Lahat ng Kabanata ng My Accidental Billionaire Husband : Kabanata 141 - Kabanata 150

~Katia~Thursday evenings with Gail were the one thing in my week that didn't require management.No agenda, no strategy, no performance. Just wine and bad television and Aiden asleep in the guest room by eight thirty and Gail on the other end of the sofa with her feet tucked under her and the specific ease of someone who had been your person for long enough that silence between you was never uncomfortable.We were on our third glass when she said it."Can I ask you something weird?"I looked at her. "You're three glasses in. Everything you ask is going to be weird.""This is a particular kind of weird," she said. She was looking at her wine, not at me."Go ahead."She was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that meant she had been sitting on something for a while and had decided tonight was the night and was now second-guessing that decision in real time."Aiden," she said.I kept my face completely still."His jaw," she said. "His hands. The way he laughs." She paused. "The way he

~Julian~It had been seven days since the midnight report.Seven days of looking at the photograph of Victor Hale’s hand on Katia’s skin. I hadn't slept. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw that prick leaning into her space at the restaurant, looking at her like she was something he could just reach out and take. The text she sent me afterward—he had his hands all over me, by the way—had been a provocation. She wanted to see me break. She wanted to see how much I could handle before the mask of the professional Julian Windsor cracked and the man underneath took over.I’d spent the week in a state of controlled homicidal rage. I had walked through boardrooms and handled multimillion-dollar acquisitions, but my mind was always in that restaurant in Tribeca. I was thinking about her thighs. I was thinking about the way she looked at Hale. Most of all, I was thinking about how I was going to remind her exactly who she belonged to.By Monday morning, I was done waiting. I didn't care about

~Delia~I had planned the seating arrangement three days in advance.Katia beside Julian. Me at the opposite end, close enough to watch and far enough to observe without appearing to. Mama and Papa on one side. Grandma Celeste at the head because nobody argued with Grandma Celeste about seating at her own table. Gail was between Katia and Papa because Gail was a buffer, and I needed a buffer between Katia and the rest of the table or the evening would end too quickly.I wanted it to last.The dinner started well enough. The food was extraordinary; it always was at the Windsor estate. The conversation moved through the usual channels. Mama talked about a charity event. Papa asked Julian about the London expansion. Grandma asked Gail about a gallery piece she had mentioned the week before.I watched Katia and Julian.They were careful. That was the thing — they were very careful. They did not look at each other directly. They did not touch. They spoke when spoken to and directed their a

~Julian~I did not sleep.I lay in the dark and thought about the terrace and what Delia had said and what she had not said and the difference between the two. She had said Las Vegas. She had seen the certificate. She had said Jules and Kat.What she had not said was anything that connected either name to a real person.She had said Jules. She did not know Julian raced. She had no way of knowing that Jules was Julian, that Jules was the name he had used on underground circuits for fifteen years, the name that had ended up on a Las Vegas marriage certificate because a drunk twenty-eight-year-old had written the only name he answered to on a circuit. To Delia, Jules was a stranger's name.She had said Kat. She did not know who Kat was. She had an investigator, photographs, and a timeline of Instagram posts — but nothing that put a surname to a one-syllable alias on a six-year-old document. To Delia, Kat was a ghost.I was not much further ahead than Delia on that front. I suspected. I h

~Julian~Katia met me at the door at 10 AM.She had not slept. I could see it, not in her appearance, which was immaculate, but in the quality of her attention. It was sharper than usual. She had the alertness of someone running on adrenaline and the refusal to let an attack go unanswered."The server room is this way," she said.I followed her.We worked for eighteen hours on the first day.My team had sent me with the full WEG security documentation, the four-year-old file on Victor's methodology, the entry patterns we had mapped, and the vulnerabilities he looked for in systems that had scaled quickly. I sat with Sam and Chen and walked them through it layer by layer.Sam was extraordinary. Seeing her work on her own infrastructure was different; she understood every node of IG's architecture. She pushed back on two of my recommendations with better solutions. I told her she was right, and she moved on.Katia was everywhere.She moved between the server room and the operations floo