My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 299

consider whether the story you are telling me, and likely telling yourself, is the whole truth or only the part of it that lets you keep believing something that stopped being true a long time ago.” She picked her book back up, a clear signal that the conversation, as far as she was concerned, trad reached its natural end. “Go home, Delia. Clean up whatever you broke. And think very carefully about what you actually want, rather than what you believe you are owed.”

I sat there for another moment, the porcelain still scattered across my own sitting room floor rniles away, the photograph still burning behind my eyes every time I blinked, and found that I had no answer for her that I was willing to say out loud.

I stood up.

I left without saying goodbye.

The drive back to the city gave me too much time to sit with what she had said, the words replaying in a loop I could not turn off no matter how loudly I played the radio or how hard I gripped the steering wheel. I had walked into that room certain of my own story, certain that I was the wronged party in an arrangement that had never once functioned the way I had let myself believe it would, and I had walked out of it with that certainty cracked down the middle in a way I did not know how to repair.

I thought about the photograph again. The sandbank. The candles. The careful, deliberate way Julian had framed the shot so that whoever sat across from him remained invisible, protected, and kept entirely out of the public record while everything else about the moment was laid bare for the world to see.

He had never once protected me that way. Not in two years. Not in a single photograph, a single gesture, a single moment where he had gone out of his way to keep something about me safe from prying eyes.

That was the part Grandma Celeste had not said out loud, the part I suspected she understood perfectly well and had chosen to let me arrive at on my own. It was not simply that he did not want me. It was that he had never wanted to protect anything about me at all, and somewhere in that house tonight, on an island I could not name, there was a woman he clearly did.

I reached my own front door and let myself inside, stepping over the shattered porcelain still scattered across the floor of my sitting room exactly where I had left it.

I did not clean it up.

I left it there, a small monument to the version of myself that had believed, right up until this evening, that patience alone would eventually be enough.

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A Ticking Bumb

-Katia-

I came back from the Maldives on Saturday morning with the dinner only hours away and the strange, unsteady feeling of someone returning from a different version of her own life back into the one everyone else stil! expected her to occupy.

Jude was waiting at my apartment when I arrived, which I had not asked him to do, though I supposed by now I should have stopped being surprised when he found ways into spaces I had not explicitly invited him into.

He looked composed. The jaw had finished healing into something close to normal, the bruising long gone, the wire mesh removed weeks ago. He looked, if anything, like a man who had spent the last several days thinking carefully about his next move rather than reacting to anything in front of him.

“You look rested,” he said when I walked through the door.

“It was a work trip,” I said, setting my bag down on the counter.

“Was it?” he asked.

I looked at him.

“What is the London extension, Katia?” he asked. His tone was light, almost casual, the kind of question a man asked when he wanted you to believe he was simply making conversation rather than pulling carefully at a thread. “Windsor mentioned it the day he came to my suite. He said you would brief me on it. You never have.”

“It is a business matter,” I said.

“Whereabouts in London?” he said. “I know the city reasonably well, I might be able to offer something useful if I understood the scope of it.”

I looked at him for a long moment, weighing exactly how much of this conversation I wanted to have standing in my own kitchen on the morning of a family dinner I was already dreading.

“I would rather we not discuss business at home,” I said. “We have a dinner tonight where my entire family is going to be watching the two of us very closely, deciding whether this marriage is something they should take seriously. I think our time would be better spent focusing on getting to know each other rather than London logistics that have nothing to do with either of us as people.”

Jude studied my face for a moment, the way he always studied things he could not immediately solve.

“Fair enough,” he said finally.

I did not entirely believe him, but I did not have the time this morning to find out what he actually believed. I picked my bag back up and told him I needed to stop by the office before the dinner, and he let me go without further questions, which telt less like genuine acceptance and more like a man deciding to wait for a better moment to ask again.

Sam was already at her desk when I arrived, two coffees in front of her, one clearly intended tor me

“You look like you have been squewhere with better weather than New York,” she said, handing me the cup.

“I was,” I said.

“And Windsor was there too, I assume, since he conveniently disappeared from the city at the exact same time you did

I did not answer that directly, which was answer enough for Sam, who had known me long enough to read silence as thuently as speech.

“Katia,” she said, her voice dropping out of the easy, teasing register it had carried a moment earlier “I need to say something. and I need you to actually hear it rather than deciding in advance that you already know what fam going to say

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I sat down across from her.

“Go ahead,” I said.

“You are playing a dangerous game,” she said. “Sleeping with Julian Windsor while your husband, a man who hit you hard enough to put you on the floor of your own office three weeks ago, is living back in your orbit and trying very hard to convince everyone he has changed. What happens if he snaps again? What happens if he walks in on something he should not sce, the way Delia almost did at that dinner table, and decides this time he is not going to apologize afterward?”

“He is a changed man,” I said. “He wants to get to know his family. He came to my office and apologized on his knees, Sam. People can change.”

“He is a changed man for now,” Sam said. “I am not arguing that the apology was not real, or that the flowers were not real, or that the tears were not real. I believe all of it was real in the moment he gave it to you. But a man like Jude Wolfe does not become a fundamentally different person because one bad afternoon humbled him. He is a ticking bomb, Katia. The fuse is just longer right now than it was three weeks ago. That does not mean the bomb stopped being a bomb.”

I looked at my coffee.

I did not have a good answer for that, because somewhere underneath the version of events I had been telling myself since Jude walked into my office with white roses, I suspected she was right, and I did not want to sit with that suspicion this morning.

“Can we talk about something else?” I said.

Sam studied me for a moment, decided I had heard enough of what she needed to say, and let it go with the ease of someone who knew when pushing further would only close a door rather than open one.

“Fine,” she said. “How is the forbidden fruit?”

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