My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 288

An Interesting Call

-Julian-

I had been driving for forty minutes through traffic that should have taker: fifteen, and the only thing keeping my temper level was the thought of getting home, taking off this suit, and not speaking to another human being for at least an hour.

That plan ended the moment I walked through my own front door.

Delia was standing at the entrance of the gallery, waiting. Fully dressed this time, holding a glass of red wine out toward me with both hands like an offering.

I stopped walking.

I looked at her and then looked at the wine.

I had not forgotten what happened the last time she handed me a glass in this house. My knuckles stirk remembered the way my legs had stopped working halfway up these stairs, the way the room had tilted, the cold certainty that something had been put in the drink before I ever raised it to my mouth.

I took the glass anyway, because refusing it would have started a conversation I did not want to have, and I held it without drinking from it.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, her voice bright in a way that made me immediately suspicious of everything that was about to come out of her mouth, “I just got an interesting call from Mama.”

I stared at her and waited.

“She invited us to dinner this coming weekend,” Delia said.

“And how is that interesting?” I said.

She blinked, as though the answer should have been obvious to anyone standing in the room. “Because we are invited.”

“We are invited to things constantly, Delia,” I said. “Galas. Fundraisers. Charity boards that want my name on a letterhead so they can print it in a program nobody reads. None of it interests me. Why would your mother’s dinner table be any different?”

“Because it is family,” she said.

“It is not my family,” I said.

She flinched at that, just slightly, and recovered fast enough that most people would have missed it. I did not miss it. I had spent two years watching her recover from things quickly, building a face that could absorb almost anything I said and turn it into something she could survive.

“It could be,” she said. “If you let it.”

“I am not in the business of letting things become what they are not,” I said.

“You make it sound like a corporate decision.”

“Most decisions are,” I said. “The ones that matter, anyway.”

I walked past her without responding further, crossed to the side table near the staircase, and set the untouched wine down on the marble surface. I heard her shift behind me, the soft sound of her heels turning against the floor as she watched me decide not to drink it.

“I am not going,” I said, and started toward the stairs.

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