A Love as Hot as Summer

Bai Qingmei read Zhou Sheng'an's patience with her as proof that he did not love her, and she broke off the engagement over it. The engagement had been forced on her in the first place. She works as an independent photographer and did not want the restriction, so she laid down three rules for the arrangement and wrote him off as a dull older man, president of Hengtai Group or not. He worked at it quietly. He knelt to put her shoes on, made her brown sugar water, and learned to cook for her. The two of them held back and tested each other for a while, and the feeling came anyway. What she could not get past was her mother's history and her own fear of an open arrangement, which turned his tolerance into indifference in her reading of it. After the separation Zhang Jiuwan came at her with the sort of attention that made her own feelings plain to her, and Zhou Sheng'an lost his temper and went after him with his fists. He followed her to Jingbei and asked her to marry him, and she put off giving him an answer.