"Zhicheng, are you really going to marry that woman?"
"What else am I supposed to do?"
In the dead of night, a woman’s voice drifted through the dark, soft and coy, with a teasing sweetness in it, mixed with unsteady breaths.
"Don’t worry. If I marry anyone, it’ll be you. If I touch anyone, it’ll be you too. Be good, stop moving around. You’re making it hard for me..."
A man answered in a hushed voice.
As if afraid she would not believe him, he hurried to add another line.
"If it weren’t for getting my hands on those things, I wouldn’t even bother with her. The minute I get them, I’ll dump her and marry you."
"Really?"
The woman let out a cry of delight.
"Zhicheng, that jade pendant hanging around her neck looks real nice. I want it. Can you get it for me?"
"Sure. It’s only a jade pendant. There’ll be better things later. Be good..."
"Oh—Zhicheng, easy... that hurts..."
Very soon, the room filled with rustling sounds, along with the kind of noises that made people’s ears burn.
Clara Whitfield woke up to exactly those shameless sounds.
When she opened her eyes, she used the pale moonlight to look around and finally made out where she was.
It was a courtyard, almost the same as the one at her grandmother’s country home.
Right in the middle stood three brick-and-tile rooms, with two smaller side rooms on each side.
She was lying now in a corner outside the small room on the west side, and those filthy sounds were coming from the room just behind her.
Then the flood of unfamiliar memories in her head made one thing clear at once—
She had transmigrated.
The girl who’d had this body before her was also named Clara Whitfield.
She was eighteen this year. Her family had lived well enough, and because of that, she’d been spoiled into a stubborn sort of temper.
Her father worked in the government offices and was the deputy mayor of Tongcheng. Her mother held a post at the health bureau.
Clara had been the only girl of her generation in the Whitfield family, so ever since she was little, all the elders had coddled her like a treasure in their palms.
But not long ago, disaster hit the Whitfields. Someone set the family up, and both her parents were sent down to the countryside for labor reform.
The original Clara got dragged down with them.
Her family had actually arranged a way out for her long before that. They wanted her to hurry back to the capital and marry the fiancé she’d been promised to since childhood.
Who would’ve thought she flat-out refused? She was dead set on marrying the man she’d chosen for herself—
Rupert Blackwood.
Because of that, she fought with her family until the house was in an uproar.
She argued as if she had all the reason in the world, saying this was a new age now, that people believed in free love and choosing their own marriage, and nobody had the right to interfere with her.
She even said arranged marriage was old thinking, something that should’ve been thrown out long ago, and if word got around, people would criticize it to no end.
No matter how the family tried to persuade her, it was useless. With the house search about to happen and no time left, they had no choice but to publish a notice in the newspaper cutting ties with her, all to save her life.
Afraid of being dragged down by her own family, the original Clara hurriedly packed up a huge pile of belongings before the confiscation began and moved straight into the Blackwood house.
She really thought that if she married the man she loved, she could dodge the whole disaster and live a steady, peaceful life from then on.