My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 104

Above Everything

~Julian~

The car collected her at four thirty

She was already in the lobby when I arrived. Light jacket, hair down, and that look of a woman who was awake and functional but had reserved judgement on whether the hour warranted it.

“Four thirty,” she said.

“Sunrise doesn’t negotiate,” I said.

She looked at me for a moment. Then she walked to the car.

The balloon launch site was forty minutes outside the city, a flat stretch of desert that the company used specifically because it had no light pollution and no obstacles. The crew was already there when we arrived, the envelope half–inflated, the burners throwing heat into the dark in controlled bursts that lit the immediate area gold and left everything else black.

Katia watched the inflation process with the focused attention she gave to things – how it worked, the physics of it, and the logic of hot air and fabric and lift. She asked the pilot one question about wind patterns at altitude. He answered properly, and she nodded, satisfied, and said nothing more.

The basket was small. That was the correct word – small. Large enough for the pilot and two passengers and nothing wasted. When we were inside, the space between us was the space of a lift, a car back seat proximity that required either acknowledgement or avoidance.

We had stopped avoiding things two days ago.

The burner fired and the basket lifted.

The desert at sunrise from the air was something that photographs had never managed and never would.

It was not the colours – though the colours were extraordinary, the horizon moving through black to deep blue to rose gold to something that had no name in any language I knew. It was the silence. At altitude, with the burner off between blasts, the silence was absolute. No city, no traffic, no wind noise. Just the earth below and the sky above and the specific quality of being between them with nothing else.

Katia was looking at the horizon.

I was looking at her.

She turned and caught me. She didn’t look away. Neither did I.

“You planned all of this,” she said. “Before we left New York.”

“Yes.”

“The souk. The desert. The Burj Khalifa. The yacht. This.”

“Yes.”

“That’s a significant amount of planning for someone who had not yet decided what he wanted.”

“I had decided,” I said. “I simply hadn’t told you yet.”

r

She held my gaze. Below us the desert was waking up – the dunes catching the first real light, the shadows long, and the landscape entirely different from anything it looked like at ground level.

“Julian,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

Above Everything

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“Do you? Because what you’re asking–”

“I’m not asking anything,” said. “I’m here. You’re here. That’s all this is right now.”

She looked at the horizon. The sun was at the edge of it – not yet visible, the light arriving before the source, the sky ahead of itself in the specific way it was at dawn.

“Aiden asked me this morning,” she said quietly.

“What did he ask?”

“He asked if I was happy.” She paused. “He’s five. Nearly six. He shouldn’t be asking his mother that.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him yes.” She looked at me. “I wasn’t lying.”

The burner fired – a controlled blast, the heat immediate and enormous, the balloon adjusting its altitude. The pilot managed it without a word. Below us the desert spread in every direction, the city just visible at the horizon, small and irrelevant from úp

here.

I reached over and took her hand.

She looked at our hands. Then at the horizon.

“He looks like you,” she said.

The words landed quietly. No drama, no accusation. Just a statement she had been holding for days and had decided, up here

above everything, to put down.

I was very still.

“Katia-”

“I’m not saying — ” she stopped. Started again. “I know we had never met before the WEG partnership. I know that. But he looks like you, Julian. The jaw. The way he tilts his head. The hands.” She looked at me directly. “I’ve been telling myself it’s a coincidence for weeks. Up here I can’t make myself believe it.”

The silence stretched between us. The balloon drifted. Below, the desert was gold now, fully lit, the shadows retreating.

I looked at her.

There were things I could say. Things that the pattern in my study – the marriage certificate, the file labelled K, Gail’s throwaway comment about nephews — was already telling me. Things that were building toward a conclusion I had not yet let myself finish because finishing it would change everything.

“I don’t know,” I said. Honestly. “I don’t have an answer for you.”

She nodded. She hadn’t expected one. She looked back at the horizon.

“He asked about his father again last week,” she said. “He asked if his father knew he was missing out.” Her voice was steady“! told him his father didn’t know what he was missing because he doesn’t know he exists.”

I looked at her profile against the sunrise sky.

“Then he’s a fool,” I said quietly.

She turned. Her eyes found mine. Something moved in them – recognition, or something close to it, the specific look of a person hearing a sentence that has come from somewhere they didn’t expect.

“That’s what Aiden said. I really don’t know who my baby daddy is, and I got married on top of that. Now I’m with a child and having an affair with my sister’s husband,” she said softly.

Above Everything

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We looked at each other. I didn’t say anything.

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