Chapter Text
It’s 1816, and the season is ripe with women ready for marriage or scandal. For Duke Hiromi Higa, he was feeling hopeless. Season after Season now he’d been losing out to better men left and right, and he didn’t know why. He was rich and usually that was a good pull, he knew about flowers for goodness sake and that was something women liked right? Maybe he overstepped, or maybe he came across too patronising. But it meant that he continually had no successful proposals. He’d tried yes, with women he wasn’t even interested in, but nothing worked. Hiromi wasn’t forceful with it after all, he was kind and gentle…and maybe that made him seem weak despite all his triumphs.
Kindness was in his nature, and he had hoped that would’ve been enough, who didn’t want the gentle calm husband who would…probably let you walk all over him.
It was frustrating, for the last few seasons of failures Hiromi had stood by flailing. All the while witnessing Oka Shokichi and his cousin brushing off any women who came their way. He didn’t get why they’d keep turning them away, Hiromi would do anything to have the chance to turn a woman away if they didn’t do it so naturally themselves. Kojiro had always seemed so uninterested in the women though, that was clear to any man jealous of him, but the way Oka flirted his way through bachelordom was frustrating. Maybe it was his dashing looks, his charming smile, or those warm brown eyes that kept the women coming. He knew the cousins could’ve been married ten times over if they wished to, something Hiromi wished he could do deeply.
This was going to be his season though; he’d decided as much. As a single man with a new fortune due to his father’s passing the year before he was an even better candidate, and who better to help him than Oka. Surely, he could get the rake’s advice on how to get women falling for him and a wife so he could have his life settled. After a whirlwind of a year Hiromi just needed that- a wife, someone to settle him and give him a new purpose.
But who knows because this season is not going to be as straightforward as the rest. Hiromi isn’t even entirely sure if he’s jealous of Oka getting the women, or not being the centre of Oka’s attention…but that’s a completely different problem to manhandle.
Armed with all the bouquets the ton could ask for, will Hiromi finally find himself the wife he wants? Or will he get the love he so desperately needs.