Then Do You Dare Say It Again, Right to My Face?(Maren's POV)

"This woman right here is the mistress who tore apart me and my fiancé!"

After the NCI Group security guards had thrown me out once, I stormed straight back in, seized the receptionist, and screamed it in her face.

The color drained from her cheeks. "You're out of your mind! I don't even know your fiancé!"

I let out a cold laugh and dragged her, overpowering her, deeper into the building.

Someone tried to stop me. I went at them like a rabid dog, snapping at anyone who got close with a single question—Are you my fiancé's mistress?—until everyone around me wanted nothing more than to put a hundred yards between us.

I caught snatches of the anxious gossip about me.

"I heard she's a mechanic. Stood by her fiancé when he got hurt, supported him for five years. When it finally came time to get married, he kept pushing the date back—said he had to earn enough to buy a house first. Three months ago he left for work. He didn't bring much money home, but he did bring back a prenatal checkup report!"

"She went to the hospital to confirm it, and saw with her own eyes—her fiancé escorting the other woman to a pregnancy exam!"

"No, no, no—she's just insane. A lunatic. She keeps insisting her boyfriend's name is Asher. We've told her there's nobody at this company named Asher, and she refuses to believe it!"

I curled my lip in contempt.

People only panic when their own interests are on the line. If I hadn't acted at least a little crazy, I'd never have made it past the front door, let alone be standing here confronting a mistress.

"Valentine and Clementine are here!"

Someone shouted it, and the whole lobby fell silent at once.

I turned to look.

The man had brown hair and eyes as blue as the open sky, a face flawless as a sculpture, and the kind of tall, perfectly proportioned frame you rarely see.

His expression was glacial as he looked down at me, his gaze cold enough to freeze.

Yet his arm was wrapped tenderly around the young woman beside him—the very same woman who'd gone with him to that pregnancy exam at the hospital.

Having finally caught him with his mistress red-handed, I couldn't hold back a short, sharp laugh. I stepped forward slowly, my voice dripping with scorn.

"Valentine? No wonder they all said there's nobody here named Asher."

"So it was you all along. You changed your own name just to cheat on me!"

I could faintly hear my own voice trembling.

After everything, I had given this man five whole years of my heart.

But I never expected his answer.

Faced with my raw emotion, Asher only said, coldly, "Miss, I think you have me confused with someone else."

My eyes went wide with shock. I had imagined a hundred different scenarios.

Him going pale and grabbing my arm to explain. Him begging for my forgiveness. Even him pulling the other woman close and declaring that she was his one true love.

The one thing I had never imagined was this—him looking at me like a total stranger and telling me I'd made a mistake.

Was he really so terrified of upsetting his mistress?

Rage drowned out the ache in my chest in an instant. My whole body shook, and I was about to let loose a stream of curses.

Then the receptionist I'd been holding onto suddenly started shrieking.

"Lunatic! I told you she's mentally ill! God knows where she found out Valentine is the heir to the St. Clair family—that five years ago he had an accident, lost his memory, and ended up stranded in the slums. Now she's cooked up this whole drama, deluded enough to think she can worm her way into his life!"

"She even invented this 'Asher' name—made it sound convincing, I'll give her that. But everyone knows Valentine is deeply in love with his childhood sweetheart, Clementine! They got engaged five years ago, and the moment Valentine recovered his memory, the first thing he did was announce their wedding date!"

The words hit me one after another, and all at once they left me stunned.

Heir to the St. Clair family? Five years ago? Engaged?

Wasn't Asher just some homeless man I'd picked up off the street? How had he suddenly transformed into the heir of the St. Clair family—with a fiancée he'd had all along?

And me—I'd become the mistress?!

"You absolute lunatic. You've taken the story of Valentine and Clementine and pasted it onto your own life, claiming you were the one who saved Valentine, that you supported him for five years. Pathetic!"

My mind was a tangled mess, but hearing something so absurd, I couldn't stop myself from cutting in.

"I did save him!"

Five years ago he'd been covered in blood, his breathing faint, when I took a shortcut home and found him. Out of simple kindness, I saved his life.

He'd been burning with fever then, delirious, his whole face flushed red, his body scorching to the touch.

I prayed to God not to take him. For nights on end I never closed my eyes—wiping down his body, bringing his fever down, until I ran myself into a fever too. Only then did I manage to drag him back from death. And after that I went on supporting him, keeping him alive.

The receptionist sneered. "Valentine said it himself in the news—it was Clementine who saved him, who stood by him and nursed him. You don't even have your facts straight, and you've got the nerve to steal their story and come make a scene at this company? Go get your head checked!"

I was completely dumbfounded.

The mocking voices bored into my ears from every direction, no gap left unfilled, forcing my frozen brain to start working again.

Valentine was no ordinary homeless man. Three months ago he'd recovered his memory and reclaimed his place as the heir to the St. Clair family—worth hundreds of billions—and settled on a wedding date with the fiancée he'd been engaged to for five years.

But he never told me.

He deceived me. He humiliated me. He turned me into the mistress, watched me drive myself half-mad with suspicion, and now that I'd caught him, he was flat-out pretending he didn't know me—and worse, stealing the fruit of my labor to hand to his lawful bride!

Something inside my skull detonated.

I fought down the trembling in my body and fixed my eyes on Asher. "Oh, really? Then do you dare say it again, right to my face? Asher."

Clementine's expression was puzzled, her tone carefully gentle. "Miss, you really have made a mistake. Five years ago, I was the one who saved my fiancé."

But I kept my eyes locked on Asher, pathetically, stubbornly waiting to hear an explanation from his own mouth.

It never came. Asher said nothing. Not even his gaze so much as flickered.

Ha—how laughable. I'd come to catch a mistress, and in the end I'd not only become the mistress, I'd had everything I'd built stolen out from under me, mocked to my face!

"Miss, why don't I have someone take you to the hospital."

Clementine seemed about to say something more. She took a step toward me, as if to offer comfort—then, just as she got closest, she suddenly cried out, stumbling backward and glaring at me in fury.

"Miss, why did you shove me?"

I stared at her, bewildered.

"I'm pregnant," she said. "Are you trying to make me lose the baby?"

"I did not!" The whole thing was beyond absurd.

But before I could get out a single word of explanation, she cut me off with disgust.

"Seeing as there's clearly something wrong with your head, I'm willing to overlook the fact that you deliberately tried to harm me. But the specialist and prenatal care that follow will cost a hundred thousand dollars—and every cent of it is coming from you, as your apology!"

I was so shocked I could barely speak. "Clementine, I never even touched you."

"If you didn't push me, then what—am I extorting you? Since the day I got pregnant, my fiancé has already poured in tens of millions of dollars, all so our child can grow up healthy."

"Asking you for a mere hundred thousand is me being generous, wouldn't you agree, Valentine?"

I couldn't wrap my head around her sheer bandit logic. The numbers she was hurling at me left me reeling.

Ten... ten million dollars?