My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 276

I Hate Punishing You

~Julian –

The lights in the dining room were warm when I walked through the front doors.

I could hear them, Grandma Celeste’s voice, low and measured; Gail responding; the faint clink of silverware against porcelain. A normal evening. Dinner at the Windsor family mansion was the way it had always been – quiet for a household that had learned to function around the silences its men left behind.

I did not stop.

I walked through the entrance hall, past the open dining room doors, and I did not look in. I heard the conversation stop. I heard the clink of silverware pause. I heard Grandma say nothing, which was the loudest thing she could have done, because Grandma Celeste always knew when to say nothing.

I kept walking.

The blood on my shirt was dry in places and still wet in others. My knuckles had bled through the medical tape again—the warehouse had been thorough work. My face was clean. That was the only clean thing about me.

I took the east corridor to the guest wing.

I stopped outside her door.

I stood there for a moment in the quiet hallway, my hand flat against the wood, the sound of my own breathing the only thing in the corridor. Behind me the house was holding itself still. Nobody was going to come out of that dining room and ask me anything. They knew better.

I opened the door.

The room was dark. The curtains were drawn against the evening, and the only light was the thin line of the city coming through the gap at the bottom of the fabric. She was in the bed–on her side, facing the window, the duvet pulled up to her shoulder, her breathing the slow, even rhythm of someone genuinely asleep.

I stood in the doorway and looked at her.

The bruise on her cheek was visible even in the dark. Jude had left his mark on her face and the sight of it made something (may chest move in a way I did not have a clean word for. Not anger – anger had been handled. Something older and heavier chars anger. The grief of a man who had been three minutes too slow in a Brook stairwell and twenty four hours too slow (it a

Manhattan office.

I went to the bathroom.

I turned the shower on and stood under it until the water running off my hands ran clear 2 did not look at the cubs on m knuckles I washed my hair and stood there in the heat of it for a long time, letting the warehouse drain off me

I turned the shower off

I dried off and wrapped the towel around my waist and stood at the bathroom mirror be ment

I looked at my own face

Seven years

Seven years since Las Vegas Seven years since Jules and hat and a narrage ventilate with two diasex aldarin in my jacket pocket for three days before I gave it to her had been twenty seven she had been twenty W. trac and something else simultaneously, the chemistry of two people who found each other in a place mither of thier wa to be, doing things neither of them was supposed to be dong, and for one night load d

And then she was gone

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I had searched for her. Not immediately—immediately I had been young and stupid and had told myself she would surface, that a woman like that did not simply disappear, and that the marriage certificate with two aliases was a thing that would resolve itself in time. But time had passed and she had hot surfaced, and the alias had been a wall I could not get past.

She had come back to New York two years ago.

Two years ago she had been standing in front of me in a boardroom, and I had not known. She had been sitting across from me at dinner tables, and I had not known. She had been building a company that was being integrated into my infrastructure, and I

had not known.

If she had worn the ring.

If she had walked into that first boardroom with the Windsor fire stone on her finger, I would have known in the first thirty seconds. That was our family ring; I have seen Grandma wearing it for years before she passed it down to the. I had known its shape and its weight and the way the stone caught light in a way no other stone did. I would have known.

But she had not worn it.

For two years she had been in the same city, and she had not worn it, and I had sat across from her at a table and negotiated contracts and not known that the woman across from me was the one I had been searching for.

The magazine. The photo from the magazine was what it took for me to know she was the one. The very same forbidden woman I have been dry humping and finger fucking was my wife.

If Katia wore that ring, I wouldn’t have bothered with her sister. I made a deal with the wrong sister because I had been trying to get close enough to find out if the woman I was watching was who I thought she was. A deal that required me to bring another woman into my house while my wife was standing in front of me not knowing what she was to me.

I pressed my hand against the bathroom mirror.

The cool glass was a flat, indifferent surface.

I had been angry at her for it. For the two years of not wearing the ring, for the alias, and for the careful, invisible life she had built that had kept her hidden from me. I knew it was not rational. I knew she had not known I was looking. I knew she had built that invisible life to protect herself and Aiden from exactly the kind of exposure that men like Jude Wolfe used as weapons.

I knew all of that.

And I was still angry.

I went back to the bedroom.

because that was the state of things now

and I piled back the duver on 5 say

I pulled on the clean trousers and shirt that I kept in the drawer in her room clothes in her room, she had not asked for an explanation and I had not oftered one and got in

She did not stir

Hay on my back in the dark and looked at the ceiling and listened to her breathe

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