Page 15 of He Is My Bride
The Qians would never know.
“Why couldn’t a girlfriend want to see her cute boyfriend in a dress and some makeup?” Anne asked.
Li Ying thought about it. “Yeah, why not?”
“Okay, next look, please.”
Hanjun was standing in meditation outside the fitting room, carrying a shopping bag full of makeup they had picked up earlier.
“Are you astral projecting out of here or sum?’” some guy standing nearby quipped. “Man, I wish I could do that. It’s been thirty friggin’ minutes.”
Hanjun opened his eyes fully and acknowledged him with a nod.
“How long your girl been in there?”
Hanjun turned his wrist to check his Vacheron Constantin. “Twenty-six minutes.”
“Condolences, man.”
Not long after, Li Ying and Anne returned from the fitting room with half the clothes they’d gone in with.
“Come, Hanjun.” Li Ying snapped his fingers as he walked past him, and Hanjun followed them to the cashier, taking out his card.
“Good for you,” said the other guy who was still stuck in purgatory.
While they sat down for mall sushi, Li Ying turned to Anne:
“Actually, Anne, I have been deceiving you.”
She looked at Li Ying with suspicion, as she did whenever he started a sentence this wildly. They had known each other since high school, and Anne already knew to be wary of her friend’s antics.
“As you know,” Li Ying solemnly put down his chopsticks, “Hanjun wants to put a ring on it. However, Hanjun’s family back in China are fossils and wouldn’t bless us, so… You following?”
“Not really,” Anne had to admit.
“The plan is to pass me as a woman to the Wus and everyone else in Shanghai.”
“Wait—what?”
“So that we can marry properly and keep up the façade of a straight couple. This way Hanjun gets to marry who he wants without his family disowning him, his family dynasty gets an heir by surrogacy, and I get Hanjun. Everybody wins.”
Anne stared at him. This was beyond the scope of even Li Ying’s usual crazy ideas.
“Howexactly is this going to work?”
“Ah!” Li Ying grinned and pointed at her. “That’s where you come in! I’m gonna have to learn to dress up and do my makeup and hair like a nice, marriageable girl in four months. Then we will travel to Shanghai for Christmas and I will meet the in-laws.”
Anne nodded, fascinated to hear how this crazy plan would pan out. Li Ying continued:
“There’s some paperwork involved, but nothing we can’t handle. If you can help me figure out the optics, the biggest issue will remain getting the Chinese marriage health certificate.”
“In order for a couple to get married, it’s necessary to acquire one from a local hospital that the marriage registration office designates,” Hanjun supplicated.
“Apparently they feel you up pretty intimately in there, so that’s where I could get caught. But,” Li Ying put his hand on Hanjun’s arm and grinned, “Hanjun said not to worry about it.”
Hanjun looked at Anne with intensity the poor girl was unaccustomed to, and she felt a cold shiver run down her spine. Hanjun’s tone was calm but insistent:
“It won’t be anything illegal.”
