(The following is Annie’s Chapter, as short as possible)
Actually, Annie never wanted to leave the Davis family.
But suddenly one day, this conviction of leaving started to become stronger than ever.
“Is it possible that from the beginning, you were approaching me on purpose?”
As she said this, Annie sat on a tree stump by the lake with her legs wrapped around her and looked back at him.
Jeremy was sitting on a wooden chair that she had hand-built in front of the cabin, which was made in a very simple way, and he sat down on it, but added a touch of style and elegance.
He was holding a cigarette in his hand, idly playing with it, and between his hands and feet was the laziness of a family man.
At that, he raised his eyes and smiled at her, his long eyelashes were rooted, and he answered not too far from the heart, “Well, on purpose.”
“…”
She gazed straight at him, her lips pursed tight.
“Why would I wait around this lake, every day, for you to come out if I didn’t want something from you?”
Jeremy smiled in a loose manner, making it impossible to see the truth.
“What do you want from me?”
She asked insistently.
Jeremy listened, his smile stuttered, put the cigarette in his mouth and bit it, and then threw it aside, leaned down close to her in the chair, a pair of eyes staring at her, so deep that they refracted deep love.
“Figure you’re beautiful, believe it or not?”
He said.
People at home always said she was a good judge of character, but the truth was, Annie couldn’t quite read Jeremy; he was always three parts true and seven parts false, his speech plausible and his eyes confusing.
She sat on a tree stump, resting her face and looking straight at him.
“It’s not like you’re coming with me, and you’re looking at me like that? Not afraid that I robbed you by force?”
He laughed lowly, saw her hair slipping down to her face, raised his hand to set it aside for her, but thought better of it.
“You really want to go back?” Annie stared at his handsome, stern brow, “That place didn’t make you happy, did it?”
“Who said that?”
He looked at her.
“Every time you get a call from home, you wait for it to ring for a while before you answer it, and every time you answer it, you smoke and are very quiet and don’t say anything.” She said staring at him.
“Observing me so closely?”
He teased her.
“You’re happier when you’re here, you can smile when you’re fishing for a fish.”
She added.
Jeremy, who naturally didn’t have time to tuck a mirror around his body to look at himself, wondered when he heard that, “Do I?”
“Isn’t it good to stay where it makes you happy, why do you have to go back?”
Annie looked at him and said, “the Davis family searched for a long time to find this piece of paradise, here the mountains are good and the water is good, living here is not more comfortable than outside the hustle and bustle?”
The man’s gaze lingered on her face, “Are you trying to recruit me into THE Davis FAMILY?”
“…”
Again.
Every time she talked to him seriously, he always pulled something immodest.
Annie stopped looking at him and looked down at the mud underneath her feet, stomping on it with some annoyance, when she heard his low voice come through, “Comfortable places may not be for me, The Gustin family’s villa where the power struggle is going on is where I should be.”
“Why?” Annie couldn’t help herself and looked up at him.
Jeremy cocked his head at her, a smirk in his eyes, “I thought you were ready to ignore me.”
“…”
It took Annie a moment to realize she’d fallen for it again, every time she was pissed at him he always had a way of getting her to shift her mood in the next moment.
She wanted to leave.
Annie was about to get up and leave when Jeremy suddenly said, “I’m a bastard.”
“…”
She stopped.
“I’m a bastard child born after my father had an affair with a college teacher, when he only had one eldest son at his knee, he was too young to keep me, and to keep me he begged my mother to fake a pregnancy, so that I could successfully be the second youngest son of The Gustin family’s villa.”
Jeremy said as the man leaned back in his chair, one eye looking out over the calm, unmoving lake.
“And his wife even agreed?”
Annie was born into the Davis family and hadn’t heard anything so unbelievable.
“It’s not uncommon in the big families, and a real scandal wouldn’t do my mother and big brother any favors, and besides, it’s not like my mother doesn’t have her own way of dealing with me.”
Jeremy smiled a somewhat sarcastic smile.
“…”
Annie looked at him fixedly.
“Have you ever heard of cupping?”
Jeremy retracted his sight to stare at her, obviously still smiling, but the bottom of his eyes was born cold, “I was the young master who lived the most comfortable life in my family before I was 18, my mother favored me the most, giving me whatever I wanted, sports cars, name lists, even, the girl I looked at in school, the first day I flirted with a couple of words, the next day the person could be sitting in the house and waiting for me.”
At that, Annie looked at him in shock.
“Since I was a child, when I missed or failed my exams and couldn’t go to school, she tried her best to help me cover up and spend money to get out of the way; when I fought outside and raced cars underage, it was all her who stepped in to solve the problem; when my father lectured me twice, she privately took the money to pick me up and let me go and have some fun.”
Jeremy looked at her and said, “Jeremy before he was 18 was the lead in a dude movie, I’ve done every asshole thing you can think of and not think of.”
“…”
“Did you treat me even less after hearing that?”
Jeremy laughed again, wistfully and as if he’d gone off the deep end.
“She’s purposely keeping you from growing up.” Annie said.
“My father kept me back then to keep one more hope of prospering the family, but with my virtues, I was long out of his sight, and I didn’t care, I had my mother to spoil me anyhow.”
“Then how did you find out later?”
She thought, the bastard thing must have been well hidden, perhaps, known only to the three people involved, his parents, and, his birth mother.
“Later, I had my eye on a girl who was working and studying, so I went to the place where people were working part-time every day and blocked her, and forced her to take her home, she got average grades, and when she got home, she had to get tutoring from a teacher in the same alley, I heard that she used to be a college teacher, but then she got fired for some reason, and had to work odd jobs, and charge cheap money to give tutoring.”
Jeremy said, “So I threw a ton of money at her to tutor me too.”
“…”
Annie had guessed who that tutor was, and her gaze couldn’t help but darken.
“I was chasing girls to go, but this woman also seriously tutored me up, and even bought a ruler for me, beating me when I did something wrong, and every day comes with an ideological education class, treating me like a little kid training.”
Jeremy said this and shook his head with a smile, “It was so annoying that I got someone to beat her up in secret, and the next day when it was tutoring time, I was at her door about to do something to the waiting girl when she actually came back and lectured us with an IV bag raised in her hand.”
He must have been pretty shaken up then.
Never in his life had there been someone who wanted to save him.
“You didn’t hit her again after that, did you?” Annie asked.
“Wouldn’t have gotten the chance to hit her if I wanted to, she’d been beaten alive.” Jeremy said in a light tone.