My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 959: Courtney’s Mind

The Rolls-Royce limousine sighed open to reveal the slender blonde figure waiting outside.

Courtney stood beside the car like a composed stroke of pale gold beneath the moon, slim, luminous and exquisitely arranged, her beauty not loud enough to beg for worship but polished enough to receive it without apology.

The night caught in the pale champagne of her hair and lingered there, turning each strand into something silken and faintly celestial, while her posture remained relaxed in that careful way only truly professional women mastered after years of surviving cameras, celebrities and rich people who considered inconvenience a form of persecution.

She looked elegant, sharp and quietly expensive, not in the arrogant manner of heiresses born believing furniture should apologize before touching them, but in the purposeful manner of a woman who understood the world.

Phei smiled at her softly and dipped his head, a courteous gesture refined enough to offer respect without surrendering intimacy. Courtney returned the nod, her eyes resting on him for a brief second longer than ordinary politeness required, not because she had been ensnared by some ridiculous romantic thunderbolt, but because curiosity had a way of sharpening even disciplined women when the subject in front of them had spent the night turning global power into televised ash.

The Goddess shifted beside him, preparing to step out of the car, and Phei offered his hand at once, palm open, steady and attentive. She placed her hand in his, allowing him to guide her down with such seamless trust.

Courtney’s eyes gleamed.

’Now that is new.’

She had known the Ashford Madam for a long time and had worked with her before and seen her through shoots, campaigns, private consultations, expensive meetings and those silent spaces where powerful people smiled beautifully while evaluating one another like knives arranged on velvet.

Courtney had seen men admire her, fear her, flatter her, tremble before her, fail to impress her, and occasionally lose their dignity near her like coins spilling from a torn pocket.

She had seen Damien beside her too, steady, familiar, respected.

Yet she had never seen even Damien receive this kind of effortless surrender from her, this graceful acceptance of guidance and the small silken trust placed into another person’s hand as though the gesture were not a courtesy but a quiet claim.

’Interesting. Very interesting.’

Courtney had already made her own research about Phei Ryujin Tiamat, naturally.

She did not work closely with anyone until she knew at least something about the person, their habits, dislikes, preferences, temper, public image, scandals, boundaries and whatever hidden oddities might explode into expensive problems if handled carelessly.

It sounded excessive only to people who had never spent three hours managing a celebrity who wanted imported fucking mineral water from a country that had stopped existing two centuries ago.

In her career, information was not gossip. Information was armor; charm opened doors, yes, but preparation kept them from slamming shut on one’s fingers, which humanity, being the dramatic little species, it was, kept doing to itself with astonishing commitment.

But Phei had been an enigma.

Everything she found about him divided itself into two violent halves: the unfortunate past and the meteoric rise.

Before, he had been the charity case, the boy dragged through Ashford Elite Academy’s polished cruelty, the quiet shadow beneath the Maxton name.

Then suddenly, almost obscenely, he had become this Young Dragon, as everyone liked to call him, the godlit boy around whom incest relationship scandals, wealth, beauty and old bloodlines began arranging themselves like planets discovering a new sun.

Beyond that, she found mostly rumors. His relationships. His aunt. His cousins. His women. His origins. His tragedy. His supposed scandals:

Speculations dressed as news, theories perfumed as insight, public filth with a grammar check.

Courtney had no use for most of it.

She was not a rumors person.

Even if half the things whispered about Phei and his family were true, those were their personal lives, and Courtney gave precisely zero rat’s fucks about trespassing into them.

She wanted to know how to work with him, how to complete the shoot, to avoid stepping on whatever invisible royal landmine surrounded him and how to leave with her work done, her dignity intact and her payment unthreatened by the emotional weather of rich people.

’People love to confuse curiosity with intrusion.’¹

Courtney preferred the useful kind that helped her survive the day, read the room and not become another casualty in the battlefield of beautiful people with unresolved histories.

Still, the more she had interacted with Phei during the shoot, the more curious she became.

’He is strange.’

Not difficult or arrogant in the exhausting way neither was he a spoiled young master demanding a separate climate for his ego. Strange. Charming without crowding. Flirtatious without becoming vulgar. Aware of his beauty without dragging it around like a drunk prince demanding taxes from strangers.

Phei had been obviously attracted to her, yes, but he had not made it crude or loud or humiliatingly public.

’He let me know without forcing everyone else to know.’

That was skill and dangerous too:

A man who knew how to aim attention quietly was far more troublesome than one who simply threw it around like cheap perfume and hoped someone fainted from poor ventilation.

Courtney’s gaze moved from him to the Goddess and back again.

’No wonder beautiful girls, princesses and grown women orbit him.’

He really was good at this.

And yet, despite finding him almost offensively attractive, Courtney felt no sexual hunger toward him.

Curiosity, yes. Professional interest, certainly, obviously, because she had eyes and was not in the habit of lying to herself for moral decoration.

But not desire or the intimate pull people mistook for destiny when their bodies became too loud.

With Phei, she wanted to observe, understand, perhaps laugh once or twice at the absurd little kingdom of devotion and danger he carried around him but she did not want to be swallowed by it. Not yet. Perhaps not ever.

Courtney respected storms but she did not necessarily wish to move into one and begin choosing curtains.

What she had not expected was the Ashford Madam.

’Not like this.’

Never seen her hand held like this by anyone or seen that soft brightness on her face as she looked at someone.

The Ashford Madam’s beauty had always carried a queenly distance, a lonesome grandeur, the kind that made admiration feel permissible only from across a polished table.

Tonight, beside Phei, that distance had warmed; worse, it had bloomed.

Courtney was still turning that impossible little detail over in her mind when she realized both Phei and the Goddess were standing before her and she had been staring just a fraction too long; busy in her mind.

The Goddess cleared her throat softly.

Courtney blinked once, then cleared hers too. "Ahem."

The Goddess’s smile made the night feel less cold. She looked at Phei first, and Phei looked back at her with such open affection, such quiet, unguarded warmth, that Courtney had to admit, privately and with some irritation, that the rumors had been underselling the problem.

Whatever this was, it was not casual or some passing young-master infatuation dressed in silk and bad judgment. It had weight to it.

A darkly tender gravity that looked beautiful right up until one remembered beauty had started wars between men before and probably enjoyed the attention.

"Courtney," the Goddess said, turning slightly while still standing close enough to Phei that distance itself had clearly been dismissed from employment, "this is Phei Ryujin Tiamat. Phei, this is Courtney, a longtime acquaintance of mine. I believe—"

Courtney extended her hand toward Phei with a professional smile. "We actually met earlier, and—"

The Goddess took Courtney’s hand instead.

Smoothly but effortlessly:

The gesture was so graceful that anyone with poor instincts might have mistaken it for courtesy.

But there was a blade inside that elegance, a silken claim hidden beneath manners, a quiet line drawn in moonlight while everyone pretended they were simply being civilized.

"That is why I said officially," the Goddess replied, smiling as she held Courtney’s hand before Phei could.

Phei watched the exchange, and something delighted and wicked stirred inside him.

’Oh... so she feels jealous too?!’