When she heard Su Tang’s voice, Luo Xingchen looked over with a smile. She briefly turned back to tell her entourage to unload the carriage and then walked forward while saying: “Miss Su!”
Luo Xingchen folded her hands into a formal salute and greeted Su Tang solemnly. Seeing Luo Xingchen pretending to be a serious young master like this, Su Tang was a bit stunned. But her mind flashed and she quickly realized that it was probably because of all the outsiders around.
Having realized that, Su Tang also saluted back and said in an equally solemn way, “Second Young Master Luo.”
Of course, for Zhang Cuilan and Baohe, who had seen how Luo Xingchen usually behaved in front of their young miss before, this scene seemed strange. However, they didn’t dare to say anything. After all, the ruthless way Luo Xingchen had dealt with the traitor in his entourage last time was still firmly engraved in their minds.
They were just servants. Only by not asking anything, not seeing anything, not hearing anything, and especially not saying anything about their masters could they avoid causing troubles for themselves. But they didn’t mind it. After all, their current lives were good to the point that they would have never dared to even imagine it before, so they definitely wouldn’t make any foolish mistakes like asking unnecessary questions which might cause them to give up such good lives.
After raising her head from her salute, Su Tang saw Luo Xingchen winking down at her, so she smiled and stretched out her hand in a welcoming gesture, “Please, come inside!”
Luo Xingchen nodded and agreed and then stepped into the main room of the cafe with Su Tang half a step behind her. Then Su Tang turned around and ordered, “Baohe, Pu Wei, go ahead and open the shop. Ms. He, make some fresh milk tea and bring it up later. Ms. Lan, brew two cups of honey hawthorn tea.”
With Su Tang’s orders, the several people all dispersed to handle their own tasks. When Baohe and Pu Wei went out to open up the shop, they saw the group of people from before were all unloading the carriage outside diligently while one of them headed inside to ask Zhang Cuilan where they could put the things.
“Why are you here now? Didn’t you say that there would be an audit at the end of the year keeping you busy?” After Su Tang and Luo Xingchen were behind closed doors, they both sat down and Su Tang asked.
Luo Xingchen heard her question and smiled sarcastically. “My old man got wind of the sauce business I discussed with you earlier this year and stuck his hand into things. He directly handed all of my inventory over to Luo Xinghe for him to handle. But whatever, it’s fine. Anyway, the new year is almost here and it’s almost time for our Luo family to settle your payment, so I decided to come a little earlier to send you some new year gifts and your money, and also to lay low for a while.”
As Luo Xingchen talked about this, her tone was indifferent, as if it were all expected. After all, the current head of the Luo family only had two sons, and if either one of them were too capable he would begin to feel worried. Back then he had brought Luo Xingchen into the family business because she had shown off her ability, but he was always worried that she might amass too much power.
After all, while Luo Xingchen was indeed talented and able to secure great benefits for the family, in the end, her father had always been more concerned that one of his sons might seize power from him than he was about the good of the Luo family. That was why he had been pitting them against each other and using them to contain one another for all these years.
Of course, normally this wasn’t the sort of thing Luo Xingchen would say to an outsider, but she and Su Tang had no secrets between them anyway. Su Tang already knew her family was a mess. On top of that, Luo Xingchen didn’t have any female friends or relatives at home she could talk to, so she was always feeling suffocated from bottling all of her problems inside. After all, her sisters were all already married, and if they ever came back they would only want to talk about the concubines that were annoying them at home or discuss about who was giving birth these days, so it wasn’t like she could confide in them.
Those sisters of hers probably wouldn’t understand Luo Xingchen’s problems at all and, in the first place, they didn’t even know she was a girl and all regarded her as their younger brother, so it was pointless to think about from the start. Back then, her mother had always been deathly afraid someone might discover that Luo Xingchen was a girl so she had raised her in a very solitary way, which meant that Luo Xingchen’s sisters weren’t very close to her anyway.
Nowadays even if any of them came to find Luo Xingchen it was usually because they needed her help. And if they happened to coincidentally find themselves in a situation where they had to talk to each other they basically wouldn’t talk much because they didn’t really know what to say.
Of course, Luo Xingchen had tried confiding in her mother before, but whenever her mother heard about her problems she would just cry and try to persuade her to be more considerate of her father and so on.
After a few times of this, Luo Xingchen wasn’t interested in discussing things were her mother anymore. Clearly, her mother only cared about her husband. After all, the woman had even raised her as a boy for so long just to please him and maintain her status.
Enduring all of this by herself for so long was part of the reason Luo Xingchen had developed a reputation for her terrible temper. However, now that she had met Su Tang, she finally had someone else she could confide in.
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