My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 108

Another fake Catwoman

~Delia~

I booked the flight to Dubai myself.

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Julian didn’t know. Nobody knew. I used my personal card, packed a bag while the housekeeper was out, and was in the air before anyone thought to check where I was. Let them wonder. Let them scramble. I had spent eight months being the woman who waited in the east wing and said nothing and wore the right dress and smiled for cameras that never looked at her anyway.

I was done with that version of myself.

Dubai hit me like a wall when I stepped off the plane. The heat, the light, the specific arrogance of a city that had decided to be extraordinary and charged you for the privilege of standing in it. I didn’t care. I checked into the Atlantis, not the Burj Al Arab where Julian was. I wasn’t stupid, and I sat on the bed in my room, and I thought about what I was going to do.

The pre–race press gathering was that evening. I had found it in Julian’s Dubai itinerary – the one I had photographed on my phone three weeks ago when he left his laptop open. WEG was a VIP sponsor. There would be cameras. There would be journalists. There would be people who wanted a story.

I was going to give them one.

The press gathering was at a venue attached to the race circuit – an open–air hospitality space with the track just visible through the barriers, the whole thing buzzing with the specific energy of people who were paid to be excited about something and had succeeded. Racing journalists, photographers, and a few broadcasters doing pre–race pieces to camera with the circuit

behind them.

I walked in at eight PM in a dress that cost more than most people’s monthly salary, and I smiled at everyone, and nobody knew who I was, which was the story of my life, until I found the journalist.

Her name was Riya Mehta. She wrote for three racing publications and had forty thousand I*******m followers and the specific hungry look of someone who had been at this gathering for two hours and hadn’t found anything worth writing about

yet.

I sat down beside her at the bar.

“You look bored,” I said.

She looked at me. “Press gatherings are usually the same ten stories in different orders.”

“What if I gave you a different one?”

She turned toward me. “Who are you?”

“Delia Kensington,” I said.

୮

She looked at me blankly. The name meant nothing to her. I was used to that. I had been invisible my entire life, and I was about

to use it one last time.

“That doesn’t mean anything to you,” I said pleasantly. “It will. Because I’m Julian Windsor’s wife.”

The silence that followed was magnificent. Her entire face changed – the boredom gone, replaced by the wide–eyed, slightly panicked energy of a journalist who had just been handed something enormous and was trying to decide if it was real.

“Julian Windsor is… married?” She looked around the room instinctively, as if checking whether anyone else had heard. “ Nobody knows that.”

“Nobody was supposed to,” I said. “He preferred it quiet. I’ve been keeping his secrets for eight months.” I picked up my drink. “ I’ve decided I’m done with that.”

She was already reaching for her phone. I put my hand lightly on her arm.

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Another TownIOR’S

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“Not yet,” I said. “Let me finish.” I leaned in, giving her the exclusive feeling, making her feel chosen. “I’m telling you this because I want you to understand who I am. Not just as Julian’s wife. As myself.” I say looking at her. “Some people call me

Catwoman.”

Two seconds of silence.

Then Riya Mehta’s expression did something can only describe as Christmas morning.

“The underground racer?” she breathed. “That Catwoman?”

“I’m saying some people call me that,” I said, with the measured smile of someone confirraing without technically confirming “But I’d rather keep it between us. Tonight is about the race, not about me.”

Two bombs. One conversation. Julian Windsor is secretly married — and his wife is Catwoman.

Telling a journalist to keep something between them was the most reliable way to ensure it was everywhere by morning. I had learned that from Julian. From eight months of watching how he controlled information while I sat in the corners of his world taking notes.

I excused myself twenty minutes later, smiling, unhurried.

By ten PM my phone was ringing. Martha. Three missed calls.

By eleven PM the first article was live. Julian Windsor’s Secret Wife — And She Claims To Be Catwoman. Riya Mehta had moved fast. Two stories in one headline. The photograph she had taken of me – I had made sure I was angled correctly, with the circuit barriers behind me and the racing atmosphere around me — was everywhere.

By midnight I had been photographed in a borrowed racing suit from the WEG hospitality wardrobe by four different photographers who had appeared, as if from nowhere, because that was how it worked when something became a story.

I was smiling for every single one of them.

My phone buzzed at twelve fifteen.

Julian.

I let it ring.

It buzzed again. A text this time.

Where are you.

Not a question. A demand. The specific punctuation of a man who had just found out something that had disrupted his very controlled evening and was not happy about it.

I smiled at my phone.

Dubai, I typed back. Surprise.

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