My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 293

The Villa

+15 Bonus

-Katia-

The villa was the kind of place that made you forget you were still on earth.

It sat alone on stilts above water so clear it looked unreal, the kind of blue that photographs never quite captured because the human eye refused to believe it was real until it was standing in front of you. The entire structure was built around glass and pale timber, the walls opening onto a private deck with an infinity pool that bled directly into the lagoon beyond it, so that from certain angles you could not tell where the pool ended and the ocean began. A section of the living room floor was glass, and beneath it fish moved in slow circles, completely unaware that anyone was watching them.

Julian had booked the entire property. Not a room, not a suite. The entire small island the villa sat off, with its own private staff who appeared only when summoned and vanished the rest of the time, leaving us with the strange, unsettling sense that the world had simply stepped back to give us room.

I had not said a word to him since the jet.

He had not pushed me to.

We were shown to the villa by a member of the resort staff who explained the layout with the practiced warmth of someone trained to make guests feel like the only people on earth, and then she left us standing in the main living area with the doors open to the sound of water against the stilts below.

Dinner was served on the deck as the sun went down.

It should have been beautiful. It was beautiful, technically and objectively, the kind of sunset that painted the entire sky in deep orange and violet, the water turning gold beneath it. But I sat across from Julian at a table set with more care than either of us seemed willing to acknowledge, and neither of us said a single word through the entire meal.

I ate because I was hungry. I did not look at him more than I had to.

He ate slowly, his eyes occasionally moving to me and then away again, and the silence between us stretched out over each course until it became its own kind of conversation, heavier than anything either of us could have said out loud.

I thought about everything I had told him on the jet. About Aiden coming home. About being done with midnight calls and secrets. I had meant every word of it when I said it, and somewhere over the Atlantic the conviction behind those words had started to feel less solid than it had in my office that afternoon.

I did not know what that meant about me.

When the staff cleared the final course and disappeared back into whatever part of the island they retreated to when we were at being served, I stood up from the table without looking at Julian.

“I am going to find a room to sleep in,” I said.

It was the first full sentence either of us had spoken since the elevator at the Whitmore.

I walked back through the open doors into the villa, past the glass floor where the fish were still circling beneath my feet toward the corridor that led to what I assumed were several guest bedrooms in a property this size. I had no intention of sleeping anywhere near bin tonight. I needed distance I needed a closed door and several hours of quiet to figure out what actually wanted, separate from whatever gravity Julian Windsor exerted on me the moment we were in the same wom

I made it three steps down the corridor.

His hand closed around mine.

He did not say anything. He did not explain himself or ask permission of offer any version of the conversation I had been bracing for since dinner began. He simply took my hand, his grip warm and certam, and turned, leading me down the corridor in the opposite direction from where I had been walking, toward a set of double doots at the far end of the villa

+15 Bonus

I should have pulled away.

I did not pull away.

I let him lead me through the doors into a bedroom larger than any room! had slept in before. The bed sat beneath an open frame that let the night air move freely through the room; the sound of water below us was constant and soft, and beyond the far wall, the same glass panel from the living room continued here too, so that ever in bed we would be sleeping above the same slow circling fish.

Julian let go of my hand only once we were standing beside the bed.

He did not say anything about Aiden. He did not say anything about Jude or Delia or the things had said to him on the jet that I was no longer certain I still meant the same way I had meant them hours earlier. He siraply pulled back the sheet on one side of the bed and waited, watching me with an expression that asked nothing and assumed nothing, leaving the decision entirely in the space between us.

I climbed into the bed.

He climbed in beside me a moment later, the mattress shifting under his weight, and for a long time neither of us spoke. I lay on my side facing away from him, listening to the water below the villa and the occasional call of some bird I did not recognize somewhere out in the dark, and I waited for the tension in my chest to either resolve itself or make itself known more clearly.

It did neither.

At some point his arm came to rest across my waist, light and undemanding, and I let it stay there.

I fell asleep before I had decided whether that was a mistake.

I woke once in the middle of the night, the room still dark, the air carrying the faint salt smell of the lagoon through the open frame above the bed. Julian was asleep behind me, his breathing slow and even, his arm still resting where it had settled hours earlier. I lay there for a long time looking at the glass panel beneath the bed, watching for any sign of movement in the dark water below, and found none. The fish had gone wherever fish went when the light disappeared.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify