My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 97

The Windsor Invitation

~Julian-

She was there at seven.

+25 Bonus

I had not been certain she would be. Not because she had said no – she hadn’t said anything, which with Katia was its own kind of answer – but because the night before had been what it had been, and mornings had a way of clarifying things that evenings made complicated. I had been standing in the hotel lobby at six fifty–five with two traditional kanduras arranged by the WEG concierge and the specific controlled patience of a man who had learnt to want things without showing it and was finding that skill increasingly inadequate.

She walked out of the elevator at seven exactly.

She didn’t bring Sam. She had come alone, which meant she had decided something before she got dressed this morning, and she had decided it without consulting anyone, which was the Katia method; internal, final, and not open for renegotiation once made.

She looked at the lobby, then at me. At the garment bag I was holding.

“You actually arranged traditional attire,” she said.

“I said I would.”

“I thought it was a figure of speech.”

“I don’t speak in figures of speech.”

She looked at the garment bag for a moment. Then she took it from my hand without further comment and went back to the

elevator. She returned eleven minutes later.

The abaya was deep navy — I had asked the concierge for something appropriate, and he had, apparently, understood the assignment. It was silk, floor–length, with delicate gold embroidery at the cuffs and collar. It covered everything and revealed nothing and made her look, in a way I had not anticipated, like someone who belonged to a world older and more permanent than the one we usually occupied together.

I was wearing a white kandura, the traditional Emirati robe that the WEG team wore for cultural events. I had worn it before. It

had never felt particularly significant.

Today it felt like something else.

-1

She looked at me for a moment. Something moved across her face there and gone, the specific quality of an expression she

had decided not to finish.

“The car is outside,” I said.

We went to the car.

Old Dubai was forty minutes from the hotel and a different world entirely.

The new Dubai – the Dubai of the Burj Al Arab and the Palm and the glass towers – was what the city showed to the world. Old Dubai was what it was before it decided to be extraordinary: the creek, the souks, and the narrow streets of Deira that had been trading since before the towers existed and would be trading long after. The abra boats crossing the creek. The smell of the spice market carrying over the water.

I watched Katia in the Spice Souk.

She moved through it the way she moved through everything – with complete, unhurried attention, stopping where something caught her interest, asking questions of the vendors in a mix of English and the three words of Arabic she had apparently acquired at some point without mentioning it. Saffron, cardamom, frankincense – she held things, shelled them, put them back or didn’t. She was not performing interestingly. She was actually interested, which was the thing about Katia that I had

1/4

The Windeer trivitation

+25 Bonus

catalogued and kept returning to: she was never anywhere she wasn’t fully present.

One of the vendors offered her a small glass of tea. She accepted it. She asked him something. He answered at length. She

listened.

I stood three feet away and watched and thought about the terrace last night and about the way the navy abaya moved when she walked and about the specific impossible fact that this woman – this precise, extraordinary, complicated woman – had been in my life for months, and I still felt like I was only seeing the edges of her:

“You’re staring,” she said, without turning around.

“I’m observing,” I said.

“There’s a difference?”

“Observing is professional.”

She turned. Those dark eyes, steady and direct. “And what are you observing professionally?”

“The way you listen,” I said. “Most people wait for the translation. You listen to the original.”

Something shifted in her expression. Small. Careful. The thing she did when something had landed and she was deciding what

to do with it.

She turned back to the vendor and said something that made him laugh.

The Gold Souk was three minutes from the Spice Souk on foot – the covered arcade of it, the specific concentrated glitter of more gold in one place than seemed reasonable, and the vendors calling from their stalls with the practised ease of people who had been doing this for generations and had no particular anxiety about whether you bought anything.

Katia moved through it differently than the Spice Souk. More carefully. Her eyes taking inventory in the specific way they moved when she was doing something other than just looking.

She stopped at one stall. A necklace, old work, not the modern commercial pieces that dominated the souk. The vendor produced it with the care of someone who knew what he had

I watched her look at it.

“It’s Yemeni,” the vendor said. “Very old. The work-” he indicated the filigree with a careful finger, “this style, you don’t find

it anymore.”

She held it. She turned it. She put it back with a care that said she had understood exactly what it was and respected it.

She moved on.

r

I bought it and I did not tell her.

The abra was a small wooden boat – the traditional water taxi that had been crossing Dubai Creek since before the city existed

in any form that would be recognisable today. Six dirhams. The boatman didn’t look at either of us. He looked at the creek, which was his job, and managed the small engine with the practised ease of someone for whom this crossing was simply a fact

of his day.

The creek was wide and brown and busy – cargo dhows, other abras, and the specific working waterway energy of a place that had never stopped functioning regardless of what the city around it became.

Katia sat at the prow. I sat beside her. The abra was narrow enough that our knees were almost touching, the navy abaya and the white kandura side by side in a wooden boat on an ancient creek in a city that was simultaneously a thousand years old and fifty years new.

She was looking at the water.

214

The Windsomvitatio

+25 Bonus

“Why did you bring me here?” she said.

“WEG cultural hospitality programme,” I said, but that’s a lie, I wanted time alone with her, withthe woman who suck my cock like nothing matters.

She looked at me sideways. “Julian.”

“Katia.”

“No team,” she said. “No Zane. No Sam. No regional directors.” She looked at the water again. “Just you.”

I said nothing for a moment. The boat moved across the creek. The boatman didn’t look at us.

“I wanted to show you something real,” I said finally. “Dubai gets performed a lot. The towers, the hotels, the scale of it.” I looked at the water. “This has been here longer than any of that. It’ll be here after.” I looked at her and then went on. “I thought you’d appreciate the distinction.”

She was quiet for a moment.

“I do,” she said.

The abra reached the far bank. We disembarked. The boatman took his six dirhams and pushed off without ceremony and went back to the business of crossing.

We stood on the Bur Dubai side of the creek in the morning sun, the traditional district around us, the old wind tower houses

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify