My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 398

Not My Father

~Julian~

Noah Vesper arrived unannounced in the middle of our family lunch, and for a moment simply stared at him standing in the doorway of the dining room, uncertain whether the man in front of me had come as an extension of his father’s war or something else entirely.

I did not move.

Katia’s hand found mine under the table, a quiet, steadying pressure that kept me seated rather than standing and kept me watching rather than reacting.

“Grandma,” Noah said, crossing the room toward her with a bouquet of white lilies held carefully in both hands. “I heard you

loved these.”

Grandma Celeste rose from her chair, something soft crossing her face as she took the flowers from him, and when he leaned down to kiss her cheek, I understood, watching the ease between them, that this was not the first time these two had spoken.

“Sit,” Grandma Celeste said, gesturing to the empty chair beside her. “You are just in time.”

He sat.

Lunch continued in a silence I expected to feel uncomfortable and somehow did not. Delia, seated further down the table, said nothing sharp, offered no pointed looks, and simply ate quietly with an ease I had rarely seen from her since everything had

come apart in public. Whatever tension I braced for never fully arrived, the meal settling instead into something almost ordinary, five people sharing a table without a single raised voice or barbed comment passing between any of us.

When the plates had been cleared, Noah looked at me.

“Julian,” he said. “Can you spare me a moment?”

“Sure,” I said.

We walked out to the terrace together, each of us carrying a glass of bourbon, the afternoon light stretching long and gold across the lawn below. I braced myself for whatever version of this conversation was coming, an ultimatum, a threat dressed up in politeness, some extension of the war his father had already declared against my family.

“You must be surprised,” Noah said, “why I am showing my face here after what my father did at the gala.”

That was not what I expected him to say.

“I am surprised,” I admitted.

“I just want you to know I am not my father,” Noah said, his voice calm, carrying none of the careful performance I associated with everything Elliot had built. “I want to genuinely get to know my family. I grew up without a mother. My father never showed me much love; he was always too busy building whatever it was he spent his life building. I just want to feel what it is like to have a family that cares about me, and I want to be someone who cares about them in return.”

I studied his face, looking for the calculation I expected to find there, some hidden angle beneath the sincerity.

“So you are not involved in your father’s dealings,” I said.

“What dealings,” Noah said, his confusion sounding entirely genuine.

“Your father is trying to take this family down,” I said. “He targeted my wife. He sent a man to pretend to be her husband, to threaten her, to threaten our son.”

“What?” Noah said, the word landing with real shock. “Julian, I had no idea. The only thing I did when we moved to New York was follow his instructions. I married Delia because he told me to. I secured shares in I* Technologies and WEG, which I knew nothing about beyond the assignment itself, so I sent Delia to handle it, my now–wife, without ever questioning why he wanted

Not My Fath

+15 Bonus

it done or what it was actually for.”

I said nothing, watching him carefully, waiting to see if the shock in his expression would crack into something else.

It did not.

“I just want to have a brother,” Noah said finally, quieter now. “I want to spend time with people my father apparently considered family but never once told me about, not until the gala. I found out you existed at the same moment the rest of the

room did.”

I looked at him for a long moment, weighing everything I had learned about his father over the past several weeks against the man standing in front of me now, and understood, with a certainty I had not expected to feel, that whatever Elliot had built, whatever war he had waged against this family in silence for over a decade, Noah genuinely had no part in it.

I set my glass down and pulled him into a hug.

He returned it, stiff at first, then easing into it the way a man did when he had not been held by family for longer than he wanted to admit.

“Welcome to the family,” I said.

We walked back inside together, and I found myself, for the first time since the gala, believing that whatever came next with Elliot, this thread of the story might actually end somewhere good.

Back at the table, Katia looked up as we returned, her eyes moving between Noah and me with a question she did not voice aloud

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify