Chapter 314

[ 1,120 words ]

Katia’s POV

I came back from the Maldives on Saturday morning with the dinner only hours away and the strange, unsteady feeling of someone returning from a different version of her own life back into the one everyone else still expected her to occupy.

Jude was waiting at my apartment when I arrived, which I had not asked him to do, though I supposed by now I should have stopped being surprised when he found ways into spaces I had not explicitly invited him into.

He looked composed. The jaw had finished healing into something close to normal, the bruising long gone, the wire mesh removed weeks ago. He looked, if anything, like a man who had spent the last several days thinking carefully about his next move rather than reacting to anything in front of him.

“You look rested,” he said when I walked through the door.

“It was a work trip,” I said, setting my bag down on the counter.

“Was it?” he asked.

I looked at him.

“What is the London extension, Katia?” he asked. His tone was light, almost casual, the kind of question a man asked when he wanted you to believe he was simply making conversation rather than pulling carefully at a thread. “Windsor mentioned it the day he came to my suite. He said you would brief me on it. You never have p>

“It is a business matter,” I said.

“Whereabouts in London?” he said. “I know the city reasonably well. I might be able to offer something useful if I understood the scope of it p>

I looked at him for a long moment, weighing exactly how much of this conversation I wanted to have standing in my own kitchen on the morning of a family dinner I was already dreading.

“I would rather we not discuss business at home,” I said. “We have a dinner tonight where my entire family is going to be watching the two of us very closely, deciding whether this marriage is something they should take seriously. I think our time would be better spent focusing on getting to know each other rather than London logistics that have nothing to do with either of us as people p>

Jude studied my face for a moment, the way he always studied things he could not immediately solve.

“Fair enough,” he said finally.

I did not entirely believe him, but I did not have the time this morning to find out what he actually believed. I picked my bag back up and told him I needed to stop by the office before the dinner, and he let me go without further questions, which felt less like genuine acceptance and more like a man deciding to wait for a better moment to ask again.

Sam was already at her desk when I arrived, two coffees in front of her, one clearly intended for me.

“You look like you have been somewhere with better weather than New York,” she said, handing me the cup.

“I was,” I said.

“And Windsor was there too, I assume, since he conveniently disappeared from the city at the exact same time you did p>

I did not answer that directly, which was answer enough for Sam, who had known me long enough to read silence as fluently as speech.

“Katia,” she said, her voice dropping out of the easy, teasing register it had carried a moment earlier. “I need to say something, and I need you to actually hear it rather than deciding in advance that you already know what I am going to say p>

I sat down across from her.

“Go ahead,” I said.

“You are playing a dangerous game,” she said. “Sleeping with Julian Windsor while your husband, a man who hit you hard enough to put you on the floor of your own office three weeks ago, is living back in your orbit and trying very hard to convince everyone he has changed. What happens if he snaps again? What happens if he walks in on something he should not see, the way Delia almost did at that dinner table, and decides this time he is not going to apologize afterward p>

“He is a changed man,” I said. “He wants to get to know his family. He came to my office and apologized on his knees, Sam. People can change p>

“He is a changed man for now,” Sam said. “I am not arguing that the apology was not real, or that the flowers were not real, or that the tears were not real. I believe all of it was real in the moment he gave it to you. But a man like Jude Wolfe does not become a fundamentally different person because one bad afternoon humbled him. He is a ticking bomb, Katia. The fuse is just longer right now than it was three weeks ago. That does not mean the bomb stopped being a bomb p>

I looked at my coffee.

I did not have a good answer for that, because somewhere underneath the version of events I had been telling myself since Jude walked into my office with white roses, I suspected she was right, and I did not want to sit with that suspicion this morning.

“Can we talk about something else?” I said.

Sam studied me for a moment, decided I had heard enough of what she needed to say, and let it go with the ease of someone who knew when pushing further would only close a door rather than open one.

“Fine,” she said. “How is the forbidden fruit p>

I almost laughed.

“That is your business, not mine,” I said. “How is Zane p>

Sam’s mouth curved into something between amusement and reluctance.

“The forbidden fruit wants us to be official,” she said. “He brought it up again last week. Dinner reservations under his own name this time instead of a private table somewhere discreet. A real date, apparently, with a beginning and an end and people who might actually see us together p>

“And what did you tell him p>

“I told him I do not do official,” Sam said, taking a long sip of her coffee, her expression entirely unbothered. “Official comes with expectations. Official comes with everyone having opinions about a thing that works perfectly well as long as nobody puts a label on it p>

“That sounds like a very convenient philosophy,” I said.

“It is,” Sam agreed. “I invented it specifically for this purpose p>

I laughed, the first real laugh I had managed since stepping off the plane, and for a moment the dinner waiting for me that evening, with Jude and Julian and my entire family in the same room, felt slightly further away than it actually was.

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