OTGM 1

Chapter 1

“A very nice piece of trash… a capable piece of trash.”

Dosil murmured softly with her small lips. That was the man she was supposed to meet today. No—he was the man she had to pull into marriage.

They said there were countless places in South Korea touched by the hand of the KJ Group.

The place she was seated in now was one of them: a premium restaurant at the KJ Hotel. The private VIP room was decorated with luxurious furniture and framed artwork, lavish flowers arranged with deliberate excess.

Her hands, roughened and darkened from harvesting peaches all summer, looked pitiful atop the pristine white tablecloth.

The peach-colored nail polish she had hurriedly applied to her nails felt grotesquely uncomfortable.

The priceless designer two-piece outfit and the long, wavy hair styled by a professional hair artist felt just as awkward on her.

Heavy makeup in shades that didn’t suit her face shimmered crudely. No matter how much money was spent dressing her up, the hastiness of it all couldn’t be erased.

The man she was about to face today was the head of planning at KJ C&E—and the chairman’s second son.

According to Secretary Yuseon, who had once parachuted into the company out of nowhere,

“In a word, he’s a cheat character. Well, you’ll see when you meet him, but people say he’s one of the best visuals this industry has ever seen. Ah, they say he looks like the idol Minguk. But you know, right? Just being handsome doesn’t make someone a cheat character. He used to be the child the family cast aside, but now he’s the prodigal son who returned. He enlisted almost out of spite, then graduated early from MIT, and even built a success story by founding a content investment company. And then he came back in glory. If there were a personification of young and rich and handsome, it’d be Go Jun-i.”

That’s why—

Such grand titles clung to the man’s name.

“Cheat character,” “the embodiment of young, rich, and handsome.” Embarrassingly exaggerated, cartoonish descriptors followed him everywhere.

How do you even win the favor of a man like that? Would he ever think about marriage?

“No. Women flock to capable men like him, you know. The party crowd doesn’t leave him alone. There have been countless rumors with actresses too…”

Actresses?

“Ah, I shouldn’t give you any preconceptions, so I’ll stop there. I’ll just add one thing—this is another nickname he has. A very nice piece of trash. A capable piece of trash.”

A very nice piece of trash. A capable piece of trash.

And she was the tragic heroine who, one way or another, had to stand beside that trash as the lead in a marriage plot.

A tragic heroine? No—more like the protagonist of a fantasy novel. A perfectly ordinary farmer at twenty-nine suddenly became the youngest daughter of a media conglomerate.

It was the busy season as always, when she was completely absorbed in thinning peaches.

Then, like a brushstroke gone wrong on a rural dirt road, a foreign luxury car appeared out of nowhere. And with it came a middle-aged woman whose hair was puffed up with so much volume it seemed she wanted to resemble Margaret Thatcher.

Chairwoman Lee Seol-ha, owner of the Jeonghan Daily Group.

The iron lady who arrived without warning instantly transformed Dosil into the daughter of a media tycoon.

“My husband—the former chairman of Jeonghan Daily Group—had an illegitimate child. That child is you.”

She revealed a birth secret Dosil had never known or even imagined, even as she approached her thirtieth year.

In the rumor-filled countryside, Dosil had been nothing more than the daughter of an unmarried mother who didn’t even know her father.

People said her mother had gone to Seoul, failed, and given birth to the child of some bastard she met in a bar.

Still, she never imagined that a secret of her birth would suddenly barge into her life.

But because of the iron lady who came all the way to the middle of nowhere, a Cinderella-level rise in status occurred.

No—status rise, my ass.

“You must win Director Go’s favor no matter what. And you must take it all the way to marriage. Understood?”

She was nothing more than a hired Cinderella tasked with carrying out an absurd mission.

To her, who had become shabby from working nonstop in the fields, to a farmer who knew nothing but peaches and her grandmother—

The mission handed down was this:

Win Go Jun-i’s favor, and go straight into marriage.

If she cleared the mission, her grandmother could live comfortably and happily for a long, long time.

Her grandmother—the one who raised her, protecting her fiercely despite all the gossip.

Dosil had lost her mother. Her grandmother had lost her daughter.

Having lost half of their lives, they were each other’s only family, leaning on one another like a support beam.

Dosil hadn’t left the land of Yongcheon in North Gyeongsang Province even once in her twenty-nine years of life.

And now, marriage?

With that terrifying man whose nicknames alone were overwhelming—very nice piece of trash, capable piece of trash, cheat character, embodiment of young, rich, and handsome.

It was a mission unlikely to succeed. No—wasn’t it closer to an impossible myth?

She tore at a hangnail on her thumb with her index fingernail. She was anxious. She couldn’t picture the man who would soon walk through that door; everything about him was shrouded in fog.

A piece of trash. Did that mean he was really such a rotten, irredeemable human being?

And with such a complicated love life, too. Her own romantic history was simple and nonexistent. How was she supposed to win his favor, his heart? Damn it.

She frowned at her bare face, fiddling with the hangnail again.

Then—click. The VIP room door opened. She lifted her head slightly and looked toward it.

What is he, a door?

She was overwhelmed at first sight by his sheer size. A man built like a door panel stood motionless at the entrance.

Her gaze was dragged upward like a fish caught on a line, and the moment it landed on his face, Yuseon’s words replayed in her mind.

“In a word, he’s a cheat character. You’ll see it when you meet him—people say he’s an all-time visual in this industry. They say he looks like the idol Minguk.”

She couldn’t clearly picture Minguk’s face, but she was certain he must be the visual of his group.

Even in photographs, Go Jun-i had looked unreal—like an idol photoshoot.

But in person, it was even more intense.

Yuseon once said that meeting a top star felt like encountering an alien from another world.

That description was spot on.

He looked like an alien who had briefly descended from another world into this one.

Skin so glossy it seemed to reflect light, sharply sculpted features, and eyes so clear and cold they were almost blade-like. His outline looked as if it had been carved.

He was so tall his head nearly brushed the top of the doorframe.

His style was anything but ordinary. Instead of a standard suit, he wore a loose-fitting brown check suit that clung effortlessly to his frame—like something straight out of a luxury designer collection.

And he carried himself like a man who knew exactly how good he looked.

The moment he entered, tension flooded her body, her face stiffening like stone.

She felt small and shabby in her boring black two-piece chosen for “safe” elegance.

After briefly sweeping his gaze around the room, the man finally stepped inside. Sssrk. The door closed behind him.

Up close, his pupils were unnervingly dark—eyes so ambiguous it was impossible to read his emotions.

She stood up stiffly from her seat. Repeating Margaret Thatcher’s first rule—watch your dialect—she opened her mouth.

“Hello. I’m Ma Dosil.”

Her voice trembled slightly. It sounded rough, her intonation awkward.

He smirked faintly. Whatever it meant, it only made his handsome face look even smoother.

Taking the seat across from her, he spoke in a flat, commanding tone.

“Sit.”

Ah—she’d been standing there awkwardly.

His bored gaze followed her until she sat down. Then his voice, low and heavy, fell between them.

“Go Jun-i.”

Dialect. Watch the dialect.

She forced a smile, every nerve on edge. An awkward, clumsy smile.

“Nice to meet you.”

Placing his phone and car keys together at the corner of the table, Go Jun-i asked abruptly, without warning—

“Do you plan on getting married?”