“Please pardon me, Your Highness Claude, but please listen to what people have to say until the end.”
“… M–my bad.”
“As for the answer to your earlier question, I’d be happy to accept your invitation, but I must decline.”
Bridgette then bows her head.
I didn’t expect to get rejected.
It was the first time my invitation got spurned, so I was at a loss as to what to do next.
“Y–your Highness Claude, I request you to please forgive Lady Bridgette…”
“Oh, ah… Okay, I forgive you.”
Then Sufia approached me and urged me to forgive Bridgette, who was still bowing her head to me.
“Thank you. Well, I’ll leave you with this.”
Bridgette raised her head after getting my permission and left.
She would never have behaved this way in the past.
As a potential fiancée, my relationship with Bridgette goes back to childhood. We have been together long enough that I can sense the changes in Bridgette that I feel when I actually meet her in person.
I wondered where she headed after refusing my invitation.
Perhaps she’s meeting another man?
I couldn’t stand still, so I followed after.
◆
[Kaisar POV]
“Sorry to have kept you waiting, My Lord.”
“No, I wasn’t waiting for you, and I don’t remember calling you?”
At lunchtime, just as I was about to have lunch in the woods behind the school building, Bridgette appeared out of nowhere.
I am currently a celebrity in a sense, so I have lunch in the thicket behind the school building or at a blind spot at the edge of the campus, avoiding the public eye. But Bridgette always comes to me every time, even though I have not invited her.
Even if I change location, she always appears as if she already knew the new site in advance.
“We–Well, don’t say that. It took me a little while to throw off my pursuers. But as Master Kaisar’s sword, dog, and slave, I am sure that no matter how many people follow me, I will always be able to evade their pursuit and come back to you, Master Kaisar!”
I wonder… if it’s my imagination that she’s becoming more assertive these days and that her propensity for bad habits is getting stronger and stronger.
And then I talked to Bridgette, who looked like a big dog being petted by its owner, as I pet her head, which she offered me herself.