My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 385

Wrong Side of the Table

~Delia

Noah called me into his office two days before the gala, a single folder sitting closed on the black stone

desk between us.

“I need you to arrange a meeting,” he said, without any of his usual preamble. “With Julian Windsor. Vesper Group would like to invest in WEG before the gala takes place. It would strengthen everything we are trying to build here, having our name tied to WEG’s before the launch rather than after.”

I nodded, writing the note down on my tablet without fully processing what he had actually asked me to do.

“I can reach out to his office today,” I said. “Set something up before the end of the week.”

“Good,” Noah said. “Make it happen.”

I left his office feeling, for the first time since signing the contract, something close to useful in a way that had nothing to do with seating charts or guest lists. This felt like real work, the kind of assignment that might actually prove to Noah I belonged in rooms larger than the ones I had spent the last several days arranging chairs inside.

I called Julian’s office that same afternoon and secured a meeting for the following morning, feeling almost proud of how quickly I had managed it, not stopping to consider why a meeting with someone I had once lived beside for two years had been so easy to arrange.

I arrived at WEG headquarters the next morning in my best suit, the folder Noah had given me tucked under one arm, rehearsing the pitch in my head the entire elevator ride up. Vesper Group would like to invest in WEG. A partnership that would benefit everyone involved, ahead of what we expect to be a significant period of growth for both companies.

Julian’s assistant showed me into his office, and he looked up from his desk with an expression I could not quite read, something between confusion and mild amusement that I chose to ignore in favor of my prepared opening.

“Thank you for meeting with me,” I said, sitting down across from him without waiting to be invited, the way I had watched Noah do a hundred times over the past week. “I am here on behalf of Vesper Group. We would like to invest in WEG.”

Julian was quiet for a moment, something shifting behind his eyes that I could not immediately read.

“Invest in WEG,” he repeated slowly. “In what aspect?”

I opened my mouth and found, for a long, humiliating second, that I did not actually have an answer ready

“In the company,” I said finally. “As a partner. A stake in what WEG is building going forward.”

Julian leaned back in his chair, and something about the movement felt more dangerous than if he had

wrong sign

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simply raised his voice.

“Delia,” he said, “do you understand what WEG actually is?”

“An investment firm,” I said. “One of the largest in the country.”

“WEG does not need outside capital,” Julian said. “We are not a company looking for backing, Delia. We are the ones who provide it. Every year, hundreds of companies come to this building hoping we will decide to invest in them, because our capital is the thing that turns a promising idea into an empire. We are not short of money. We have never once been short of money. The entire premise of what you are asking me sits so far outside how this company functions that I am struggling to understand what Vesper Group actually believed they were offering.”

Heat crawled up my neck, sharp and humiliating.

“I was simply delivering the request,” I said. “I did not draft the proposal.”

“Then whoever drafted it should have understood the basic function of this company before sending you here to represent it,” Julian said. “You have walked into my office and offered WEG something it has no use for, structured as though we were the smaller, hungrier party in this conversation rather than the one holding all the leverage. Do you understand how that sounds, Delia? An unproven company, run by people who will not even attach their names to it publicly, offering to invest in one of the most established firms in this country, as though we were the ones in need of rescue.”

I did not have an answer for that.

“I am declining,” Julian said, sliding the folder back across the desk toward me, untouched. “Not because of anything personal between us, though I imagine that will be the story you tell yourself on the way out. I am declining because the offer itself makes no sense and because it tells me everything I need to know about how little Vesper Group actually understands about the company they are hoping to attach their name to.”

I picked up the folder, my hands trembling slightly despite my best effort to hold them still.

“That will be all,” Julian said, already turning back to whatever had been on his screen before I walked in, dismissing me with a finality that stung far more than I wanted to admit.

I walked out of his office with my spine straight, the same way I had walked out of Noah’s office days earlier, my face carefully arranged into something that gave nothing away, though inside I felt the full weight of exactly how badly I had just embarrassed myself in front of the one man whose opinion of me 1 had spent years unable to stop caring about.

I did not know how I was going to explain this to Noah.

I only knew that whatever happened next, it was going to be considerably worse than anything Julian Windsor had just said to me across that desk.

I sat in my car in the parking garage beneath WEG headquarters for nearly twenty minutes before I trusted myself enough to drive, replaying the conversation over and over, each time landing on some

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new detail that made the humiliation sharper than the last. In what aspect. Two words, delivered flatly, that had exposed exactly how little i actually understood about the proposal I had carried into that room with such confidence

I had built two years of my life around being close enough to men like Julian Windsor to understand their world, or so I had told myself. I had hosted his dinners, attended his galas, and learned the names of his business partners well enough to make polite conversation at every event I had ever stood beside him at I had believed, somewhere along the way, that proximity had taught me something real about how his world actually functioned.

It had taught me nothing. I understood that now, sitting alone in a parking garage with a rejected proposal folder on the passenger seat beside me.

My phone buzzed, Noah,

I stared at the screen for a long moment before answering, dread already settling into my chest before he had said a single word.

“Well, Noah said when I finally picked up. “How did it go?”

“He declined,” I said, keeping my voice as level as I could manage.

“Declined how,” Noah said. “Politely. Enthusiastically. Tell me exactly what happened, Delia, because your tone is telling me this went considerably worse than a simple no.”

I closed my eyes.

“He asked in what aspect we wanted to invest,” I said. “I did not have a clear answer. He then explained that WEG does not need outside capital and that they are the ones who provide it, not the ones who receive it. He made it very clear how the offer sounded, coming from a company nobody has heard of.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

“You went into that meeting without understanding the offer you were making.” Noah said finally, his voice carrying something I could not immediately identify, not quite anger, something colder and more assessing than that. “You represented this company without a clear answer to the most obvious question anyone in that position would have asked you.”

“Nobody explained the structure of the offer to me before I went,” I said. “I assumed the proposal in the folder had already accounted for that.”

“You should have asked before you walked into that room,” Noah said. “You should have understood exactly what we were offering and why, closely enough to answer a simple follow-up question without hesitating. Instead, you handed Julian Windsor the exact confirmation he needed that this company does not know what it is doing.”

I am not the one who drafted the proposal,” I said, my own frustration finally cracking through the careful composure I had been holding onto since I left Julian’s office

“No” Noah said. “But you are the one who delivered it, and delivery is exactly what I am paying you for. I

d someone in these rooms who understands enough about how this business actually wo cachame this before it reaches someone like Julian Windsor Clearly that is not you

The words landed harder than I wanted them to

will fix this,” I said. Twill find a way to smooth it over before the gala

“See that you do fosh said. “Because right now you have handed WEG a reason to walk into our launch already thinking this company does not know what it is doing. That is not a small mistake, Dellia. That is the kind of mistake that costs contracts”

He ended the call before I could say anything further

I sat there in the quiet of the parking garage for a long time afterward, staring at the rejected folder on the passenger seat, feeling smaller than I had felt in weeks, smaller even than the moment Tessa Sterling had dismantled me across a restaurant table with the entire city apparently watching

Thad walked into Julian’s office believing, foolishly, that I finally had something real to offer, something that might prove my usefulness beyond seating charts and guest lists.

Instead, I had simply handed him one more reason to look at me the way everyone else in this city had started looking at me lately.

Like a woman who had spent two years standing in rooms she never actually understood.

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