Dangerous Fiancee

Chapter 4

She wrapped her father's hand on her cheeks with her trembling hands. His hands were a bit cold in the night cold, but obviously they were the living man's hands as she felt warm.

She could sense his deep feelings of sorrow and concern about her even though she was only one step away from him.

'This is real. He's my real father who is alive. It's so vivid. This can't be a dream."

She continued, "I think I just had a bad dream. After I woke up, I missed you so much. What should I do?"

And then she hugged him hard. She rubbed her face on his tight shoulders and laughed.

Though she didn't stop shedding tears, she burst into laughter strangely.

'I'm alive here! Your father is right here beside me!'

Surprised by her reaction, Duke Kling said, "Oh dear! I thought my daughter was a lady, but you know how to play the baby like this."

In fact, they lived in the times when it was quite embarrassing for a lady over 20, and for a daughter from a noble family to play the baby.

Nevertheless, she was always honest with her feelings. She didn't know how to lie. If she liked it, she nodded while she shook her head if she hated it. She didn't have to curry favor with somebody.

And it was of course Duke Kling himself who raised her like that.

Fortunately, he did not doubt her reply.

As if he were less worried, he stroked her dark hair over and over again.

Saying that one's dream always brought about the opposite outcome, he jokingly told her that he would not sit idle if she had such a dream again.

She cried loudly in her father's arms.

She wondered whether all this was possible. She wondered if it was real that she was dead in the lake or if she was twenty-one years old and talking to her father here, how she travelled back to the past. But all this did not matter at all to her. The fact that her father, whom she could reach out and touch, was alive here and breathing only mattered.

She didn't care even if all this was her last dream, whose body was decaying in the lake bottom because it was the dream of the dead who wouldn't wake up anyway.

'If I want to defend this fantasy world, I can do anything and I will.'

She made a vow to herself before she completely recovered her senses in reality. And it was a promise that would change her life.

* * *

The next morning, Marianne woke up in a fresh mood after she slept soundly.

Familiar colors and patterned ceilings in her room were reflected in her eyes.

She heard chirping birds outside the window. It was an unrealistic peaceful scene.

Instead of getting up immediately, she pulled a fluffy blanket over her eyes. She rolled her emerald pupils and looked around.

Although she woke up from sleep, nothing particular changed in the world. Four seasons outside the window, the scenery inside the room and her hesitation before going to bed last night were all the same. She felt a sense of an unbelievably stable reality in them.

'No wonder... I feel like I'm back to the same place,' she thought to herself.

That was a fantastic adaptation for a woman who died just yesterday and then was reborn back as herself two years ago.

She felt like her own boldness was ridiculous, but she soon concluded that she was all right.

After she met her living father last night, she decided that the world she was living in now was real. She thought that God who felt pity for her gave her a second life.