My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 94

Dubai Arrival

~Katia~

Dubai hit like a wall.

+25 Bonus

Not just heat, though the heat was immediate and absolute, the kind that pressed against you the moment the aircraft door opened and the kind that had weight and intention rather than just temperature. It was everything simultaneously: the light, white and relentless off every surface; the scale of it, buildings that made Manhattan look modest arranged against a sky that was a specific shade of blue that didn’t exist anywhere else, and underneath all of it, the smell – salt and construction and something expensive that Dubai seemed to exhale permanently, the scent of a city that had decided it was going to be extraordinary and had not yet finished the project.

I had been here twice before. Both times as Catwoman, both times in the dark, both times gone before the city fully woke up.

This was different.

The WEG motorcade was waiting on the tarmac, three black vehicles, precise and unnecessary, the kind of arrival arrangement that existed to establish something rather than achieve anything practical. Julian’s team moved like people who had done this before: luggage transferred, vehicles loaded, doors opened in the correct sequence.

Sam appeared beside me as the cars were arranged. She looked at the lineup. She looked at me.

“You’re in the car directly behind his,” she said.

“I noticed.”

“Just making sure you noticed.”

“Sam.”

“I’m just saying.”

She got into the second car with a perfectly neutral expression. I got in after her. The motorcade pulled away from the tarmac and into the Dubai afternoon, and the city opened around us like something that had been waiting.

The Burj Al Arab rose ahead.

–

I had known we were staying there it had been in the itinerary, the kind of hotel that appeared on WEG itineraries the way other companies‘ itineraries listed conference centres and airport hotels. The building was exactly what it looked like from photographs and also nothing like photographs, because photographs could not account for the specific quality of being next to something that large and that committed to its own statement.

୮

Our suites were confirmed at check–in. Sam received the details with the calm efficiency of someone who had stopped being impressed by hotels three years ago. I received mine and looked at the floor number.

Three floors below Julian’s.

I said nothing. Sam said nothing. We took our key cards and followed the staff to the elevator, and the elevator opened onto a corridor that smelt of something subtle and expensive, and my suite was the kind of room that required a moment of adjustment – not because it was overwhelming but because it was so completely, deliberately beautiful that the eyes needed a second to accept it as a functional space rather than a display.

I set my bags down. I opened the balcony doors.

Dubai spread below and around me in every direction – the coastline curving away to the left, the city rising to the right, the Gulf catching the late afternoon light and throwing it back in fragments. The air was still hot but moving now, the evening beginning to negotiate with the afternoon, the specific quality of a desert city settling into dusk.

I stood on the balcony and breathed it in.