Peerless Perverted Actor Has a Celebrity Harem?!

One mistake Park refused to make was stopping Quinn from walking out of his room.

He watched the door close behind her and as the heavy carved wood meet its frame with the same expensive, unhurried finality it had brought when it opened he remained exactly where he was on the leather sofa, one hand still spread flat over the drum-quick beat of his own chest, cognac-gold eyes fixed on the wood grain long after the woman on the other side had gone.

From the second he had allowed Quinn inside — no... .

..from the second she had followed him inside — he had known exactly what she expected.

A woman that sharp did not miss the current running underneath every word he had spoken in the car. She didn’t miss the way his gaze had lingered a full beat too long on the fine line of her throat when she adjusted the mirror.

Hell, he hadn’t even tried to hide it.

She seen the small precise cracks in his composure the same way she catalogued sightlines and exits in every room she entered.

She understood the male mind the way a blade understood flesh.

’Intimately. Without illusion. Without sentiment. And still — still — she had let me continue.’

That alone told him everything he needed to know.

Quinn was daring. Curious.

’Playful in that quiet, careful way disciplined women get playful — pleasure only allowed in small doses, all of them measured, none of them share with anyone she hasn’t chosen.’

Quinn was the sort of woman who stood at the edge of a cliff not because she wanted to jump, but because she wanted to feel the wind try to make her, then walk back to the car afterwards with her spine perfect and her hair unmoved.

He knew the type.

In his old life he had admired the type across bar counters from twenty feet away:

’In my old life, too, I have never been allowed to touch one.’

Attraction was already between them. That much had ended tonight. Her thumb on his wrist had ended it. The half-inch tilt of her face into his waiting hand had ended it again. The way she had gone still against him — that specific stillness deciding whether to lean in or step back and choosing, for one long second, neither — had ended it a third time.

’Calling this thing infatuation would be stupid.’

Attraction was easy. Attraction happened in elevators and in the small pupil-flick a woman couldn’t hide when a good-looking man stepped into her sightline before she adjusted her face.

Attraction was a physical fact and did not cost anyone anything.

But infatuation took time, it actually took poison...

The slow, steady drip of it, in small doses, over weeks, until one morning the woman woke up and realized — with the quiet horror of realizing she had lost her professional footing — that she was no longer running her own attention.

He was not stupid enough to mistake the first for the second.

Yes, his confession had gone in deeper than he had planned.

Park knew that.

He felt it happen the moment I almost died today, Quinn crossed the last distance between them and lodged somewhere he had not been sure she had.

The lonely guard beneath the perfect suit had felt something shift when the peerless young master spoke honestly about a life he had almost lost. The soft particular shift of a woman who had spent years standing behind other people’s lives and had never, until tonight, been asked to stand inside one.

She hadn’t noticed the moment her guard came down.

Park himself had watched it come down behind her eyes with the quiet proprietary attention of a boy who had, at last, been given eyes that could see it happen; he did not miss things like this.

The boy behind them, who had spent his old life failing to be looked at, had spent every hour of that failure teaching himself how to look.

And the forbidden part had made it worse for her.

’Or better.’ He suspected better.

He was strictly off-limits to every female member staff of the household — his stepmother had made the rule herself, back when the household was still figuring out how to hide him, and how to get used to a handsome young kid like him and the Chancellor made rules the way other people made bones—

—and that rule had turned tonight, for Quinn, into stolen wine drunk in a locked pantry at three in the morning.

’Quinn has always liked the pantry.’

Park had counted on all of it and he did not dare rush for the prize (namely kisses and the rest of the game) like some idiot handed a cheat and a harem script on day one.

’And that,’ he thought, letting the small satisfied thought settle across the warm hollow Quinn had recently left, ’is why I am going to have her.’

Unlike the usual novel MCs who somehow land the girl before even the first night ends, armed with face cards, some pleasure abilities to knock a woman off her feet into the realms of desire to bed the MC, and the author’s shameless favoritism—

—Park had none of those luxuries to rely one.

There were no R-18 skills tucked quietly away in the background waiting to smooth the road. No Perfect Kiss (SSS) passive, Legendary Tongue unlocking at Tier Two, Guaranteed First Time pinned modestly under Peerless Idol.

The Shameless Pervert trait, glitched and half-registered and now presiding sheepishly over the Celebrity first woman sub-system’s mission it was seasoning.

The System had given him tools for entering the fight. A face. A body. A Halo. A room-changing presence. The ability to make grown men flinch and grown women forget which floor they were walking to.

’Seduction abilities, though. Real system seduction abilities...’

—the System had not given him that.

That, apparently, he was expected to earn.

He had good raw material. He did not yet have finished technique.

The old Park had been too afraid of women to make a move on any of them. The new him had been in this new life less than a day.

Which meant, if he was being honest with himself in the way he had been avoiding for two lives, that his actual game was still mediocre.

’Fine,’ he thought, unbothered. ’The honest route builds better instincts. A woman like Quinn can taste cheap-game the moment it enters the room. She has spent years watching lesser men try lesser tricks on her, and I imagine each of them left her presence one small dignity poorer than they arrived. I do this the long way. Every step of the road. She’ll feel each one. She’ll choose each one. And when she finally arrives, she’ll look up and realize how good I drew the map.’

Park exhaled, eyes half-lidded against the low honey light.

His heart, at last, began to slow into something he could pretend to conduct.

’Baby steps into her heart.’

Anything larger than baby step would snap every thin string he had spent the last hour patiently weaving between on her heart to link with his. A hand held one second too long. A joke pushed one degree too far:

A request too openly, too soon, too hungrily — and Quinn’s discipline would relock itself, and everything he had earned tonight would get filed by her under Incident, non-recurring.

He had, tonight, opened a door in her he hadn’t known she owned. Quinn now knew that door existed.

She had cracked it open, taken one careful measurement of the room on the other side, and closed it again on her way out.

’But she had not locked it.’

The next move was his before she made her move.

After that, his.

After that, hers again.

And so on, and so on, in the unhurried volley of two people who had both quietly agreed, without saying so, that they were going to take their time about the ruin.

’A campaign,’ he thought. ’Not a raid. I am not a raider.’

Park closed his eyes. Smiled at the ceiling and let every small win — every blush, every catch of breath — save itself neatly away for tomorrow’s work.

Tomorrow he would see her again. She would come to him with the suit pressed, the spine perfect, the hair pulled back, the face composed into that clean administrative neutrality she brought to every dawn shift.

She would look at him. Once. Briefly. Efficiently.

And he would know, from the small tension at the corner of her mouth as she looked away, that at some point between now and then — in the sleepless hours he was about to be responsible for—

Park looked into the fire. And for the first time in either life, let himself feel the small quiet pleasure of waiting for something.

’Sleep well, Quinn,’ he thought, low, unhurried. ’What little of it I plan to leave you.’