My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 127

I Love You!

Katia~

I read the article at six forty–five AM, standing in my kitchen in my robe.

I read it once. Then I put my phone face down on the counter and stood very still for thirty seconds.

Then I called Sam.

She answered immediately. “I’ve read it.”

“Board meeting,” I said. “Nine AM. Everyone.”

“Already sending the invites,” she said.

I hung’up and went to get dressed.

The board meeting ran forty minutes.

I presented everything Sam and I had built over the past weeks, the eighteen–month campaign; Daniel’Osei’s recruitment and what he had fed them; the fabricated security audit failures that had been quietly circulated to procurement contacts; and the strategic leaks that had cost I* three government contracts we should have won. I put it on the screen in front of twelve people, and I walked them through it without editorialising, without dramatics, just the facts in sequence.

When I finished, the room was very quiet.

“Are we under threat of acquisition?” the chair of the investment committee asked.

“No,” I said. “We are not under threat of acquisition. Victor Hale made a forty per cent stake offer in Dubai which I declined in under two minutes. This article is not a genuine acquisition approach. It is a reputation attack designed to weaken our position before a government contract renewal that both Halo and I* will be bidding on in twelve months.” I looked around the table. “I* is not under threat. I* is about to go to war. Those are two very different things.”

Another silence.

“What do you need?” the chair said.

I told him.

Sam was promoted to chief security officer before she left the meeting. I hired three ex–intelligence analysts by end of day through a firm Sam had used before. Two cybersecurity legal firms were contracted by noon. The false data pipeline through Daniel Osei was already running — Victor was receiving a carefully constructed picture of I*‘s vulnerabilities that pointed in entirely the wrong directions.

At two PM I sat down and wrote the statement.

Four paragraphs. No mention of Halo by name. No aggression, no defensiveness, just the surgical dismantling of every implication in the article the security concerns, the acquisition framing, the anonymous sources. I used the language of complete confidence because I had it. I wrote it in twenty minutes and sent it to Sam, who changed two words and sent it back, and I published it.

Fifty thousand shares in three hours.

I was already in Julian’s car on the way to his office when the number hit forty thousand.

He was already standing when I walked in.

He didn’t offer coffee or pleasantries. He just said, “I should have told you sooner. I’m sorry.”

I had four sentences ready. Precise. The specific language of someone who was furious and had decided that cold was more

effective than heat.

I didn’t use any of them.”

+25 BONUS

Because he crossed the room, and I didn’t move back, and his hand came to my jaw firm, not gentle, and his mouth came down on mine hard. His tongue pushing past my lips and my hands grabbing his shirt and pulling him closer when everything rational said don’t.

He kissed me like he was making a point.

I forgot what I was angry about.

I forgot his assistant was twenty feet away on the other side of the glass door. I forgot we were in his office at three in the afternoon. I forgot everything except his mouth and his hands and the fact that I was kissing him back just as hard.

He pulled back first, his forehead against mine. We were both breathing hard.

Neither of us moved for three seconds.

“I love you,” he said. “I know the timing is wrong and I know everything about this is complicated and I know you have a hundred reasons to walk out of this office right now. But I need you to know that.”

I looked at him.

My chest did something I didn’t have a name for. Something that hurt in the way that things hurt when they were true and you had been trying not to let them be true for a very long time.

“Julian,” I said. “You are married to my sister.”

“I know.”

“She is my sister. Whatever the arrangement is, whatever it isn’t, she is still my sister, and you are still her husband, and this-

“I stopped. Started again. “This is not simple.”

“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”

“Then how-”

Was

“That will change,” he said; his voice was steady. Completely certain. The certainty of a man who had made a decision and not going to revisit it. “The arrangement with Delia – I’m going to end it. Properly.” He looked at me directly. “I should have done it before Dubai. I knew before Dubai that I needed to do it.”

I looked at him for a long time.

“You can’t promise that,” I said.

“I just did.”

“Julian-

He kissed me again.

r

Not hard this time. Slower. The kind of kiss that had nothing to do with urgency and everything to do with saying something that words were not quite enough for. His hands came up to my face, and he kissed me like I was something he was not going to let go of, and I felt it all of it, every month of boardrooms and charged silences and almost–moments and the desert and the balloon and the Burj Khalifa, all of it landing at once in the warmth of his mouth on mine.

I felt the tear before I decided to cry.

Just one. It slipped before I could stop it, and I pulled back and pressed my fingers to my face and looked at the ceiling for a second because I was Katia Kensington, and I did not cry in people’s offices.

Jullan’s thimb came up and caught it.

+25 BONUS

He didn’t say anything about it. He just looked at me with that expression, the unguarded one, the one he had no control over, and said quietly, “I will fix this. All of it. I promise you.”

I looked at him.

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” I said.

“I have never made a promise I didn’t keep,” he said.

I believed him.

That was the most terrifying part. I believed him completely.

I stepped back. I straightened my jacket. I sat down across from his desk because if this conversation were going to continue, I needed something solid between us.

He sat down too.

He opened a folder and pushed it across the desk.

“The file,” he said.

“The file,” I agreed.

I read it.

All of it. The WEG connection was made four years ago the same Victor had used against Julian’s company before he had refined it. The government contract five years ago that Meridian won and that had started Victor’s vendetta before Katia had anything to do with Meridian at all. Sir Edmund’s involvement. The renewal timeline. Everything Julian had known for weeks

and had decided, unilaterally, not to tell me.

I closed the folder.

“You’ve had this since Dubai,” I said.

“Yes.”

“You decided I didn’t need to know.”

“I decided that knowing would make you move visibly and tip Victor off,” he said. “I was wrong. He moved publicly anyway, and now you’re behind on information you should have had.”

I looked at him across the desk.

“Don’t do that again,” I said.

“I won’t.”

r

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