My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 79

Julian Meets Aiden (His Version)

~Julian~

I noticed the boy before I saw Katia

That was the order of it, and I have gone back to that detail more times than I would admit to anyone, the sequence, the fact that my attention went to the child first. Not because he was loud or demanding or doing anything that would have drawn notice in a normal sense. He was doing the opposite. He was moving through the showcase with the focus of someone who had come to learn something and was going about it properly, and that quality of focused stillness in a child that age was unusual enough that it caught the eye before the mind understood why.

I was at the simulator making an adjustment to the display settings when I heard him stop beside me.

I looked up.

Dark curls. Sharp jaw. Seven years old at most, in a small blazer that he had clearly put on deliberately, with the look of someone who had assessed the occasion and dressed accordingly. He was looking at the simulator with focus and interest, like someone evaluating a piece of equipment rather than a toy, and when he looked from the simulator to me, it was with the samne direct, assessing quality–taking me in, filing me, deciding something.

“What does this do?” he said.

I answered him properly. Not the simplified version I would have given a child who wanted to be entertained — this one wouldn’t have accepted it. I explained the circuit, the physics, and the mapping of the controls. He asked two questions that required me to think before answering, which almost nobody managed, and he listened to the answers with the full, still attention of someone who was actually using the information rather than just receiving it.

I told him he could try it, and he climbed in without hesitation.

He took the Silverstone layout like someone who had thought about corners before. Not the flailing, overcorrecting, delighted chaos of a child on a simulator–something more considered. He found the line intuitively on the second attempt and held it with a steadiness that made one of the WEG engineers nearby put his coffee down and watch the screen.

His lap time came up.

“That’s a strong time,” I said.

He looked up at me. “Is it accurate? You said it was four percent off the real thing.”

“It is. But the skill translates.”

He considered this. Then: “You’re good at this. Do you race?”

“I do.”

He nodded slowly. Filed it. “Me too,” he said. “Mum says I’m a natural.”

Something moved through the room, not physically, not anything anyone else would have felt. Just a shift, internal, the sensation of a thought beginning that you aren’t ready to finish.

I looked up.

Katia was across the room. Thirty feet, maybe more, with the event moving around her the way things moved around Katia — she was always slightly separate from the motion, always the still point other things organized themselves around without knowing they were doing it. She was watching me. Or watching us. Or watching the boy and me and the space between us, which was three feet of simulator and something I couldn’t yet name.

Her expression gave me nothing. It was the boardroom face, composed, present, revealing nothing above the level she had decided to reveal. But she was holding her champagne glass in both hands and not drinking from it, and the woman beside her, Sam, I registered, had the look of someone who was maintaining a very careful stillness.

1/3

Julian Mestsiden (His Version)

+25 Bonus

Hooked back at the boy.

The dark curls. The sharp jaw, The head tilt when he was thinking, just slightly teft, the degree of it, the one I had been looking at in mirrors since I was old enough to notice it.

I told myself it was coincidence. Children had similar features. The world was full of dark–haired boys with sharp jaws and a tendency to tilt their heads when they were processing something. It was pattern matching, nothing more, the mind finding shapes in data that weren’t necessarily there.

I told myself that.

“What’s your name?” I said.

“Aiden,” he said. “What’s yours?”

“Julian.”

He looked at me for a moment with those direct, clear eyes, the color of them, the quality of attention in them and then he turned back to the simulator. “Can I go again?”

“Yes,” I said.

He went again. I watched the screen. I watched his hands on the wheel. I watched the way he approached the first corner, the instinct of it, the line he chose without being told, and the quality of fearlessness that was different from recklessness that came from somewhere deeper than just confidence.

Mum says I’m a natural.

I looked up and found Katia still across the room. She had not moved. Our eyes met and held, and this time neither of us looked away immediately for a second longer than professional, a second that had its own weight.

Then I looked back at Aiden.

Then back at Katia.

The thought that had started didn’t finish. It sat at the edge of something, incomplete, with the quality of things that were too large to approach directly and could only be circled, carefully, from a distance.

Something cold and electric moved through me.

I couldn’t name it.

I couldn’t look away from either of them.

୮

Aiden’s second lap time came up, faster than the first. He looked at the number and nodded with the measured satisfaction of someone who had expected improvement and received it.

“Better,” he said.

“Much better,” I said.

He climbed out of the simulator with the contained, purposeful movement he had used to climb in. He looked at me with the directness he had used throughout. “Thank you,” he said, with the formal politeness of a child who had been taught manners and had decided they were worth keeping.

“Anytime,” I said.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify