“…What did you just say?”
Wondering if he misheard just now, Lloyd tilted his head to the side and asked Nainiae.
“What did you just say? We are not going?”
Nainiae’s answer was nothing in lines of ‘We apologize, but I’m afraid we are not able to attend,’ or anything similar.
Also, after giving her initial response, Nainiae repeated herself to Lloyd as if she thought maybe he didn’t hear her. All that made Lloyd’s facial muscles to twitch.
“Hey. Perhaps you don’t know because you are new, but if you shoot your yap off like that…”
“Like that?”
Because of the difference in height, Nainiae was looking upward to Lloyd with her chin up. She pulled her chin slightly, glanced at Lloyd’s chest and said,
“You mean like this?”
With demonstration, Nainiae was tossing an advice to Lloyd.
“…”
By Nainiae’s act, which was out of the blue, Lloyd fiddled with his fingers as he thought about how he moved his eyes in front of Sera.
‘This bitch…’
Lloyd was here under Ryan’s order. He came here, at the hallway in front of Riley’s room, to observe Nainiae, the new maid that Riley took in from Solia.
In the process, he also ran into a maid he lusted after with his eyes occasionally. So he invited her for a cup of tea to his room, and took a quick glance at her cleavage while at it. It appeared Nainiae noticed him in the act.
‘She may look the way she is, but she is quite street smart at least it seems?’
Nainiae tilted her chin up slightly again and looked at Lloyd.
As his eyes met with Nainiae’s, Lloyd’s face crumpled.
‘Tsk, just look at that face.’
He was cringing not because of her way of talking or her advice that hit the heart of the matter. It was a cringe that felt like it was out of disgust.
“Young master, my apologies, Nainiae is from Lower Solia, so her crude language habits were not corrected yet.”
Lloyd’s face changed as if he just chewed on something awful. Noticing this, Sera, while breaking in cold sweat, came in front of Nainiae and lowered her head.
“I’ll educate her separately to correct this, so please…”
She was saying Lloyd should generously forgive her.
Watching Sera properly bowing and asking for forgiveness for the mistake of her new recruit, Lloyd laughed as he wiggled his brows,
“…Ha!”
Just a maid glaring and talking in such a crude language toward a young master of a count’s House was a problem that could not be forgiven so easily.
“All right. Well… I’m a generous guy.”
His facial muscles were still twitching slightly, but he slowly managed to regain composure. Lloyd took a step closer to Sera and looked at her face.
“But in return, as her senior, you can take the responsibility, right?”
“…”
Sera was holding it in well until now, but finally, her face crumpled.
Just like Nainiae, she wanted to say ‘I’m not going. Get lost.’ However, she couldn’t do that.
‘Haaa. How did I end up…’
She thought she had a bad feeling about this from the start, and it came to this.
Sera sighed heavily enough to make the ground sink. Instead of resenting Nainiae, she was resenting herself for not warning Nainiae in advance.
‘When I became a maid, it’s not like I didn't know a situation like this could happen, but…’
When she became a maid, she had thought about the possibility.
Until now, while serving Iris, she managed to avoid a situation like this, but it looked like her luck finally ran out.
‘Still, this is… Huh?’
Sera was biting her lips as she thought it could not be helped, but she relaxed her narrowed eyes after hearing a quiet voice from the back.
‘Nainiae?’
Mumble Mumble
The one quietly mumbling was Nainiae, the one Sera quickly hid away behind her back just now.
Following a certain someone’s advice, Nainiae was standing a step behind.
From a place where Lloyd’s field of view cannot reach, she was mumbling something.
“…Sleep.”
After whispering for a few seconds, Nainiae finished reciting the spell. She put forth her hand over Sera’s shoulder and activated the magic she prepared.
“Well then, Sera. When you are finished with your work in the evening, come to my…room…”
Blink, blink…