My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 297

Beneath the Surface

~Katia~

The reef sat a short boat ride from the villa, close enough that the staff dropped us off and left without waiting, trusting we would signal when we wanted to be collected again.

Julian had brought the masks and fins himself, refusing the offer of an instructor or a guide, which did not surprise me by this point in the trip. He preferred to do things himself when he could, the same way he had cut the fruit for breakfast with his own hands rather than letting the staff arrange it, the same way he had taken the boat wheel from the resort captain without asking the first morning we arrived.

“You have done this before,” I said, watching him check the strap on his mask with practiced fingers.

“Once or twice,” he said. “Not recently.”

We slipped into the water together.

The cold hit first, a brief shock against skin that had spent the last several days adjusting to air thick with heat, and then it settled into something almost gentle, the lagoon holding us the way water always seemed to hold people who had stopped fighting it. I put my mask on and looked down, and the world beneath the surface opened up in a way that made me forget, for a

moment, that there was anything above it worth thinking about.

The reef was alive in a way I had not expected. Color everywhere: coral in shades of violet and burnt orange and pale green clustered together in formations that looked built by something with taste; fish moved through it in schools that scattered and reformed as we passed, indifferent to us in the way wild things were indifferent to anything that did not threaten them directly.

Julian swam beside me without speaking, which suited the moment better than words would have. We moved together through the warm water, following the slope of the reef as it dropped deeper in places and rose closer to the surface in others, and at one point he reached out and took my hand beneath the water, not pulling me anywhere, just holding it, the two of us drifting above the coral in a silence-that felt entirely different from the silence we had carried through that first dinner three nights earlier.

A turtle passed beneath us at one point, unbothered by our presence, moving with the slow, deliberate grace of something that had never once in its life needed to hurry.

Julian surfaced just long enough to pull a small waterproof case from the pocket of his swim shorts, the kind built to protect a phone from exactly this sort of afternoon, and went back under to photograph the reef itself. He took his time with it, framing cluster of violet coral against the shafts of light filtering down from the surface, then a school of fish scattering past in perfect formation, then the turtle again before it drifted out of range.

When we surfaced again, he checked the images, satisfied, and posted one of the reef without me in it, the cosal and the inghi doing all the work, captioned with nothing more than the coordinates.

He turned the camera on me only once we were back near the surface, and even then he did not ask me to look at it he caught me mid-laugh, water still running down my face from clearing my mask, and once more, a moment later, when I was foving off toward the horizon rather than at him.

“Those are not going anywhere either,” he said when he saw me notice

“I am starting to think you have a collection,” I said

“I have a small one,” he said “Growing”

He did not post either photograph He simply slid the case back into his pocket and dove under the surface again, leaving me there for a moment with the strange, quiet realization that somewhere on his phone, alongside the careful, curated unages the rest of the world was allowed to see, there now existed a small private archive that belonged to no one but him

I surfaced eventually to clear my mask, and when I did, Julian surfaced beside me, water running down the plates of hits face, his dark hair slicked back from his forehead. He looked at me for a long moment, treading water castly, the kind of effortless strength that made everything he did look unfairly simple

Benes

+15 Bonus

“What?” I said.

“Nothing,” he said. “I like watching you down there. You forget to be careful.”

“I am always careful.”

“Not down there,” he said. “Down there you just look happy.”

I did not have an answer for that, so I let the water carry the silence between us instead, and after a moment he reached over and pulled my mask gently back down over my eyes, his fingers brushing my temple as he did it, and dove back under without

another word.

We swam for what felt like hours, though it was likely closer to one, until the light overhead began shifting into the deeper gold that signaled the afternoon was starting to turn. By the time we made our way back toward the shallows near a small outcrop of rock that broke the surface a short distance from the reef, my limbs had gone pleasantly heavy with exertion, the good kind of tired that came from moving through water rather than fighting against anything.

Julian found a ledge in the rock just below the surface, shallow enough that we could stand on it with our shoulders above the waterline, sheltered from view by the small formation rising around us.

He pulled his mask off and set it on the rock beside us.

“Come here,” he said.

I went to him, the water buoying me, weightless in a way that made the distance between us feel smaller than it actually was. He wrapped one arm around my waist, anchoring me against him as the current shifted gently around our legs, and looked at me with an expression that had none of the urgency of the jet and none of the careful patience of the sandbank. This was something else entirely. Lighter. Easier. The look of a man who had simply decided, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, that he wanted to kiss the woman in front of him and saw no reason to wait.

He kissed me slowly, the salt of the ocean still on both our mouths, his hand sliding from my waist down to my hip beneath the water, pulling me flush against him until I could feel every line of his body pressed to mine, warm despite the cool water surrounding us. I let my arms wrap around his neck, my fingers finding the wet strands of his hair, and felt him exhale against my mouth, a low sound caught somewhere between a laugh and something far less casual.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify