All Chapters of My Accidental Billionaire Husband : Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

~Julian~My grandmother's summons arrived the way they always arrived, through her personal assistant, two days in advance, with a single line: Tea on Thursday. Four o'clock. Don't be late.She had been sending variations of that message my entire life. When I was eight, it meant I had done something wrong and needed to account for it. When I was twenty-two and just taken over WEG, it meant she had things to tell me that couldn't be said in a board meeting. Now, at thirty-four, it still meant both of those things simultaneously, and I had stopped trying to figure out which one was dominant until I was already in the room.The Windsor estate in the late afternoon had a particular quality of light—the way it came through the tall windows of the east sitting room and caught the dust in the air and made everything look like it existed slightly outside of time. My grandmother sat in her usual chair by the window with her tea already poured and her hands folded in her lap and the expression

~Julian~The invitation arrived on a Tuesday morning, buried between a legal brief and a quarterly infrastructure report in the stack my assistant placed on my desk at 7 AM. It was printed on heavy cream card with the Dubai Motorsport Authority seal at the top and the kind of formal language that meant someone had decided this mattered enough to send physical mail instead of an email.Windsor Empire Group is cordially invited to attend the Dubai 24 Hour Race as the official VIP sponsor.I read it twice. Then I set it aside and worked through the legal brief and the infrastructure report and a conference call with the Singapore team, and at eleven I picked it up again and read it a third time with my full attention.The Dubai 24-Hour Race. One of the most prestigious endurance events on the underground circuit calendar, not officially sanctioned and never publicly listed, but attended by enough serious money and serious talent that its reputation had outgrown the legal grey area it ope

~Delia~I had been in the West Wing twice before, and both times Julian had been home.This was the third time. He was in Tokyo. Three days, which his assistant had confirmed through the household calendar that Delia Kensington-Windsor was apparently permitted to view but not modify, a distinction that felt like its own kind of message. The estate was quiet in the way it only got when Julian was genuinely gone, not the tight, managed quiet of his presence behind a closed door but the looser, emptier quiet of a house that had stopped holding its breath.I had been holding mine for eight months.I stood outside his study door for a full minute before I opened it.Not because I was afraid of what I would find. I had already decided what I was looking for, and I had already decided I was going to look for it. The minute outside the door was something else, the last moment before knowing something you couldn't unknow, the pause before you stepped off a ledge you had been standing at the ed

~Katia~Mother called it a networking dinner.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 IG'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." Anoth

~Katia~The dinner wound down the way good evenings do, slowly, reluctantly, in stages. Guests collected their coats in ones and twos, exchanging the last conversations of the night with the particular warmth that came from wine and candlelight and the specific kind of room that made people feel like they had spent their evening somewhere that mattered.Aiden had fallen asleep in the side room. He had done it with efficiency, finished his dessert, listened to three more facts he wanted to share with the staff member who had been patiently receiving them, and then simply put his head down on his folded arms and gone. One of the Windsor staff had found a blanket from somewhere. I had looked in on him twice, and both times he was completely, profoundly asleep with the abandon of someone who had decided the evening was complete and was not going to wait for the adults to agree.I was collecting my bag when Gail appeared at my elbow.She had been at the dinner, of course she had; it was he