My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 357

The Tower

Katia~

+15 BUS

Aiden woke us both at dawn again, this time bouncing on the end of the bed with a printed map of Lotte World clutched in one hand, having apparently found it in the hotel lobby the night before and studied it long after he was supposed to be asleep.

“There is a roller coaster,” he announced, “that goes upside down four times.”

“Absolutely not,” I said.

“Dad will go with me.”

Julian, still half asleep beside me, cracked one eye open.

“Dad will consider it,” he said, “after coffee.”

By midmorning we were standing in line for the very roller coaster Aiden had been threatening us with since sunrise, Julian on one side of him and me on the other, Aiden vibrating with excitement while doing his best impression of someone who was not, in fact, slightly terrified.

“You do not have to go on it,” I told him, crouching down to his level.

“I am going,” he said, with the grim determination of a much older person walking into battle. “I already told everyone at school I would ride an upside–down roller coaster in Korea.”

The ride lasted ninety seconds. Aiden screamed for the entire ninety, a sound that shifted somewhere around the second loop from pure terror into something closer to delight, and when the cart finally pulled back into the station, he stumbled out on wobbly legs, hair completely wrecked, grinning wider than I had seen him grin in weeks.

“Again,” he said immediately.

We spent the rest of the day working through the park at his pace, which meant a great deal of running between attractions, a mascot parade Aiden insisted on watching twice, and a claw machine Julian spent an embarrassing amount of money on before finally winning Aiden a stuffed tiger that he named Mr. Choi, for reasons neither of us fully understood but did not question.

By evening we had made our way to Myeongdong, the streets alive with light and noise, vendors calling out over sizzling grills, the air thick with the smell of grilled skewers and sweet pastries. Aiden led the charge through the crowd with Mr. Choi tucked under one arm, stopping at nearly every stall to point at something new he wanted to try, and Julian, without complaint, bought him a little of everything.

“You are going to make him sick,” I said, watching Aiden inhale a fried rice cake with the enthusiasm of a boy who had never once considered the concept of moderation.

“I am making him happy,” Julian said. “Being sick is a tomorrow problem.”

We wandered the market for nearly two hours, Aiden dragging us into a shop selling phone cases shaped like cartoon animals, then another selling nothing but varieties of cotton candy in colors that did not occur in nature, and by the time the crowds began thinning, we found ourselves standing near the base of the cable car that carried visitors up to N Seoul Tower.

“Can we go up?” Aiden asked, though the yawn that followed suggested his energy was finally starting to catch up with the day.

1:3

+15 BO US

“We can go up,” Julian said. “But I think someone might fall asleep before we reach the top.”

“I will not,” Aiden said, and promptly proved himself wrong somewhere around the halfway point of the ride, his head dropping against my shoulder, Mr. Choi clutched loosely in one hand.

Julian carried him the rest of the way once we reached the summit, Aiden barely stirring, and we found a bench near the railing where the whole of Seoul spread out beneath us in a wash of gold and white light, the city humming quietly below while the wind moved cool and calm across the observation deck.

Julian settled Aiden carefully between us on the bench, tucking his own jacket around him, and for a long moment neither of us said anything, simply looking out at the view.

“Thank you for this trip,” I said finally.

“Thank you for saying yes to it,” Julian said, echoing the same words he had offered on the plane, though something in his tone had shifted since then, softer, less like a line and more like something he actually meant every time he said it.

I looked over at him.

He was already looking at me.

“I have loved every day of this,” I said. “I did not expect to. I thought I would spend the whole trip waiting for something to go wrong.”

“Nothing has gone wrong,” Julian said.

“No,” I agreed. “Nothing has.”

He reached over, careful not to disturb Aiden between us, and brushed his thumb along my jaw, the gesture slow, gentle, and simpler. A man looking at his wife on top of a tower in a city neither of us had ever expected to visit together, with their son asleep between them and an entire lit–up world spread out below.

He leaned in and kissed me, soft and slow, and I let myself sink into it completely, no thought of Delia, just the two of us and the city glittering beneath the railing and Aiden’s soft, even breathing beside us.

When he pulled back, he rested his forehead against mine for a moment.

“We should get him to bed,” Julian murmured.

“In a minute,” I said.

He smiled and pulled me closer instead, and we stayed there a while longer, watching the city lights shift and shimmer below us, in no rush at all to let the moment end.

Eventually the wind picked up enough to remind us both that we were still carrying a sleeping boy, and Julian scooped Aiden up carefully, tucking his jacket tighter around him, and we made our way back down toward the cable car, the city lights sliding past the windows on the descent.

Aiden stirred slightly in the taxi on the way back to the hotel, blinking up at Julian with the heavy, confused expression of a child not entirely sure how much time had passed since he last remembered being awake.

“Did we go up the tower?” he asked.

“We did,” Julian said.

“Did I miss it?”

2/3

心蛋

“You slept through most of it,” I said, brushing his hair back from his forehead. “But we took pictures. You can see it in the morning.”

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify