. The slightly ajar bedroom door was abruptly pushed open wide. Before I could process what was happening, Lin Chaowan was standing right in the doorway, her eyes darting suspiciously between the two of us.

She stammered in a small, mousey voice: “I felt a little scared alone in the living room, so I wanted to find Yuyu…”

Dinh’s expression turned terrifyingly dark. He cast a sharp, heavy glare in her direction, his presence suffocatingly oppressive:

“Remember this: barging into my room like this—there will never be a second time.”

Chaowan’s eyes instantly welled up, and she lowered her head in sheer humiliation. “I’m sorry… I was just so panicked, terrified my family would track me down…”

At the time, I still hadn’t thought deeply about the possibility of her liking Dinh. I simply thought that barging into someone else’s private space without knocking was undeniably rude.

However, right before we went to sleep that night, Lin Chaowan suddenly turned to me with a loaded question:

“Yuyu, does your Uncle Pho have a girlfriend?”

I paused, turning my head to look at her. I silently observed her expression for nearly half a minute before calmly nodding:

“Yes.”

Chaowan’s brows knitted tightly, a complex look flashing through her eyes. “You two aren’t even blood-related, and he already has a girlfriend… Don’t you think the way you two act around each other is a bit too intimate? A single man and woman living under the same roof for so long—where I come from, people would curse you to death. No decent man would ever want to marry you after that.”

I couldn’t tell if she was genuinely worried about my reputation or just using it as a disguise to lecture and mock me. I simply fired back with a cold, smooth rebuttal:

“First of all, this isn’t your backwater hometown.”

“Second of all, I have zero interest in moving back to your backwards village just so some local guy can ‘claim’ me.”

Chaowan choked on her own breath, staring at me as if I were an ungrateful fool who couldn’t appreciate good advice. Inhaling sharply, she forced a tight, awkward smile, turned on her heel, and headed back downstairs to the living room.

In the quiet stillness of the late night, I lay in bed, replaying Chaowan’s strange behavior and attitude over and over in my head. She really seemed to be paying an inappropriate amount of attention to Pho Dinh.

As I was lost in thought, a soft, subtle click broke the silence. My bedroom door pushed open.

Dinh had just showered, a loose bathrobe draped carelessly around his body. The deep, dark intensity in his eyes made no effort to conceal his raw hunger.

My eyes widened in absolute shock. What the hell…? Lin Chaowan was literally still in the house! Did he eat tiger balls today or something?!

Reading me like an open book, Dinh drawled in a lazy, low tone: “Relax, I’m not doing anything to you tonight.”

Before my heart could even return to a normal rhythm, I noticed his burning gaze locked firmly onto my lips. I knew it! I immediately lunged forward, slapping both hands over his eyes:

“Don’t look! Dinh, how can you be so shameless?! I’m going to call the cops on you!”

Dinh let out a deep, amused rumble of a chuckle. But he was true to his word—he merely pinned me down and gave me a thoroughly wild kiss to satisfy his cravings before pulling away to leave.

However, as he reached the exit, his hand paused on the door handle, refusing to turn it. Sensing something off, I quietly slipped out of bed, walked over to his side, and whispered, “What’s wrong?”

In the very next second, stealthy, creeping footsteps echoed softly down the hallway outside. Right after, the handle of the neighboring bedroom door was turned—that was Dinh’s bedroom!

The man standing beside me turned impossibly dark, his face black as ink. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that his tolerance for Lin Chaowan had officially hit rock bottom.

I quickly pulled Dinh back into the shadows of my room, then stepped out into the hallway to confront the unwelcome guest myself.

“What on earth do you think you’re doing?”

I stood tall right behind her, my voice ice-cold and utterly devoid of emotion.

Chaowan whipped around in total shock, then immediately lunged forward to hug me. Sniffling and weeping, she put on her most pitiful act:

“Yuyu, I just had a terrible nightmare… I dreamed my parents caught me and forced me to marry that crippled man. I was so terrified, so I came upstairs looking for you… I thought… I thought this was your room.”

My female intuition screamed that this was a ridiculously trashy soap-opera tactic, but I couldn’t catch her red-handed just yet.

After a moment, I peeled her fingers off me one by one, delivering a blunt, icy warning:

“Nightmares aren’t real.”

“But here’s a reality you need to learn, Chaowan: knocking before entering someone’s room is a basic courtesy even a three-year-old understands.”