Serena was completely left out by the sudden hand holding. She just froze right in the middle of the street. She stared at their hands as they disappeared into the busy crowd.

But she eventually snapped out of her daze. She hitched up her skirt and started jogging just to catch up and trail behind them.

And they spent the next few hours going around the market.

They looked for various gifts and party supplies. They bought a few minor things, but they did not go completely crazy with the spending yet.

Adrian did buy a massive amount of wine bottles though. He found a high end liquor merchant and cleared out all of their premium stock.

Then he dragged the girls over to a local glass artisan shop.

The heat from the forges hit them as they walked inside. Adrian found the master glassblower and placed a massive custom order.

"I need a large batch of crystal clear glasses." Adrian instructed the sweaty artisan. "I need deep glass bowls, flat glass plates, and elegant wine flutes. I need all of that stuff made perfectly."

The artisan wiped his forehead with a rag. "Yes, sure, my lord. We can do that."

"I want all of this ready as soon as possible, in two week to be precise." Adrian added. "I will pay you a massive premium fee for the absolute fastest speed you can manage."

The artisans instantly agreed to the rush order.

By the time Adrian finally got back to the inn, it was almost midnight. He stopped right in front of his hotel door and turned to face the two girls.

"Get some rest." Adrian offered a tired smile. "We will figure the rest out tomorrow."

He stepped inside and clicked the lock shut.

Out in the quiet hallway, Claire and Serena traded a silent nod before they split up and headed to their own empty bedrooms.

Adrian just stood in his dark room feeling totally drained.

The two girls had actually done a massive amount of shopping for Aria’s birthday. They handled a lot of intense price negotiations and haggled with stubborn merchants. But they also just ran around to random cosmetic shops and dragged Adrian into every single one of them.

He basically just stood there while they tried on half the jewelry in the city. They tested out heavy silver earrings, clunky gold pendants, and rows of pearls. They even slipped a few expensive diamond rings onto their fingers just to see if it looked good on them.

It took hours.

But as Adrian sat on the edge of his mattress and kicked his boots off, a very specific realization hit him.

He had definitely noticed how incredibly pretty and gorgeous both of those women were. Whenever they put on certain accessories, the jewelry just perfectly enhanced their natural looks.

And even though Adrian spent most of his time stressing about his territory or focusing purely on Aria, he was not completely immune to beautiful women.

Spending hours watching them smile and laugh kept forcing Draven’s words back into the front of his mind.

"Your daughter needs a mother." he muttered as he turned to look at Aria who was already fast asleep on the bed.

But if Adrian was being completely honest with himself, it actually was not just the fact that Aria needed a maternal figure. Because finding Aria a mom was only half of the equation.

Every single time Claire or Serena clasped a delicate necklace around their throats, his brain almost short circuited. They looked absolutely stunning and he could not just shut off the loud thoughts screaming inside his head about how incredibly gorgeous and cute they actually were.

So this whole thing was not purely about securing a maternal figure for his daughter.

It was a very selfish, personal issue too.

Because before he transmigrated into this magical world, the original Adrian from Earth was not exactly a seasoned romantic.

He literally had a child in this new world, of course. But the original host body had only slept with his ex wife exactly one time, and even that happened when he was heavily drunk and completely unconscious. So the current Adrian did not even possess a single memory of what actually happened that night.

This missing memory was actually one of the main reasons why the original Adrian in the webnovel had aggressively refused to believe that Aria was his own biological daughter. He did not remember having sex with Vaneira at all.

But the current Adrian knew exactly how basic science and genetics worked. He could easily tell just from looking at Aria’s silver hair and facial structure that she was definitely his biological daughter. She resembled him way more than she resembled his ex wife.

And on top of that confusing mess, there was the issue of his past life on Earth.

He had a very limited encounter with intimacy. He had exactly one girlfriend back during his younger college days.

And that relationship only lasted for a miserable six months before everything went straight to hell. Because the breakup was not clean or mutual. It was a completely toxic disaster that drained the life out of him.

He slept with her a handful of times over those six months. But the physical act felt totally empty and lacked any real connection. That miserable relationship was the exact opposite of what he actually wanted out of his life. It was just an extremely toxic environment. 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

So now, surrounded by two incredibly loyal, beautiful women who actually respected him, he just could not stop himself from thinking about them in such a way.

As he had walked back to the inn with the two of them walking right beside him, his mind just kept running wild simulations.

’What if I actually date these two?’ Adrian thought to himself in the quiet room. ’Or what if I marry them? How would things actually go?’

He thought about Aria.

He did not know much about Serena’s current personality yet. But in the original novel he read back on Earth, it was explicitly written that Serena had ultimately sacrificed her own life to save Aria. At least if people read through the hints and focused on the "villainess’s backstory".