Why the Northern Duke Wanders the Snowfields - Chapter 3

“You do remember the name Kay, at least.”

Aubrianna placed her hand on the man’s arm draped over the edge of the tub.

‘Is she trying to comfort me?’

Watching the warm, small hand gently stroke his arm, the man recalled the day he first came to his senses here.

He woke up on a muddy pool where hot blood had mixed with melted snow.

The clothes soaked with blood were stiff, and his military boots were tightly laced.

A longsword hung at his waist, and three small daggers were tucked into his clothes. The black jacket had no pattern or shoulder tabs, but it was made of fabric used for military uniforms, and the stitching was quite high quality.

A soldier, or an assassin.

He raised a gloved hand and felt the back of his head. His fingertips pressed heavily into a deep indentation in hardened skin.

It looked like he’d been ambushed with a single blow rather than struck head-on.

He’d probably fallen without being able to properly respond, then lost consciousness.

He might’ve even stopped breathing for a moment. It was a miracle that whoever knocked him down didn’t stab him again to make sure he was dead.

When he lifted his head, he saw this cabin. When he turned back to figure out where he’d come from, he couldn’t tell anything because snow already covered the entire world.

And that was when he realized he couldn’t remember his name or his family.

“It’s not my name. I took it from the letters engraved on my cufflinks.”

Kay pointed to his bare wrist.

“I see.”

“I’m Kay. Who are you?”

Those were the first words he spoke when she opened her eyes.

Aubrianna lifted her wavering red eyes and looked at Kay.

Beneath his dark beard and shaggy hair, his vivid blue eyes shone with an intelligence that even lost memories couldn’t erase.

She knew this man very well.

The man’s name was Kaeloc Tennant.

He was the young duke of the Tennant family, who ruled the northern territory of the Kingdom of Trilan.

Now he was a man living as the hunter Kay after losing his memory.

Would this man fall for my seduction?

Fear gathered like storm clouds over Aubrianna’s impatient heart.

***

She was now living her second life.

In her previous life, she was a maid in the ducal estate and Kaeloc’s mistress.

Amid the curious whispers that she was a maid who bewitched the duke with her beauty, she ended up becoming pregnant with the duke’s child.

But Kaeloc, a high-ranking noble, proceeded with an engagement to the young lady of the wealthy Lott family, relatives of the royal family.

Watching him never embrace another woman, Aubrianna held onto faint hope, but when news of his marriage arrived, she fell into despair and despondence.

Then one day, she received word that Kaeloc, who had participated in the autumn battle against the Carnu tribe, had gone missing.

Not only the ducal house but the entire northern region was thrown into chaos.

In the war against the Carnu tribe that had continued for thirty years, the commander who led the army had disappeared.

The borderlands were ravaged by incursions from the Carnu tribe, and the entire Kingdom of Trilan trembled with anxiety.

Amid that chaos, Aubrianna gave birth and had the baby taken away by the former duchess before she could even properly see its face.

“If Kaeloc never returns, I will register this child into the family and raise it as the heir.”

Eloise, Kaeloc’s stepmother, had no interest in Kaeloc’s disappearance or the borderlands being laid waste by attacks from the Carnu tribe.

What the Dowager Duchess wanted was the honor and wealth of the Tennant family without a head.

With no heir and an uncertain future, the Dowager Duchess called the baby the young duke and took fairly good care of it.

However, the baby soon returned to Aubrianna.

It was because Cedric Coville, the nephew of the Dowager Duchess, was revealed to have a mother of Tennant blood.

In an instant, Cedric Coville became the acting head of House Tennant and took control of the ducal estate.

If Kaeloc did not return like this, the Marquessate of Coville, the Dowager Duchess’s maternal family, could become the northern ducal house following the Tennant family.

Amid the successive turmoil, Aubrianna’s position wavered like a flickering candle in the wind, and she was confined to her room under the Dowager Duchess’s surveillance.

“Lien, this food tastes strange.”

The maid Lien, who had brought the meal, lowered her head deeply and disappeared, and the rough-looking man guarding the door sneered at her.

“Keep that baby quiet. In times like this, it could disappear without a trace.”

She was seized by the fear that if things continued this way, she and the baby might die together.

“The Duchess Dowager must find that baby troublesome.”

One day, Kaeloc’s aide, Sion, came to see her and spoke in a cold voice.

“I told you before. A maid like you shouldn’t stay by the duke’s side.”

She had always known he disliked her. But there was no one else she could turn to for help right now.

“Sion, please help me. Please, at least save the baby.”

At her plea, the man’s black eyes glared at her with contempt, then he opened his mouth as if granting a favor.

“One week. Prepare yourself.”

And so, a week later, she left the hellish ducal estate and arrived at the snowy plains. It was because she thought that even she should search for Kaeloc, who had gone missing in the snowfields.

And she lost the baby.

When she came to her senses, she was imprisoned in a dungeon on the charge of murdering the duke’s son.

“No! I went to save the baby! Please. There was someone else. Please listen to me.”

Harsh beatings followed. They even took issue with her foreign appearance, accused her of colluding with the Carnu tribe as a spy, and subjected her to brutal torture, saying she might also be connected to the duke’s disappearance.

“Sion, you know! I don’t know where the duke is.”

“That isn’t important. You were just a foolish woman.”

When she was nearly driven mad from enduring each day, Kaeloc returned.

Having lost all his memories.

“She was my mistress?”

Ashamed of her emaciated body, she hid her face with her loosened hair and turned away from Kaeloc, who tilted his head in confusion.

“Stop this. She’s someone who committed outrageous acts and hasn’t even repented. She’s also suspected of betraying the kingdom.”

What did Kaeloc reply to Sion’s words then?

She couldn’t remember.

As time passed, she became a villainess who murdered her child and threatened the safety of the north.

“Have you repented?”

Someone asked from behind her as she lay on the cold stone floor of the prison.

Festive music spread beyond the iron bars, and fanfares resounded.

“I did nothing wrong.”

With a thin voice on the brink of death, Aubrianna protested.

“I, I did nothing wrong.”

What she did wrong was loving Kaeloc but trying to settle for a comfortable reality.

She gave her heart to something she couldn’t control and relied on it.

She waited her whole life for a noble father whose face she never knew, and only dreamed that someday she would enter a girls’ school.

Yet she dismissed what was placed before her as impossible and wasted her days.

Her breathing grew rapid, and now it was hard even to speak.

“There is something I regret.”

I wanted the life of the baby born with noble blood to be different from my own lowly life, so I never once gently called the baby by name.

“Theo.”

If there is a next life, I will live wisely. I will live only for myself, without worrying about what anyone else thinks.

She slowly closed her eyes, clutching tightly the ruby necklace, her mother’s keepsake.

When she opened her eyes again, she was back in the snowy plains.

Holding a baby that was still alive in her arms.

***

Aubrianna glanced at the baby.

It had been playing quietly on the bed, sucking on a towel with great diligence, and had just fallen asleep.

Its plump, red cheeks full of vitality were unbearably lovely. She felt gratitude at the gentle rise and fall of its chest.

‘The only one I can trust right now is this man.’

The reason she wandered through the dangerous snowy plains to meet him was only one.

‘Without him, we can’t return to the ducal estate, and even if we do return, we’ll be as good as dead.’

Kaeloc had never shown kindness or affection, but he certainly liked her body when she was his mistress.

Even when she was pregnant and her belly had grown large, the man still desired her.

Aubrianna steeled her resolve again and tightened her grip on the hand resting on the man’s arm, pulling him toward her.

The heavy, densely woven muscular arm slid toward her chest as if riding on rails.

“Then what about this? You don’t remember this either?”

Her red pupils narrowed seductively. The man’s innocent face, as if he were seeing a naked female body for the first time, was adorable.

“What?”

When her other hand climbed onto the man’s firm thigh, his large body twitched and twisted, and water splashed up.

“Ugh.”

The penis that had already been stiff since he started looking at the woman in the tub began to grow without restraint the moment her small hand touched it.

The man, who had unknowingly grabbed the woman’s breast, met her eyes with a troubled look.

His whole body tensed, and his lips fell open slackly.

A faint tremor rode on his breath and scattered.

“I might have a wife.”

“Or you might not.”

She lifted the corner of her lips and tempted him softly.

“Are you… a prostitute?”

To ask something like that while his penis was swollen to its fullest.

In the past, it would have been a word that made her angry. It was so insulting that it was vile and cruel enough to make her want to hang herself on the terrace overlooking the garden.

Aubrianna smiled broadly and leaned her face in close.

“If I am, then what will you do? Kay.”

From the woman’s entire body flowed a warm, fragrant sweetness mixed with the scent of milk.

It seemed like her natural body scent, and a floral fragrance tickled the tip of his nose.

Would a prostitute smell like this? Kay didn’t even know whether he was the kind of man who slept with whores, so he only stared intently at the woman’s face.

The woman’s hand tightened and began to move slowly up and down.

In time with the disturbance in the water, a helpless moan leaked from the man’s lips.

“Ugh.”

That was when it happened.

Waaah.

The baby’s cry, waking from hunger, suddenly filled the cabin.

When the small hand gripping and twisting the tip of the ominously raised penis stopped moving, the two met each other’s gaze as they panted.

Seeing his own face distorted with unresolved desire reflected in her burning red eyes, Kay turned his head away.

He heard the woman rise without hesitation, wrap her body in a towel, and head to the bed.

Soon, the sound of the baby suckling could be heard.

Suck, slurp. Slurp.

Even though it was only the sound of a baby feeding, Kay pictured the woman’s ample breasts in his mind.

‘Damn it.’

Covering his ominously erect penis with his hand, he slowly moved it up and down as the woman had done.

Even that alone made his waist tremble, and chills ran up his spine.

The thought that he might have had a wife was long gone.

Right now, his mind was filled only with that woman’s naked body.

Her straight nose and petal red lips. Her elegant jawline and slender neck. Her sweet, full breasts swollen with milk and her supple waist.

And beneath the wavering water, the faint outline of her vulva.

Was it the same pale red as her eyes, or a deep rose color?

The speed quickened, and the water sloshed.

Splash, splash.

“Hah.”

The turbid liquid that burst out clumped into a white mass for an instant in the water, then spread thinly and disappeared.

At the unfamiliar and explicit sight, the man hurriedly lifted his body, and the woman looked at him with a puzzled expression.

‘What did I just do?’

Kay’s cheeks flushed red beyond control.