Chapter 95: Those Bygones
"I don’t believe you for a second!" Jiang Li scowled.
Jing Ruo remained silent, and simply lay on the bar, pretending to be drunk.
It wasn’t until she heard the sound of Jiang Li’s departing footsteps that Jing Ruo buried her face in her arms and let out a long sigh.
She was playful, but not just for the sake of being playful—her involvement with Tang Cheng wasn’t without reason. Tang Cheng was more well-informed than she was about Beijing’s goings-on.
And those genuine sons and daughters of the wealthy households of Beijing, to a lesser or greater extent, all took an interest in her and Bo Jingshen, the likes of them whose origins were, to put it mildly, unconventional. Without saying whether it was a malicious interest, it was an interest, nevertheless.
It was the kind of interest akin to a cat teasing a mouse.
Like Bo Jingshen, she, too, was born of an unconventional background—a child born out of wedlock.
To be blunt, if it weren’t for this peculiar interest, an upright young master like Tang Cheng, whose mother was a legitimate wife and both of whose parents’ families wielded tremendous power and prestige, wouldn’t even give them, the illegitimate children, a second glance.
Both she and Bo Jingshen shared the same father, Jing Ce, who was a leading figure in the Jing Family—one of the four biggest wealthy families in Beijing.
Bo Jingshen’s mother, Zhou Xiaochu, was once a minor starlet and one of Jing Ce’s many mistresses—it was during her time as his mistress that she fell pregnant in secret.
She had always dreamed of marrying into a wealthy family, but dreams were just dreams after all. Marriage in that kind of family carried too much weight; usually, marriages were transactional dealings with clearly marked prices. Given Zhou Xiaochu’s background, there wasn’t the slightest chance for her—not even one percent.