My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 346

What My Father Would Not Do

Delia~

I sat across from my parents at the kitchen table and finally said the thing I had been avoiding for two weeks.

“Julian is not my husband,” I said. “Not really.”

Martha set her cup down.

The kitchen had gone quiet in the way it did when something true finally entered a room that had spent month filled with things everyone politely agreed not to say out loud. My mother’s face did not move much, but I could see the small shift in her eyes, the recalibration of two years of assumptions collapsing at once.

“He told me from the beginning,” I continued, my voice steadier than I expected it to be. “He said he was already married. He said he would never touch me. It was an arrangement, that was all, a name and a house and an/ appearance for the family and the press. I thought if I stayed long enough, if I were patient enough, he would eventually feel something for me.” I looked down at my hands. “He never did.”

My father was quiet for a long moment, his eyes fixed somewhere past my shoulder, as though he were doing the arithmetic of two years all at once and arriving at a sum he did not like.

“So for people to respect you,” he said finally, “you faked being Mrs. Windsor.”

I did not answer.

“It is no wonder,” he continued, “that when Katia said seven years ago she would not marry Julian, you said you would. Delia, that is not love. That is an obsession. You spent two years of your life pretending to be married to a man who told you from the first day that he would never want you, and you stayed anyway, telling yourself a story that was never going to become true.”

“You do not understand,” I said.

“I understand perfectly,” my father said. “I am simply disappointed that you do not.”

The word “disappointed” landed harder than anything sharper could have. My father had never been a man who raised his voice or reached for cruelty when he was angry. He had always been quiet in his disapproval, and somehow that quiet had always cut deeper than any shouting my mother was capable of.

“We never shared a bed,” I said quietly, the words coming out before I had fully decided to say them. “Not once, in two years. He kept his own wing of the house, and I kept mine. He told me the terms before I ever moved my things in, at a restaurant, in the middle of the day of all things. He sent a car for me, a Rolls Royce, right to the house. I remember thinking that meant something, a man sending a car like that just to pick me up. I did not understand yet that it was simply how he moved through the world, that the car had nothing to do with me at all.” I could still see that afternoon clearly, the two of us in a booth at The Velvet Ember, the same restaurant where ! had first seen Katia again after years apart. I had not thought anything of the location at the time. I understood now that nothing about that day had been an accident

“He told me to order something to eat,” I said. “He did not eat anything himself. Just drank And then, before I had taken more than one bite, he told me he was already married.”

Mama’s hand came up to her mouth.

“I asked him why he was even engaged to me if that was true,” I continued. “He said I would not be Mrs. Windsor. Not legally. He called ne a solution. When I asked what that meant, he said the entire thing had nothing to do with me at all. He said it was about a debt his family owed to Katia, something from years back that she does not even

What My Father Would Not Do

+15 Bonus

know about herself. He never explained what the debt was. He simply told me there would be no intimacy, no shared bed, and that no one, absolutely no one, was ever supposed to know what he told me that day. He also said he was only interested in my sister, but then she got pregnant, and they switched Katia to me.” I looked down at my hands. “Before he left, he told me I had until the next day to give him an answer, and I can still walk away from this, as he is not interested in marrying me. Then he put money on the table and walked out.”

“I used to cook for him after that,” I said. “In the beginning, before I understood any of this fully. I thought if could not have his affection, I could at least earn his gratitude. He never once ate a single meal I made him. He would come home, see the plate, and go straight to his study without a word.”

Mama’s face had gone pale, her hand still pressed against her mouth.

“Two years,” I said. “Two years of separate wings, separate lives, separate everything, and I kept telling myselit would change if I were patient enough.”

I thought about the two years I had spent building a version of myself that fit into Julian’s house, learning the names of his business partners, hosting dinners he barely attended, and sitting through events alone while people whispered about where my husband had gone this time. I had told myself all of it would eventually add up to something real, that patience alone could earn me a place in a life I had never actually been invited into.

Hearing my father say the word “obsession” out loud made something in my chest go tight, because some small, honest part of me had known it was true long before he said it. I had wanted Julian since I first heard his name, back when Katia turned twenty and the Windsors became a name our own family started saying in a certain tone at dinner, the tone people used when they were talking about a world they were not part of but wished they were.

I had never actually met him back then. I had only heard about him, about the wealth, and about the kind of man he was supposed to be, and somewhere in the years that followed, I had built an entire idea of him in my head long before I ever sat across from him in that booth at The Velvet Ember.

I had wanted him even after Katia refused him, even after it became clear he did not want either of us the way I had imagined, and I had built an entire life around a want that had never once been returned.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify