My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 212

The Dote

+25 BONUS

The Date

-Katia-

I smelled it before I was fully awake.

Coffee. Something warm and savory underneath it. The particular smell of a kitchen being used by someone who knew what they were doing.

I opened my eyes.

Julian’s side of the bed was empty. The sheets were still warm. I lay there for a moment listening to the sounds coming from my kitchen–the particular domesticity of it, the quiet efficiency of someone moving around a space they had decided was theirs.

I got up.

He was at my stove. Still in the clothes he had slept in–or rather had not slept in, given that sleep had not been the primary activity–he was cooking with the same focused, unhurried attention he brought to everything. Eggs. Something in the pan that smelled extraordinary. Toast already done and waiting.

I stood in the doorway and looked at him.

Julian Windsor. In my kitchen. Making breakfast.

I did not know he could cook.

I had known him for over a year. I had been in boardrooms with him and deserts with him and server rooms at two in the morning, and I had never once considered that this man might be standing at a stove somewhere making eggs.

He looked up. He saw me in the doorway. He said nothing. He turned back to the pan.

I sat at the kitchen table.

He served the food and sat across from me, and we ate in the quiet of a Sunday morning in Brooklyn with the city doing its thing outside the window and neither of us saying anything because apparently we had arrived at the kind of place where silence was not uncomfortable.

The eggs were good.

I did not tell him that. I ate them, and he drank his coffee, and we sat in the particular peace of two people who had decided, without quite saying it out loud, that this was where they were.

“What are your plans today?” Julian asked.

“Office,” I said. “I have the Meridian quarterly review, and Sam has been chasing me about the

“Clear your schedule,” he said.

I looked at him.

“We have a date,” he said.

I stared at him. “A date.”

“It is not as though we have never been on a date before, Kitten.” He picked up his coffee. “I want you to teach me something.”

“Teach you what?”

“How to fly a jet,” he said. “Since you are apparently a woman of many talents.”

I looked at him across my kitchen table.

The Date

+25 BONUS

He looked back at me steadily.

“You know,” I said.

“I know,” he said. Simply. Without elaboration. Without the hundred questions that should have followed it.

I held his gaze for a moment.

“Okay,” I said.

We showered together.

It was not the urgent kind it was the unhurried, ordinary kind, the kind that happened between people who had decided they were comfortable in each other’s space. We did not perform it. We just showered, passing the shampoo, moving around each other in the small space without difficulty, like we had been doing it for years.

We got dressed.

We left together.

Julian’s hangar was at a private airstrip forty minutes from the city. I had known he had one–men like Julian Windsor had private jets the way other men had cars- -but I had not known the scale of it until the car pulled through the gate and I saw what was waiting.

Three jets.

The middle one stopped me.

A Gulfstream G700. Matte white with a single dark stripe along the fuselage. The newest configuration, the extended cabin, the range to cross any ocean without stopping. I had seen one at a race event in Dubai and had spent twenty minutes walking around it while the owner explained its details to someone who was not listening as carefully as I was.

“Choose,” Julian said.

I looked at the three jets.

I walked to the G700.

I put my hand on the fuselage the way I put my hand on a car before a race–feeling the material of it, the quality, the particular solidity of something built to a very high standard.

,” I said.

“This one,”

Julian looked at it. Then at me. “That is the most expensive aircraft I own.”

“I know,” I said.

He almost smiled. “Of course you do.”

He followed me up the stairs.

The cockpit was exactly what I expected

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two seats, dual controls, the G700’s updated avionics suite with the touch–screen panels and the heads–up display that made everything cleaner than the older configurations. I sat in the left seat. Julian sat to the right. He looked at the instrument panel with the expression of a man who was intelligent enough to know how much he did not know.

“Walk me through it,” he said.

I walked him through it.

Pre–flight checks first systematic, thorough, the way my racing instructor had taught me to do vehicle checks before I was allowed near a circuit. Julian followed everything. He asked questions that were good questions, the kind that came from

The Dute

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someone who was paying genuine attention rather than feigning interest.

We taxied.

Then we were in the air.

The G700 climbed at a rate that pressed your back into the seat in a way I had never stopped enjoying Julian felt it too- I saw his hands on the co–pilot controls tighten slightly and then deliberately loosen as he absorbed the sensation and decided it was something he was going to be comfortable with.

“Altitude,” I said. “Keep your eyes on it. You want to level at thirty–five thousand.”

“Thirty–five,” he said.

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