Shen Tang felt her mind seize up for a moment.
Then the words burst out of her: "You're all men. If you accidentally saw him, surely you wouldn't develop murderous intent toward him. I just want to know what you were doing when you 'accidentally saw' him."
As soon as she'd asked, Shen Tang realized that hadn't come out right.
It made Qi Shan sound like he had a peeping fetish.
She'd known Qi Shan for so many years, and he really had lived up to the title "Eternal Bachelor." He'd devoted himself entirely to his career, and for a long time, the only women in his household had been Su Shang and her cats and kittens. Even his servants were mostly men. Later, he adopted Qi Miao, and since it was inconvenient for him as a man to care for her, he hired several older female servants, along with maids to attend to Qi Miao personally.
When he had a rare day off, he either stayed home to look after his daughter and play with the cats, or went on outings with Gu Chi, Liao Jia, and the others. Once in a while, he'd get the urge to bother Qin Gongsu. Shen Tang remembered one time when Qi Shan had made a couple of frivolous remarks, and a passing censor from the Censorate had reported him.
Riding horseback, leaning against a slanted bridge, with red sleeves beckoning from every tower?
She'd never heard of him having any such romantic escapades.
If he really had, the Censorate would've exploded by now. Those censors were all sharper-tongued than the next, and each was better than the last at finding fault. Yet after all these years, they'd never once said anything about him and women in private. The folk stories were even