"I'll never surrender my heart to a man like him," she declared, folding her arms across her chest, the tomboyish confidence in her voice belying the flutter she refused to acknowledge.
Her elder sibling raised an eyebrow, a knowing smirk playing at the corners of her mouth. "That's precisely why I'm sending you. You're immune to charm, remember? You've made it abundantly clear that masculine wiles leave you cold."
And so Yang Guo walked into the lair of the most intimidating legal mind in the city — a counselor whose reputation for icy detachment preceded him like a frost. Xiang Yu Ping had buried every tender emotion beneath layers of calculated precision, turning his home into a fortress guarded by two grieving orphans who'd driven away every caretaker before her. The children were frightened, wounded, lashing out at anyone who dared approach with kindness. Previous nannies had fled in tears or succumbed to the magnetism of their brooding employer.
But Yang Guo was different. She hadn't come to swoon or to run. She'd come to work.
"Your scowl doesn't frighten me," she told him on the first morning, matter-of-factly, as she served breakfast to the children who watched her with wary, curious eyes.
Something shifted behind his impenetrable gaze. Nobody had ever spoken to him that way.
Weeks passed. The children softened under her no-nonsense warmth. The household, once silent as a tomb, filled with laughter and the clatter of shared meals. And the lawyer who had built walls around every corridor of his spirit found himself looking up from his briefs, straining to hear her voice in the next room.
"You lied," he accused one evening, catching her off guard as she hummed in the kitchen. "You told your sister you were indifferent to men."
"I... I thought I was," she stammered, the mask slipping for the first time.
"And now?" he pressed, stepping closer, the space between them charged with everything unspoken.
She looked up at him — the man whose exterior had seemed carved from granite, now crumbling at the edges, revealing something achingly tender beneath. "Now I'm not so sure anymore."
What began as a strategic placement built on a fib became the most genuine connection either had ever known, proving that the heart has its own arguments, far beyond the reach of any legal brief.
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