The Hairclip He Gave Me Was a Free Gift from Her Jewelry Spree Chapter 12

The Hairclip He Gave Me Was a Free Gift from Her Jewelry Spree Chapter 12

I hadn’t expected the man Dad wanted me to marry to be Sebastian.

I stood across from him.

“You went to all this trouble to convince my father to agree to this marriage.”

“What, do you want revenge on me?”

Sebastian looked different than he had four years ago.

He had lost a lot of weight, and the youthful arrogance was gone.

The whole person had gone quiet.

“Rhea, I was wrong before.”

“Charlotte lied to me. She said you bullied her all through high school and begged me to make you suffer.”

I could finally talk about the past calmly.

“She said it, and you just believed her?”

“When I was a child, I fell into a lake, and she called for adults to save me. I’ve been grateful to her ever since and always treated her like a sister. So in the beginning, I did approach you with bad intentions.”

“But what if I said I later genuinely fell in love with you?”

I thought about everything that had happened between us.

“You love me? By buying me $2 hair clips?”

“By giving me freebies and replicas?”

“Or by inviting the press to humiliate me in public?”

I smiled and shook my head at him.

“No. That kind of love doesn’t hold up.”

“After everything between us, marriage is impossible. Give up.”

With that, I grabbed my bag and left, not wanting to tangle with him anymore.

But Sebastian was like someone who couldn’t take a hint.

As if to prove his love, he started pursuing me loudly and publicly.

Gifts poured into my workplace nonstop.

There was the gold jewelry I loved.

There were expensive jeweled necklaces.

And a diamond hair clip worth over $10,000.

My coworkers saw and asked curiously.

“Rhea, that man chasing you is really generous.”

“He’s handsome too. Why don’t you consider him?”

But Sebastian didn’t know that the more expensive his gifts were, the more I ached for the girl who had given

him her whole heart four years ago.

This went on for a while.

Until one day, Sebastian waited outside my apartment with roses.

Four years ago, he had confessed to me with a single rose.

Four years later, the rose had become an enormous bouquet that couldn’t be counted.

He was still the same person.

But I felt no flutter at all. Only exhaustion.

“Sebastian, aren’t you done?”

He looked down at me. “Rhea, from now on, I will always be honest with you.”

“Let’s start over, okay?”

“Back then at the birthday party, you…”

Before I could finish, he interrupted me.

“The truth is, I never really planned to break up with you that day.”

“I was just angry that you were cold to me, angry that you were materialistic. I agreed to Charlotte’s plan in a moment of impulse.”

“Rhea, I meant to tell you my real identity at the party, but I’d also decided that if you begged me, if you said

you loved me, I wouldn’t end things.”

The evening wind lifted my long hair and made the rose petals in his arms tremble.

I heard myself say softly.

“See? Even not breaking up requires me to beg you.”

“As if being with me was some charity you were giving me.”

He panicked. “That’s not what I meant.”

He stepped forward and stubbornly pushed the flowers into my arms.

As if me accepting the roses meant we could get back together.

I refused, and he lost his composure.

Step by step, he cornered me against the wall in the stairwell.

Just then, a screech of brakes came from the entrance to the apartment.

A figure rushed over and, before Sebastian could react, landed a solid punch on his face.

It was Ethan Hale.

He had rushed over, and he stood protectively in front of me.

“Rhea, are you okay?”