Chapter 307

[ 1,130 words ]

Julian’s POV

I woke before she did, the way I always woke before she did, and lay there for a long time looking at the ceiling instead of at her.

I had fucked up yesterday.

I knew exactly what I had done and exactly why I had done it, and neither piece of that knowledge made the act itself any less wrong. She was my wife. I had known it for months, carried that knowledge through every meeting and every dinner and every night I spent in her bed without telling her the one thing that would have explained all of it.

She did not know. She had no idea that the man lying beside her in this villa had a marriage certificate with her name on it locked away in a private vault in Manhattan, a ring he had been carrying since before she knew what his face looked like in daylight.

She only knew Jules as a name from seven years ago, a shape, an absence.

So when I found out she was sitting in Jude Wolfe’s suite, telling him she wanted to give him a chance, something in me had simply stopped operating on reason. I had not walked into that hotel room thinking clearly. I had not weighed the consequences of inventing a trip to the Maldives or considered what it would cost her, professionally or personally, to be seen leaving with me in front of the man the world believed was her husband.

I had wanted her away from anything that could make her think of him, away from anywhere his name could reach her, and I had taken that decision without asking her a single thing about what she wanted.

I had been wrong to do it.

I lay there in the gold light coming through the open frame above the bed and admitted that to myself plainly, without the excuses I had been offering myself since the jet. I hated what I had done. I hated more than that the silence she had given me at dinner, the careful way she had avoided looking at me through every course, because I had spent 2 years learning the weight of Katia Kensington’s silence, and I knew exactly how much it cost her to hold it.

I hated not seeing her smile.

I hated, more than almost anything else in my life, the sound of her voice withdrawn from me. I had built an empire out of being unaffected by most things. I was not unaffected by that.

I got up quietly and walked out to the deck while she was still asleep.

When she woke an hour later and came outside, she found the table set differently than the night before. No staff hovering, no formal arrangement. Just a simple breakfast laid out by my own hand, the fruit cut the way I had seen her eat it the first morning I ever watched her closely enough to notice such things, and beside her plate, a single white orchid I had walked the length of the island to find growing wild near the water.

She looked at the orchid for a long moment before she looked at me.

“I am sorry,” I said.

She did not sit down immediately.

“For yesterday,” I said. “For walking into that suite and deciding what was going to happen to you without asking you a single question about it. I was wrong. I have been many things in my life that I am not proud of, but I have never wanted to be the kind of man who moves people around like pieces on a board, and that is exactly what I did to you p>

She studied my face the way she studied contracts, looking for the place where the language did not match the intent.

“I hate it when you are not speaking to me,” I said. “I have noticed that about myself only recently, and I do not enjoy the discovery, because it means you have more power over my composure than anyone has had in a very long time. It kills me not to hear your voice directed at me, even when what you are saying is something I do not want to hear p>

She sat down slowly.

“You cannot keep doing this,” she said. “Taking decisions for me. Deciding what is best for me without asking p>

“I know,” I said.

“Say it like you mean it p>

“I mean it,” I said. “I will ask you next time. I will ask you every time, even when asking feels unbearable, even when I already know what my own answer would be if our positions were reversed p>

She looked at the orchid again.

We spent the morning on the water, taking out one of the small boats moored at the edge of the island, no destination in mind beyond simply being away from the villa and its silences. I taught her to handle the wheel through a stretch of open water where nothing could be damaged by her inexperience, and for the first time since the jet I heard her laugh, sharp and surprised, when she misjudged a turn and the boat rocked harder than she expected.

It was a small sound. It undid something in my chest that had been wound tight since the moment Sam told me what Jude had done to her in that office.

By afternoon we were back at the villa, sitting at the edge of the infinity pool with our feet in the water, the lagoon stretching out gold and endless in front of us.

“I forgive you,” she said quietly, looking at the horizon rather than at me. “For yesterday, I do not forgive easily, and I want you to understand that this is not a small thing p>

“I understand,” I said.

“And I am sorry too,” she said. “For what I said on the jet. I meant it when I said it. I am not certain I mean all of it anymore p>

I turned to look at her.

She turned to look at me.

I reached up and cupped her face the way I had not earned the right to do the night before, and this time she leaned into it instead of away.

I kissed her slowly, deeply, with none of the violence that had defined the night on the jet, just the quiet, patient certainty of a man who had finally remembered that the woman in front of him deserved to be asked rather than taken. She kissed me back the same way, her hand coming up to rest against my chest, and for a long moment neither of us thought about Jude or Delia or the dinner waiting for us when we returned to the city.

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