From Two-Bit Baddie to Total Heartthrob: This Villainess Will Cross-Dress to Impress! Volume 4 (eBook)

Masamune Okazaki (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
250 Seiten
J-Novel Heart (Verlag)
978-1-7183-1486-3 (ISBN)

Infos

Elizabeth's older brother has a new admirer: a princess from the West. The princess demands that Elizabeth's brother visit her kingdom to reject the princess's proposal in person, which turns the Burtons' lives upside down and sows discord among the happy family. Determined to nip the proposal in the bud, Elizabeth sets off abroad with a master plan: pretend to be her brother and act like the biggest womanizer the kingdom has ever seen.

But what if the princess's proposal is not what it seems...?

Textauszug

He Refuses to Apologize

Even if I tried to recall the time before I’d regained my memories of my past life, I still couldn’t remember ever having a fight with my older brother.

We were so far apart in age that we didn’t have much to fight about, and besides, I’d always been pretty easygoing and conflict averse when it came to him. We were close, and generally speaking, we’d always gotten along well.

If he ever did get upset with me, I usually deserved it. Pretty much ten times out of ten, I was in the wrong. So, every time that happened, there was only one obvious solution: apologize. My older brother knew that too, which was why any matter of conflict between us was less a “fight” and more a “scolding.”

This time, though, it was different.

Maybe it was partially my fault for being so quick to get angry, but he had to bear the blame too.

I mean, why did he have to personally go all the way to another country just to turn down a proposal? It just didn’t make any sense to me. If this princess wanted to marry him, then going there in person to refuse seemed like the worst idea imaginable. There was no way she was just going to let him go on his merry way back home.

My older brother had surely realized that too, and knowing that just made his willingness to go that much harder to stomach.

It was self-sacrificing to the extreme, and there was no honor or virtue in him making a martyr of himself like this. He might have thought that he was just sacrificing himself, but really, it was tantamount to sacrificing the people who cared about him too.

Honestly, it was downright insulting.

I loved my older brother. But my first priority would always be me, and I was prepared to fight tooth and nail to make sure that no harm would come to me. If someone was threatening to do irreparable damage to my life—even if that person was my beloved older brother—then I wasn’t about to lie down and take it.

Besides, my older brother was always fretting over Christopher and me. Wasn’t it a little unfair to say I wasn’t allowed to fret over him?

It reeked of a double standard, and if you asked me, it certainly wasn’t befitting of the title he was to inherit. After all, the Honorable Duke had a reputation to uphold of always treating people equally and fairly, regardless of their station. He was also known to do what people asked of him and say exactly what they wanted to hear.

So much for that...

I was pissed. And, unlike my older brother, I’d been born with a short fuse. It wasn’t just my older brother that I was pissed at either. I was pissed at my parents too, for failing to talk him out of this.

I even was pissed at the royal family for their ineptitude. Why hadn’t they been able to sort this out? I mean, the king was basically the boss, right? And when problems arose, it was the boss’s job to take accountability for them. If an apology needed to be issued, then it was on the boss to go and make it. No respectable company would ever put a lowly employee in the line of fire.

Honestly, royalty that couldn’t sort shit out themselves had no right to complain about being labeled incompetent. I mean, what gave them the right to dress up in glamorous clothes and sit on some fancy-ass throne if they couldn’t even do their jobs?

I couldn’t for the life of me see why my older brother and my father were holding their tongues about this. Wasn’t it their duty to call the royal family out when they screwed up and to set them on the right path?

If the royal family only existed to warm a fancy-shmancy throne with their lazy butts, then did we really even need them?

I couldn’t speak for the rest of my family, but personally, I wasn’t much of a patriot, and I wasn’t especially loyal to the monarchy either. In my eyes, a nation was basically just a box for all the people who lived in it, and royalty was just a decorative flourish. Or, to try another metaphor, the royal family was like the pandas at the zoo: They were just there to bring in the visitors.

If I was loyal to anything, then it was to my family and to the place I grew up. But it wasn’t to the kingdom. As far as I was concerned, I just happened to live here.

And if I couldn’t protect my brother, then there was no point in the box we called a kingdom, and no point in the pandas we called royalty. At least, not to me.

“Lady Elizabeth,” the head maid said, snapping me back to reality. She was looking up at me with a concerned expression on her face.

“Oh. Sorry. Guess I spaced out for a second there.”

“Please, don’t do anything rash.”

“Anything rash”? I repeated in my head, incredulous. You think I’m the one being rash here? She was clearly confused.

Was it reasonable for me to be so angry about this? Well...yes, actually. I kind of needed to act quickly, because my older brother was about to be kidnapped and locked away in some foreign country.

But the head maid could hardly call me “rash” when I was just standing around doing nothing. If anything, it was much more fair to say I was taking my time hashing everything out.

I grabbed my jacket, the gears in my head beginning to turn as I calmly planned out my next move.

◇◇◇

I hopped onto a familiar rooftop.

It was my first time entering the building from above, but I’d come through the front door several times, so I had a pretty good idea where to find the room I was looking for. I hopped down and crawled along the wall. Then I found a window and knocked on it.

After a few moments, the curtains opened and someone appeared at the window.

It was the dead of night, which meant that my knock wasn’t going to be answered by any servants or family members.

Perfect. Just as planned.

But after I waited for a few minutes, the window still didn’t open.

Maybe she doesn’t realize I’m here? I thought. I was waiting a little bit above the window, so it might not have been obvious enough. Well, looks like I’ve got no choice... Guess I’ll have to do this the hard way.

I grabbed the window and tore it off of the wall.

“Huh?” came a flustered voice, as if it were the background music accompanying my feat, as I slipped through the new hole in the wall.

The voice belonged to Lilia—whose bedroom I’d just broken into—and she’d fallen over backwards in shock. I plopped the window down onto the floor in her room and turned to face her, waving my hand in front of her wide-eyed face.

“Hey, Lilia. Come with me for a sec,” I said.

“Huuuuh?!”

As she cried out in shock, she scooted backwards on her butt away from me.

Whoa, hey. Not so loud, I thought. It was going to be a real pain if the baron’s servants came to investigate.

Lilia scooted all the way back to the wall behind her as her expression transformed from one of shock to one of pure terror. Her mouth flapped open and closed wordlessly.

For a while, the only sound in the room was of breathing. Then, finally, she let out another shrieking exclamation.

“I-I can’t believe the girl I like just climbed through my window! Am I in a dating game, or a horror movie?!”

Seriously, not so loud! Besides, isn’t this classic otome game fare? I feel like this happens in shojo manga all the time too. Can’t you act like a normal protagonist and just let out a quiet, graceful squee or something?

She remained firmly seated on the floor, unmoving. I reached my hand out to her again.

“Come on, let’s just go,” I said.

“Hang on, um...what’s going on?”

“Look... I’ve actually got a pretty short fuse, okay? And I haven’t been this close to blowing up in a long time. But when I let my guard down, I lose my cool. So let’s hurry up and get moving before I start resorting to using force.”

“Before you lose your cool?” Lilia repeated, on the verge of hysteria. “I think breaking into someone’s house through their window is a pretty good indicator that you’ve already well and truly lost that, actually.”

She was just getting started. A litany of grievances followed as she went on and on about little stuff that didn’t even matter, like “Do you have any idea how high up we are?” and “You didn’t have to break my window, you know!”

I mean, she lived here, so if anyone ought to know how high up we were, it was her, right? Dunno why she had to ask me, especially when we were kind of in a hurry.

“Lilia,” I said, looking into her eyes.

She clammed up instantly, and instead of yet another complaint escaping her lips, she let out a swooning sigh.

“Come.”

“Okee ♡” was her instantaneous reply. I swore I could see hearts swimming in her eyes. Then she muttered something that sounded like “I love it when you’re forceful, Ellie...♡”

What happened to that terrified expression you were just wearing? I wondered. She seemed to be suffering from some serious mood swings.

Shaking that thought from my...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 19.9.2025
• Reihe/Serie: From Two-Bit Baddie to Total Heartthrob: This Villainess Will Cross-Dress to Impress!
• Illustrationen: Masamune Okazaki
• Übersetzer: Masamune Okazaki
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Fantasy
• Schlagworte: gender bend • Light Novel • otome • Reincarnation • reverse Harem • Romantic Comedy • strong female lead
• ISBN-10: 1-7183-1486-8 / 1718314868
• ISBN-13: 978-1-7183-1486-3 / 9781718314863