Love Has Fireworks - Chapter 71

Chapter 71: Old Man Li

When Li Yifei rushed home at breakneck speed, Qian Fei and Liao Shiyu were sitting in the living room, chatting while watching television.

Qian Fei was currently complaining, "Ugh, that woman has total sausage lips and isn't pretty at all. Why does she always play the legendary beauty? Is it to test the male lead's stamina and tolerance?"

Seeing him appear, Qian Fei was a bit startled. She turned her head and asked, "Bro, didn't you say you were working overtime?"

Li Yifei looked at Qian Fei, then at Liao Shiyu. He let out a yawn and said, "Too tired. I came back to catch up on sleep." As he spoke, he walked toward the bedroom.

Qian Fei followed him inside, asking cautiously, "Are you sure you're 'sleepy' and not 'hungry'?"

Li Yifei threw himself onto the bed and said, "I need to catch a quick nap." Pausing for a moment, he added, "Jinjin, I remember I still have a suit at the dry cleaner's that I haven't picked up. Could you help me fetch it so I can take it with me when I leave later?"

Qian Fei curled her lips and snorted disdainfully, "Tsk! To this day, you still dare to order a certified sponsor representative like me around to do these odd jobs. I see your future is just going to be mediocre, no great prospects ahead! You really don't know how to treasure talent! Tsk tsk!" Although she spoke this way, her legs were already moving toward the door.

The moment she left the apartment, Li Yifei leapt up from the bed with a whoosh. Opening the bedroom door, he looked at Liao Shiyu on the living room sofa with a stark, serious expression and said, "Liao Shiyu, come over here. Let's talk."

●︶3︶●

Leaning against the doorframe, Li Yifei went straight to the point and asked Liao Shiyu, "The old man made you move in, didn't he?"

Liao Shiyu curled her lips into a smile. "I knew you would have already guessed it."

Li Yifei knitted his brows. "Aside from that, is there any other reason?"

Liao Shiyu tilted her head up to look at him. "It seems you already know the other reason as well."

Li Yifei's brow furrowed even tighter. "Liao Shiyu, what exactly do you plan to do? Would it be convenient to enlighten me?"

Liao Shiyu said, "Nothing much. I just wanted to know what exactly makes her so unforgettable to people."

Li Yifei countered, "Fortunately, she still doesn't know who you really are, and you haven't caused her any substantive harm yet. Otherwise, Liao Shiyu, that bit of childhood friendship between us probably wouldn't be enough to let you escape unscathed."

Liao Shiyu laughed. "I really have never seen you protect someone like this before! She truly makes one quite envious!"

Li Yifei didn't take her bait. He said icily, "Move out tomorrow. If you don't move, I will fire that guy surnamed Wang."

Liao Shiyu stopped laughing, stood up from the sofa, and walked up to Li Yifei. In a low, firm voice, she said, "Even when I broke up with him, I didn't fire him. Don't you think about touching him either."

Li Yifei let out a cold laugh. "Add up the shares of your dad, your mom, your uncle, plus your own. Combined, do they amount to more than the shares I am about to inherit? If not, then don't play mind games with me here. Hurry up and find a suitable excuse to move out." He paused, then added, "Ever since we were kids, I've truly detested this deep, calculating streak of yours!"

Liao Shiyu thought it over, a look of compromise appearing on her face. "I'll move out tomorrow. Don't touch him." After a moment's thought, she added, "I originally intended to do something to Qian Fei, but now I've lost interest. You can rest easy. But what about you? When do you plan to tell her your true identity? Hiding it from her like this—how is your behavior any different from mine? Aren't you afraid that you will end up hurting her in the future?"

Li Yifei pondered and replied, "Didn't the old man tell you? This is an agreement between us."

Liao Shiyu shrugged. "Do you think he actually wants me to be his daughter-in-law so badly that he would tell me everything?"

●︶3︶●

On New Year's Day, the legendary hot-tempered old man, Li Qiansheng, called Li Yifei.

Chapter 72: He mentioned the group's accounts. Upon reviewing them, he discovered that several branch offices and subsidiaries indeed had many problems.

In particular, a listed subsidiary of the group was being dragged down by an underlying sub-subsidiary. Its operating performance was declining year by year. If measures were not taken immediately to conduct an asset restructuring, the group's listed subsidiary could very likely be dragged down to the point of being delisted.

Ever since Li Yifei had returned home, the old man had been constantly brainwashing him, repeating that marriage required matching family backgrounds. He insisted that finding a low-born female sponsor representative was nowhere near as good as choosing a childhood friend who held shares in the group. He spared no effort trying to matchmake him with Liao Shiyu.

He had asked the old man what it would take for him to stop throwing obstacles between him and Qian Fei. The old man thought about it and said, "Let me see her capability. If she has sufficient ability to assist you, I can consider overlooking her background."

Thus, he and the old man reached an agreement.

Once he finished sorting through all the group's affairs and accounts, Qian Fei would serve as the project lead to complete the asset restructuring project for the group's subsidiary.

Before the asset restructuring plan was finalized, he could not tell her his true identity, nor could he provide her with any assistance. If she could ultimately rely on her own ability to help the company weather this crisis, the old man would no longer block them from being together.

But if Qian Fei failed, or caused any losses to the company during the process, Li Qiansheng made his stance clear: "Then she has no qualification to be a daughter-in-law of my Li family."

Li Yifei had accepted this condition. He had more than enough confidence in his woman.

She was no longer the person she used to be; she was no longer a timid, subservient junior employee. What she needed now was a battlefield to strategize and display her capabilities.

He was willing to give her this battlefield, to watch her win a beautiful victory.

●︶3︶●

Qian Fei returned from the dry cleaner's in a furious rage.

The moment she entered the bedroom, she lunged onto the bed, straddling Li Yifei and throttling his neck. She demanded furiously, "Has your early-onset dementia kicked in ahead of schedule? Do you even have a suit at the dry cleaner's? The owner, his wife, and I went through every single piece of clothing in that shop and didn't find a thing! And then I remembered you moved out ages ago, okay?!"

Li Yifei put on a look of sudden realization. "Oh right! I moved out a long time ago! It seems I've been too busy lately, my memory is all jumbled up."

Seeing his completely unbothered face, Qian Fei truly wanted to find a knife and stab him a couple of times.

Li Yifei's hands snaked onto her buttocks, giving them a slap. His face filled with a wicked, lecherous grin. "Since we're already in this position, why don't we just start our feast right now!"

Qian Fei scrambled to climb down, but she was firmly pinned by Li Yifei, unable to move.

His hands began to conduct an intense investigation into items like buttons and belts. Just as the investigation was growing fervent, a sudden knock sounded at the door.

Outside the door, Liao Shiyu was calling Qian Fei's name.

Li Yifei let out a sharp "Shit!" Gritting his teeth, he snarled, "That wretched woman, she absolutely did this on purpose!"

Qian Fei scrambled off the bed on all fours, frantically straightening her clothes and socks. Opening the door, she asked Liao Shiyu, "What's the matter?"

Liao Shiyu swept a glance past her shoulder, a flash of schadenfreude flitting through her eyes. Then she looked at Qian Fei and said, "The renovations on my apartment are finished. I'll be moving out tomorrow, just letting you know."

Qian Fei blinked, startled. "Ah? Oh, okay. If you need any help, just let me know."

Liao Shiyu went back to her room to pack her things.

Qian Fei closed the door and said to Li Yifei, "The timeline for her apartment renovations is incredibly mysterious. It just suddenly finished out of nowhere."

Li Yifei yanked her over, pinning her back down onto the bed—following the flow of things with a smirk—and grinned lewdly. "The sooner this kind of sudden surprise happens, the better! Her moving away immediately is exactly what I wished for! That way, the scope of our 'feasts' can expand to every single room in the future!"

●︶3︶●

The following day, Liao Shiyu quietly paid a visit to Li Yifei's family home.

She walked over to the French windows in the living room and called out "Uncle" to the man lying on the rocking chair, basking in the sun.

The man opened his eyes and turned his head.

It was a handsome, refined middle-aged face that bore a striking resemblance to Li Yifei, yet possessed a few more degrees of composure and decisiveness.

He tugged his lips into a slight smile, the harsh lines of his face softening for a mere fraction of a second before returning to normal.

"Little Yu is here. How did it go?" he asked in a deep voice.

Liao Shiyu took a seat on an adjacent chair and automatically poured herself a cup of tea, taking a sip.

"She is a good girl," she said softly, cradling the tea. "No hidden schemes, pure and kind. It's true she likes money, but only on the premise that she earns every cent of it herself. I have observed her character closely; there are no issues. Once she takes over the company's asset restructuring project and confirms her professional capability is up to par, you can comfortably let Li Yifei continue dating her."

The middle-aged man leaned back, rocking slightly in his chair.

"It is truly rare for you to have such magnanimity, speaking well of your romantic rival."

Liao Shiyu chuckled softly. "Because even if I spoke ill of her, it wouldn't actually turn her into a bad person. It would only lower my own standards."

The middle-aged man rocked again. "Do you really not plan to tell those two individuals involved about why you targeted Wang Ruohai in the first place?"

Liao Shiyu set down her teacup. "There is no need. It would just look like I'm trying to white-wash my actions. Why should I live my life pretending to be some innocent white lotus? I think living like this is perfectly fine, it has its own flavor." She paused, then added, "Besides, I really did steal someone else's love."

Looking out the window, the middle-aged man spoke in a low, resonant voice, "I remember during the summer vacation of your sophomore year in high school, you insisted on backpacking out for a trip all by yourself. No one could stop you. When you came back, you secretly told me that you met a boy in a water town south of the Yangtze River. You fell into the water and almost drowned, and he saved you. You also told me you liked him to pieces, and before parting ways, you made a pact to test into universities in Beijing together. In the end, during your senior year, your parents immigrated. You couldn't override them no matter how hard you fought, so you went abroad after all. Later, you emailed me saying you lost touch with the boy after arriving in the US, and you even fell ill over it."

He paused for a brief moment, then said softly, "That boy was Wang Ruohai, wasn't he?"

After a long silence, Liao Shiyu let out a faint, melancholy sigh. "Sometimes I'm truly angry that he forgot about me just like that."

The middle-aged man twitched the corner of his mouth slightly. "Back in your sophomore year, you wore glasses and braces. Your appearance has indeed changed drastically compared to now. Furthermore, didn't you say that to prevent your parents from tracking where you were traveling, you used your cousin's name and ID card at the time?"

Liao Shiyu said, "Yes. The reason I insisted on returning to China after finishing my master's degree was simply to try my luck and see if I could find him. Maybe he really did test into a Beijing university and stayed here. And I really was lucky; I never expected to cross paths with him at Qiansheng Group. I recognized him at a single glance. I waited for him to remember me too, but he didn't. I didn't hide my feelings for him, and he noticed. I asked him out; he rejected me the first two times, but he kept the date on the third. In the beginning, he didn't tell me if he had a girlfriend, and I didn't ask. Later, when I found out he really had one, I asked him to choose, but he was incredibly hesitant and couldn't make a decision. It wasn't until later when we both drank too much and went to a hotel, where he was caught in the act on the spot by Qian Fei, that he finally made a definitive choice. When all is said and done, I am still a bad woman.

"When he first got together with me, things were still quite good between us. But gradually, he always started comparing me to Qian Fei. He complained that I didn't know how to cook, didn't do chores, and that I was delicate and short-tempered. When I went home with him for the Lunar New Year, his mother kept calling me by Qian Fei's name. I was furious and didn't give her a pleasant face. As a result, after returning to Beijing, he broke up with me.

"When I was at his family's home, I walked with him along the riverbank where I had once drowned, and I asked him if he remembered anything. His face darkened, looking rather sorrowful. I knew that the person he was remembering at that moment wasn't me—it was Qian Fei."

Liao Shiyu murmured to herself, staring somewhat sorrowfully at the teacup in her hands.

"No matter how beautiful a first love is, what can it really achieve? In the end, it simply cannot compete with seven years of companionship."

Lying back on the rocking chair, the middle-aged man asked softly, "Why not tell him all this?"

Liao Shiyu drank a sip of tea. "If he can remember it on his own, then so be it. If he can't, then let it go. I don't need sympathy or to move someone to tears. I am just a bad woman, and living my life with this wicked streak feels quite satisfying anyway.”