My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 219

Get to My Wife

–Julian-

I saw it for exactly what it was.

The dinner. Christopher. The seating. The hand–holding performance Delia had put on at the table like she was auditioning for a role she had never been cast in. All of it – every carefully arranged piece of it – was a response to the night Katia had stayed in my house. Martha had seen what she had seen and had drawn the conclusion anyone with functioning eyes would have drawn and had built this entire evening around confirming it.

I had not given them what they wanted.

I was not going to give them what they wanted. Not tonight. Not in Martha Kensington’s dining room with Christopher sitting there with his charter jet and his five–figure salary and his very good jaw, waiting for me to show something that would give the whole table permission to discuss it.

I had sat through the entire evening. I had eaten my food, and I had kept my face entirely still, and I had watched Katia handle her mother with the precise, controlled devastation of a woman who had been waiting a long time to say exactly those things

and had finally decided the moment was right.

She had not looked at me when she left.

I had not looked at her.

I looked at Gail.

Gail was already reading me. She had been reading me the entire evening with the patient attention of a woman who had grown up in the same house as me and understood how I operated better than most people I had paid considerable amounts of money

to understand me.

She stood up without asking what I wanted.

She went after Katia.

I meant it. Every word of what I had said in the family meeting the week before. My son was not leaving the Windsor house. That was not a threat I had made lightly, and it was not one I was going to walk back because his mother had picked him up by the hand and walked out of a dinner in Brooklyn. Gail understood this. She would find a way.

Delia was still holding my hand on the table.

I looked down at our hands.

I took mine back.

I picked up my phone under the table and typed two words to the team.

Follow her.

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They knew what to do. They always knew what to do. I had assembled a security team that understood my requirements and did not need extended briefing, and the requirement tonight was simple–I needed to know where Katia went, and I needed Aiden accounted for, and I needed both pieces of information in real time.

I put the phone in my pocket.

The dining room had rearranged itself in the absence of Katia and Aiden. It was smaller somehow. The candles were still burning. Christopher had found something to look at that was not any of the people in the room. David Kensington was doing what David Kensington always did when something uncomfortable happened in his vicinity, which was become very interested in his water glass. Martha was at the head of her table, looking at the centerpiece with the expression of a woman who had planned something carefully and was now sitting in the wreckage of it.

Get to My Wate

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I waited.

Eleven minutes.

Gail came back through the door with Aiden.

My son’s eyes were red. Not crying–or not anymore—but the particular redness that came from crying that had been stopped and controlled because he was Aiden and Aiden controlled things. He was holding his jacket in his hands, folded neatly the way he folded everything, and his chin was slightly lower than usual, which was the only tell he had.

Something moved in my chest.

Aiden walked to Grandma without looking at me. She reached for his hand and held it and said something quietly that made him lean against her arm. Then she looked at me over his head.

She stood.

“I think we will call it an evening,” she said. To the table. To nobody in particular.

She left with Aiden and Gail, and the door closed, and the dining room was suddenly just five people–me, Delia, Martha, David, and Christopher, who was clearly wishing he had not come.

I looked at the room. At the dinner that had been arranged to provoke me into showing my hand.

At Martha, who was still looking at the centerpiece.

At Christopher, who was studying the tablecloth.

At David, who had found something urgent in his water glass.

At Delia, who was watching me with the expression she wore when she was calculating.

“I’ll take my leave,” I said.

I stood.

“Baby.” Delia’s voice had the particular quality it took on when she was performing in front of an audience. Soft. Familiar. The voice of a woman who slept in the same wing as her husband and woke up next to him every morning. “Let’s go together.”

I looked at her.

“Did you come with me?” I said.

I did not wait for the answer. I knew the answer. She had driven herself here the same way she drove herfelf everywhere because

we did not arrive together and we did not leave together, and the performance she was putting on for her parents and Christopher was exactly that—a performance, and not a very convincing one.

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