Chapter 824: Chapter 617: The Bloody Case (Part 2)

"Mr. Windsor?"

The young female flower farmer was a Chinese student, an exchange student lodging with an old flower grower’s family on the estate, who would come to the manor to help out with her host family’s flower work on her days off.

This wasn’t the first time Eric had seen this girl, but it was the first time he had, in a daze, taken her voice for someone else’s...

Maybe all girls in their early twenties were the same—pretty, lively, a bit mischievous...

Making a nearly forty-year-old single man like him feel something fresh, something young, something he couldn’t resist.

Eric lost the urge to "bury flowers," stood up, clapped his hands, and casually asked her in the local language,

"Are you getting used to tending the flowers here?"

The girl’s skin was on the darker side, probably from being out in the sun a lot. Black eyes, a small nose dotted with a few freckles, which somehow didn’t make her look the least bit unpleasant.

"The environment here is great, and following Mrs. Downton, I can learn a lot too."

Mrs. Downton was the elderly flower farmer who hosted her.

Eric inclined his head slightly.

"Good."

"Mr. Windsor, you still haven’t answered my question."

The girl was tall and slender, at least one-seventy. Standing in front of Eric, she didn’t seem short at all, yet still had to tilt her face up slightly to look straight at him.

She was a girl who wasn’t shy around strangers and liked to talk.

Unlike a certain girl who wanted to hide the moment she saw someone new.

"What?"

The girl pointed at the little pit where Eric had just dug two spadefuls of earth, pouted her lips toward it.

"Were you burying flowers just now?"

"..."

Eric’s gaze also fell on the spot where he had just been digging. For a moment...

The girl looked at Eric, and in those water-blue eyes of his there seemed to be countless layers of sorrow and pity, so much that just looking at him made one feel... heartache.

"No."

Eric came back to himself and looked at the girl.

"Oh, haha, I thought Mr. Windsor had such a hidden side to you, that you’d be as sentimental as Lin Daiyu from Red Chamber, one of the Four Great Classical Novels of my country, so moved by withered petals that you would—"

"Get back to work. I’m going inside."

"Ah? Oh..."

The girl froze for a second; she really was very talkative and not afraid of strangers.

The owner of this manor—Eric Windsor—she knew who he was, knew he had plenty of bad rumors around him, but she also knew he was an extraordinary entrepreneur.

He wasn’t that young anymore, but with that handsome face, those water-blue eyes, who knew how many women’s souls he could steal away.

Tall and strong, he could wear any kind of clothes and make them look uniquely stylish.

The girl’s name was Qin Lai, twenty-two years old, a current exchange student at London University.

Like all young girls her age, beneath the heavy load of schoolwork, she had begun to yearn a little for love.

The first time she saw Eric, Qin Lai felt as if the gates of fate had swung open. 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖

Eric didn’t come to this manor very often; once or twice a month, staying two or three days at most, was already a lot.

In truth, Qin Lai hadn’t seen him many times either.

She had no other designs; Eric was at least thirty-five or thirty-six now. For him to date her at his age would really be a bit too old.

She just... wanted to look at him. Once, then once more. That was all.

A gentle, graceful lady is what a gentleman admires.

A modest gentleman is simply what a lady can’t help but yearn for.

Eric went back inside, but not to the house where Su Xiaomeng and Yin Shixiu were, rather to the small, separate building at the back right of that house.

The moment he stepped into this standalone villa, that almost suffocating flood of longing crashed over him.

The sitting room wasn’t large. She had stood in the center of it and, at the instant he stepped through the door, shouted "Surprise!"

Then, accompanied by the most childish music, she had started doing that silly bunny dance...

His water-blue eyes glistened faintly, his body leaning slightly against the entryway, both hands in his trouser pockets, as he looked at the empty room, so desolate it made one feel a deep, bleak chill.

Time is easy to lose, and once it’s gone, it can never be chased back.

"Don’t come looking for me anymore. Every time I see you, I think of Cherry, I think of that terrorist attack, I think of that fire..."

"Cherry is already dead! And Xiao Meng and her child are both safe, aren’t they?"

"Eric, I don’t know what women in the United Kingdom are like, I don’t know what other women are like, but I know what kind of person I am."

"..."

"My heart is far, far smaller than you think. Your betrayal of me has already been frozen in my mind as something eternal."

"..."

"Chu Jiao, pregnant with your child, was ruthlessly abandoned by you. That great blaze that filled the sky nearly burned my friend to death, bullets screaming past my ears—this past half year it’s all been my daily, terrifying nightmare..."