My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 67

~Katia-

The invitation said charity gala and I believed it right up until the moment I walked through the door and saw my mother standing in the entrance hall of the Kensington ballroom wearing her best diamonds and the expression of a woman who had been planning something for at least two weeks

She had rented the ballroom. That was the first sign. Martha Kensington did not rent ballrooms for charity. She attended charity events at other people’s ballrooms, where she could be seen and photographed and positioned correctly relative to the right people. Hosting meant she controlled the guest list, which meant she controlled who Katia Kensington walked into.

I should have known.

“Darling.” She kissed both my cheeks and squeezed my hands and looked at me with the particular warmth she reserved for moments when she needed something significant. “You look wonderful.”

“Thank you, Mother.”

“And Aiden.” She bent toward him. He submitted to the greeting with the patience of a small diplomat in difficult territory. “Go find your grandfather, sweetheart. He’s near the bar.”

Aiden looked at me. I gave him a small nod. He went, with the unhurried stride of someone who had been deployed but retained the right to report back.

Mother steered me into the room.

It was a proper event with over two hundred guests, a string quartet, tables dressed in white linen, and the charitable cause displayed discreetly on a banner near the entrance where it could be seen without being the point. My mother had done this correctly. She always did the staging correctly. It was the content she struggled with.

The content, tonight, arrived in the form of two men.

The first materialized within four minutes introduced by Mother as Dr. James Okafor, a cardiothoracic surgeon, late thirties, warm smile, the kind of genuine intelligence in his eyes that told me immediately he was too good for whatever Mother was doing with him tonight. He had been pre–briefed. I could tell because he asked about I* Technologies first, before anything personal, which was the move of someone who had been told to lead with professional respect and work backwards.

He was pleasant. He was accomplished. He was completely beside the point.

I gave him twenty minutes of my full attention, which was more than he had earned and more than the situation deserved, and then I excused myself to check on Aiden.

The second arrived while I was at the drinks table. A tech entrepreneur named Marcus Webb, early forties, founder of three companies, two of which I knew and one of which I had considered acquiring eighteen months ago before the valuation became unreasonable. He knew who I was. He had known before Mother introduced us, which meant his interest was at least partly genuine and only partly engineered.

He was also pleasant. Also accomplished. Also entirely beside the point.

They both orbited me through the first half of the evening with the careful persistence of men who had been told that Katia Kensington was worth pursuing and had decided to take that seriously. I was polite to both of them in the way I was polite to everyone evenly, completely, and without a single degree of additional warmth that might suggest a door was open

Martha watched from across the room with the focused attention of a chess player who had placed two pieces and was waiting to see which one found the square.

Neither of them was going to find the square But she didn’t know that yet.

Dad found rue near the window at hall past eight.

Sunch Hop

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He looked older every time I saw him, which was something I tried not to think about too much. The years that had passed since the bathrobe, the years I had spent building and he had spent watching Mama perform and saying nothing, had settled into his face in a specific way. Not hardship exactly. More like the accumulation of small surrenders, each one barely noticeable on its own, all of them together adding up to something that looked a great deal like regret

He stood beside me, and we looked at the room together for a moment in silence. Aiden was at a table near the far wall with two other children, deeply involved in something on a borrowed tablet. The surgeon and the tech entrepreneur were circulating independently now, having apparently accepted, with grace, that the evening wasn’t going the way it had been scheduled to go.

“She means well,” Dad said.

“I know she does.”

“She worries about you. Alone.”

“I know that too.”

He turned to look at me. “You deserve companionship, Katia. That’s all she’s trying to say. However badly she’s saying it.”

I looked at my father. At the lines around his eyes and the grey at his temples and the way he held his glass with both hands like it needed steadying. I thought about all the things I had never told him. All the things I was still not telling him.

“Dad,” I said. “I’m married.”

He blinked. Just once, a slow, deliberate blink, like the sentence needed to be processed at a different speed than normal sentences. “What?”

“I’m married.”

“Since when?”

“Six years, but you knew this because you and Mother asked me who gave me the ring and who was responsible for my pregnancy.”

Another blink. His mouth opened slightly and then closed again. Around us the gala continued–the quartet, the laughter, the careful choreography of two hundred people performing an evening–and my father stood very still in the middle of it.

“Then where is he?” he said finally.

“Busy.”

“Katia

11

“He’s a very busy man, Dad. That’s all I can tell you right now.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Then his eyes dropped. To my hand. To the left hand specifically, the one I was holding my glass with. He looked at it the way he had perhaps been looking at it without fully seeing it for years, and this time he actually

saw it.

He didn’t say anything for several seconds.

“That ring is real, isn’t it?” He said. It wasn’t a question. He already knew the answer. He had known, I realized, without letting himself know–that particular quality of willful unseeing that people developed when the truth was too large to look at directly.

“Always was,” I said.

He exhaled. A long, slow exhale that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than just the evening. He looked back at the room at Mama, still watching from across the floor, still moving her pieces on the board, still entirely unaware of what she had just missed and something moved across his face that I hadn’t seen there in a very long time.

It looked a great deal like respect.

Sundas Le

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“Okay,” he said quietly.

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