My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 173

+25 BONUS

I’m Taking my Son To School

~Julian~

Zane had been sitting across from me for two hours.

We were going through the acquisition contracts

a routine review, the kind of work that required attention and produced nothing interesting. Zane was making notes. I was reading. The office was quiet in the way it was quiet on a productive afternoon.

Then Zane put his pen down.

“Have you told her?” he said.

I did not look up from the contract. “Told who what.”

“Katia,” he said. “Have you told her that you are the husband she has been looking for?”

I turned a page.

“No,‘ I said.

“When are you planning to?”

I put the contract down. I looked at him.

H

الله

“I am not,” I said. “Not yet. Not anytime soon, and what makes you think she had been looking?”

Zane looked at me. “Julian.”

“She robbed me,” I said. “Six years. Six years of searching, and she had the ring the entire time, and she never wore that ring; she only wore it whenever it benefited her–she did not try to find me. She did not try to find out who she had married. She just went back to Brooklyn and built a life and raised my son and never once-

11

“She didn’t know who you were,” Zane said.

“She had the ring.”

“She had an alias on a marriage certificate and a ring from a man whose face she never remembered,” Zane said. “How exactly was she supposed to find you?”

“She could have worn it,” I said. “Every day. She could have worn it and let people see it, and someone would have recognized it

iqa box.

box. She wore it eventually, my sister for instance; they were together every time in Harvard. But she didn’t. She kept it when it suited her.” I paused. “She didn’t want to find me.”

Zane was quiet for a moment.

“Julian,” he said. His voice had shifted–careful, deliberate. “If you want to blame someone for what happened that night, blame me.” I looked at him.

“I was the one who drugged us,” he said. “All three of us. You, her, and myself. That was my fault, and I have been living with it for seven years.” He held my gaze. “How could she have known you were her husband? She woke up that morning the same way you did with no mernory and no face to put to the night. She didn’t run from you. She ran from her own shame. Just like you did.”

I said nothing.

“You are doing the same thing you always do,” Zane said. “You are making this into something she did to you instead of something that happened to both of you.”

“I married her sister,” I said. My voice came out harder than I intended. “Because of her. Because she disappeared and I had no

Im Taking my Son To School

+25 BONUS

one, and my grandmother arranged something, and I went along with it because I was still looking for a ghost. Now I am in an arrangement with her sister, and she is standing in my office asking me if I trave ever been to Vegas, and I am lying to her face.” I looked at him. “She could have worn that ring every fucking day. But she didn’t. Why? Because she didn’t want to find me.”

“Or,” Zane said, “because she was a twenty–year–old girl who was pregnant and alone and had just been thrown out of her family home and was trying to survive. And a ring from a stranger she couldn’t remember was the last thing on her mind.”

I looked at the window.

“You are not married to Delia,” Zane said. “You have an arrangement. One conversation and it is over. The only person you are actually married to is Katia. She is your wife. She has been your wife for seven years.” He paused. “So what now? You are going to keep sleeping with Seraphina? Keep Chloe on the side? Because almighty Julian Windsor is angry that it took him seven years to find his ghost wife?”

I turned from the window.

“Lower your voice,” I said.

“I will not lower my voice,” Zane said. He stood up. “You want to be angry? Fine. Be angry. You have earned the right to be angry. But be angry at the situation – not at her. She did not know. She could not have known. And sitting in this office playing cold and aloof and asking her if she wants you to be her husband while you already know you are—that is not anger, Julian. That

is cruelty.”

I looked at him.

“She came to your office,” Zane said. “She wore the ring. She sat across from you and asked you directly if you had ever been to Vegas, and you looked her in the face and lied.” He paused. “That woman has been carrying your marriage for seven years without knowing it was yours. She deserves better than games.”

“I know,” I said.

“Then act like it,” he said.

He walked to the door. Stopped. Turned.

“Before you do something stupid,” he said, “think about Aiden.”

I said nothing.

“That boy already likes you,” Zane said. “He called you Dad in your living room like it was the most natural thing in the world. And if you start sleeping around if you let your anger make you reckless and he finds out, it will hurt him. It will hurt him in a way that will take years to undo.” He held my gaze. “You will be on your own with that. I will not help you fix it.”

He opened the door.

He left.

The office was completely quiet.

I stood at the window and looked at Manhattan and thought about Aiden on the floor of my living room with his controller saying, “Okay, Dad,” like it cost him nothing. Like it was a word he had been saving and had finally found the right place to put

1. it.

I thought about what Zane had said. That she had been a twenty–year–old girl, pregnant and alone, thrown out of her family home, trying to survive. That the ring from a stranger she couldn’t remember was the last thing on her mind.

I thought about seven years of searching.

And I thought about the fact that she had been three floors below me in a Dubai hotel and sitting two seats to my left in a war room and sleeping at her desk six feet away from me.

I’m Taking my son To School

Astugle tear slipped.

I pressed two fingers to the bridge of my nose and stood very still for a moment.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify