My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 74

Mother’s New Weapon

~Katia~

Mother called it a networking dinner.

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That should have been my first warning. My mother had never in her life used the word “networking” without an agenda attached to it. She moved through social events the way she moved through everything, with purpose, with positioning, with the particular precision of a woman who had spent forty years learning how to get what she wanted from rooms full of people who thought they were just having dinner.

“It’s a business event,” she told me on the phone. “Very exclusive. The kind of thing that’s good for I*‘s profile. I thought of you immediately.”

“That’s unusually considerate of you, Mother.”

She didn’t speak for a moment, and then she spoke again. “I’m always thinking of you, Katia.”

I looked at Sam across the office. She had been listening with the expression she produced when she was hearing something that required monitoring. She raised one eyebrow. I raised one back.

“When is it?” I asked.

“Friday. The Pembridge. Eight o’clock.” Another pause. “Bring Aiden if you like. There will be other families.”

Bring Aiden. That was new. Mother had never suggested bringing Aiden to anything before; she usually preferred him to exist in the abstract, as a fact about Katia’s life rather than a person who occupied physical space at events. The fact that she was including him now meant either she had softened, which I doubted, or the event was significant enough that she wanted Katia Kensington and her son present in the room together.

I agreed. I hung up. I looked at Sam.

“The Pembridge on Friday,” I said.

Sam was already on her laptop. “The Pembridge is hosting one event on Friday evening.” She looked up. “A private dinner. Hosted by the Windsor family.”

I sat with that for a moment.

“My mother,” I said carefully, “invited me to a Windsor family dinner.”

“It appears so.”

“Does she know it’s a Windsor dinner?”

“That,” Sam said, “is an excellent question.”

The Pembridge at eight o’clock was everything the name suggested: marble floors, candlelight, and the kind of room that had been receiving important people for long enough that it had stopped being impressed by them. The guest list, from what I could see as we arrived, was a careful mixture of business and old money and the kind of people who occupied both categories simultaneously without finding it complicated.

Mother was already there. She had positioned herself near the entrance in a deep blue gown that she had clearly purchased specifically for this occasion, and she was doing the thing she did at events, the slow, deliberate navigation of the room that looked like socializing and was actually reconnaissance.

She saw me, and her face lit up with the specific warmth she reserved for moments when a plan was coming together.

“Darling.” She kissed my cheek. She looked at Aiden. “Doesn’t he look wonderful?”

Aiden said good evening in the polite, measured way he greeted people he was still assessing. I had dressed him in his good

173

Mother’s New Weapon

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blazer, and he had accepted this without complaint, which meant he was in a cooperative mood, which I was grateful for.

“Who organized this event?” asked Mama.

“Oh, various people.” She was already scanning the room. “Come, there are people I want you to meet.”

Various people. That was not an answer. I followed her into the room and let her steer me toward a cluster of guests near the far window, and I was busy navigating the introduction of a property developer, two people from the technology sector, and a woman who apparently ran an infrastructure fund when I heard the room shift.

Not loudly. Just that particular adjustment, the collective recalibration I had started to recognize.

I turned.

Julian Windsor had just walked in. He was across the room forty feet, maybe more, with forty people between us and the full candlelit architecture of the Pembridge doing its work. He was talking to a man I didn’t recognize, his attention directed to the left, and then something made him look up.

He found me immediately. Not after scanning the room. Immediately. Like he had known where I was before he looked.

Three seconds.

We looked at each other across forty feet and forty people, and I did not move and he did not move, and the room continued around us, oblivious, doing what rooms did.

Mama, beside me, said something I didn’t hear.

Then Julian’s attention shifted back to the man he had been talking to, smooth and unhurried, as if the three seconds hadn’t happened. I turned back to the property developer and said something appropriate about infrastructure cycles, and my voice came out completely normal.

I became aware, gradually, of something I hadn’t registered when I walked in. The Windsor branding was subtle but present on the menu cards at the tables, on a small display near the entrance that I hadn’t looked at closely enough. The flowers on the tables were the Windsor estate variety. The room had the specific quality of something that had been organized by people who were very good at organizing things.

I looked at Mama. She was talking to the infrastructure fund woman, animated and pleased with herself, scanning the room at intervals with the satisfied expression of a woman whose plan was unfolding correctly.

She had no idea.

She had brought me to a Windsor dinner thinking it was a business networking event, thinking she was deploying me into a room full of useful connections, thinking she was being clever. She didn’t know that Julian was here because this was his family’s event. She didn’t know that Grandma Celeste had apparently specifically requested my presence. I had only understood that in the last thirty seconds, putting together the menu cards and the flowers and the way the room was arranged.

She had accidentally put me at the Windsor table. She thought she was playing chess.

She had no idea what board she was on.

Aiden tugged my hand. “Mum,” he said quietly, close to my side, “that man keeps looking at you.”

“Which man?”

He pointed with the directness of a child who had not yet learned that pointing was impolite, across the room toward Julian, who was now in a different conversation but whose attention, I understood from long observation, was never entirely where it appeared to be.

“He’s a business associate,” I said.

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