My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 340

Did you sleep here?

Katia

He turned and walked down the hallway toward the guest room without needing directions, his steps certain i house he had lived in longer than I had, and I stood there for a moment watching him go, struck by how strang felt to be the one granting permission for him to move through rooms he probably could have found blindfold

“The main bedroom is still off limits,” I called after him. “I meant that.”

He paused at the guest room door and looked back at me.

“I know,” he said. “Thank you, Katia. For all of it.”

I did not answer that. I turned and walked back toward my own room, and behind me I heard the guest room do close softly, the sound of a man settling somewhere he had not expected to be tonight, in a house he had built a no longer had any claim to beyond what I was willing to give him one careful piece at a time.

I lay awake for a while, staring at the ceiling, thinking about the last two days. I had told myself I was doing the right thing keeping him out, and some part of me still believed that. He had known who I was for a year. He had let our son call him Dad without once giving me the chance to know the same thing. That wasn’t a small omissi That was a year of my life spent in the dark while he decided, on his own, what I could handle and when I would allowed to handle it.

But watching Aiden cry tonight had put a different weight on all of it. My anger was mine to keep. It didn’t belon to my son, and it wasn’t fair to let it decide whether he got to see his father read him a bedtime story on a randor Tuesday night because the adults around him hadn’t figured out how to be in the same house without it turning into a battlefield.

I woke early the next morning, before Aiden, and made my way down to the kitchen to start the coffee. My phone was sitting on the counter where I had left it the night before, and when I unlocked it, I found a single message waiting from Julian, sent a little after four in the morning.

Thank you for last night. I know it doesn’t fix anything. I just wanted you to know I meant it when I said I understood the terms, and I intend to keep them for as long as you need me to.

I read it twice before setting the phone back down.

I didn’t reply right away. I wasn’t ready to give him anything more than the door I had already opened, and I told myself that was allowed, that healing from something like this didn’t have to move at the speed either of us wanted it to.

Julian came down a few minutes later, dressed but unshaven, his hair still damp from the shower. He stopped in the doorway of the kitchen when he saw me standing at the counter, and for a moment neither of us said anything.

“Morning,” he said finally.

“Morning,” I said.

“I did not want to leave without saying goodbye to Aiden,” he said. “I hope that is not a problem.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “Sit down. There is coffee.”

He hesitated, then crossed the kitchen and took a seat at the island, keeping a careful distance between us, the same way a man might sit near something he was not entirely sure would not go off if he moved too fast. I poured him a cup without being asked and set it down in front of him, and he thanked me quietly.

-151

Aiden came down twenty minutes later, still in his pajamas, his hair sticking up on one side the way it always after a good night’s sleep. He stopped short in the doorway when he saw Julian sitting at the counter, his whol face lighting up in a way that made something in my chest ache.

“Dad!” he said, running across the kitchen and climbing straight into Julian’s lap without asking.

“Morning, bud,” Julian said, wrapping an arm around him easily, like it was the most natural thing in the wor like the last two days of gates and intercoms and shouted arguments on the porch had never happened at all. W like me fucking him and leaving him with a boner didn’t affect him.

“Did you sleep here?” Aiden asked.

“I did,” Julian said. “In the guest room.”

“Can you stay for breakfast?”

Julian glanced at me over the top of Aiden’s head.

“If your mom says it’s alright,” he said.

“You can stay for breakfast,” I said, keeping my voice even. “Sit at the table properly, Aiden. Not in your father’: lap while he tries to eat.”

Aiden slid off Julian’s lap and climbed onto the stool next to him instead, grinning the whole time, and I turned the counter to pour his cereal so neither of them would see whatever was happening on my face in that moment.

“Dad read me two stories last night,” Aiden announced to the table at large, reaching for the cereal box the moment I set it down in front of him. “And he did the voices for all of them, even the mean troll one.”

“Did he,” I said, pouring milk into his bowl.

“He fell asleep for a little bit,” Aiden said. “I heard him snoring. It was really loud.”

“I do not snore,” Julian said, with the kind of mild, practiced offense of a man who absolutely did snore and had been told so before.

“You do,” Aiden said. “Mom, tell him he does.”

“I would not know,” I said, my tone flat enough that Julian’s eyes flicked toward me for half a second before he looked back down at his coffee.

Aiden either did not notice the exchange or did not care, already moving on to a story about a boy at school and a project due the following week, and for a few minutes the kitchen simply sounded like a normal kitchen on a normal morning, the three of us sitting around the same counter while our son talked with his mouth half full about something that had happened at recess.

I caught Julian watching Aiden at one point with an expression I recognized, because I had worn it myself more times than I could count, the quiet disbelief of a parent who still could not quite get used to how much they loved this small, loud person who had taken over their entire life.

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