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.

The name landed in the quiet of the gallery and changed everything about how I was thinking about the next several days.

“Oh,” I said. “I’ll be there.”

I climbed the stairs without another word, leaving her standing there with the wine and whatever satisfaction she thought she had just earned.

I reached the top of the staircase and walked down the corridor to my study, closing the door behind me before I let any of what I was actually feeling show on my face.

I sat at my desk without turning on the lamp.

Jude Wolfe sitting at Martha Kensington’s table, across from Katia, in front of her entire family, with his jaw mostly healed and his understanding of the situation still dangerously incomplete, was not something I was willing to leave unattended. He had signed the document in that warehouse. He had relinquished any claim to Aiden in writing.

But a signature taken under duress did not change what a man wanted; it only changed what he was willing to put on paper in the moment he believed his hand might not survive the alternative.

He still wanted the telemetry assets. I had heard it underneath every word he said to me that night, the calculation running quietly beneath the pain, the way he kept circling back to what Katia’s company was worth even while trying to convince me he had nothing left to negotiate with.

Men like Jude Wolfe did not stop wanting things because they had been humiliated. They recalibrated. They found a softer approach and a better angle, and an apology delivered on one knee with a bunch of white roses was exactly the kind of recalibration I should have predicted from him days ago.

I should have known he would try this.

I thought about calling Marsus and asking him to find out what Jude had been doing since the warehouse, whether he had already made contact with Katia, and what version of himseif he was planning to bring to that dinner table. Then I decided against it. I would see for myself this weekend, sitting across from him, watching exactly how he behaved in front of her family and exactly how she responded to it.

Delia believed she had handed me an invitation I would refuse out of spite or indifference.

She had no idea what she had actually just done.