My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 162

My Wite is Kand Kensington

+25 BONUS

My Wife is Katia Kensington

~Julian-

I read the article at 6 AM.

Reid had sent the link at five thirty with a brief note: ‘You’ll want to read this before the markets open.‘ I opened it before I was fully awake and read it once quickly and put my phone down and looked at the ceiling for a long time.

Then I picked it up and read it again.

She had taken her mother apart in five paragraphs. Not aggressively worse than aggressively. Precisely. She laid out the facts of what the Kensingtons had done with the clean, unflinching delivery of someone who had decided the truth was the most powerful thing she had and was done keeping it private. A twenty–year–old thrown out of her family home while pregnant. Six years away. One year back. A family that did not know their grandson’s middle name claiming to be concerned about her marriage.

The world now had questions for the Kensingtons.

The world was going to keep having them.

I read the piece a third time. The way she talked about building I* Technologies. The way she talked about Aiden. The way she had looked at the editor when asked if her marriage was real and said, ‘My marriage is the most real thing in my life,‘ and left it there without elaborating.

Then I looked at the photograph.

Katia and Aiden standing side by side. His navy shirt. Her hand on his shoulder. His chin slightly raised.

And there on her left hand.

I stopped breathing. The fuck!

My lungs simply forgot what they were doing for three full seconds because what I was looking at on the screen of my phone at six AM in my bedroom was the Windsor firestone ring on the hand of Katia Kensington.

The ring my grandmother placed in my hands when I was twenty–one years old and told me to give to the woman I would marry.

The ring I had given to a woman I could not remember in Las Vegas six years ago and had come home without and told my grandmother was lost. Holy Fucking Hell!

The fucking ring was on my wife’s sister’s hand. Not a wife, a fake fucking wife.

r

On her hand in a national magazine photograph, she had been keeping it somewhere close enough that she wore it for a magazine photograph but careful enough that I had never once seen it on her hand in all the months we had spent in the same

rooms.

She had been carrying it for six years, the same way I had been carrying the memory of giving it away. And now here it was on the cover of a magazine, and it had taken a photographer who had no idea what they were looking at to put it in front of my face.

Katia Kensington.

Kat.

My wife.

I sat on the edge of my bed and looked at the photograph, and my hands were not entirely steady. I noticed this from a distance

the slight tremor in my fingers holding the phone – and could not do anything about it.

She had been in my boardroom.

My Wife is Katur Kensington

+25 BONUS

In my grandmother’s garden.

In my server room at two in theinorning, falling asleep at her desk six feet away from me. Her son had called my phone to talk about waffles.

Six years of searching and she had been right there. I had almost fucked her in Dubai. I held myself because I didn’t want to complicate things. She had been right in from on me this whole time and I failed to see her.

All I did was half–fuck her. God the kind of fucking I will fuck her now, not even God can stop me.

A smiled curved on my lips and opened a text to her.

Typed: I read the article.

Stared at it and then deleted it. And Put the phone down. Picked it up.

Typed: The ring suits you.

Sent it before I could think further.

Then I put the phone face down and looked at the ceiling and thought about what I had just done. I had told her I had seen the ring. She would know I had seen it. She would know that the three words I had just sent her were not about the article at all.

2

Ninety seconds.

Her reply arrived in ninety seconds.

It always did.

I read those three words for a long time.

She knew I had seen it. And she had not denied it. Had not said what ring? She had said it alwaysdid – pastt tense, present tense, both atonce – and those three words carried six years of weight that neither of us had yet said out loud.

I put the phone down.

I looked at the ceiling.

Katia Kensington.

My wife.

Six years. A boardroom, a desert, a server room at two in themorning, and, a park bench with a sleeping child on my arm. Six years of searching and she had been right there. We had been circling each other for months with this between us – unspoken, suspected, almost said a dozen times and never quite said.

Not yet.

But soon.

She knew I had seen it. But does she know I am her husband? Can I toy with her a bit? I was done pretending.

The only thing left was the conversation.

I picked up my phone one more time. Not to text her. I called Zane.

He answered on the second ring, groggy. “It’s six AM.”

“I know who she is,” I said.

“Talk!”

2/3

My Wife is Ketid Kensington

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