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He was mid-laugh when his eyes landed on me. His jaw dropped. The champagne glass in his hand tilted dangerously.
Then he saw Julian.
And the shock turned instantly into rage.
The room went silent enough that you could hear a fork touch a plate.
“Julian?” Mark stammered, stepping forward, ignoring Tiffany standing beside him in a gown that looked like a giant designer marshmallow. “What… what are you doing here? With her?”
Julian didn’t flinch.
He gave Mark that cold CEO smile, the one that had probably ruined careers in boardrooms.
“I believe the invitation included a plus-one, Mark,” Julian said smoothly. “And I couldn’t think of a more beautiful, brilliant woman to escort than Elena.”
Mark looked at me like he was trying to find the broken woman he had left behind.
He found emerald silk, straight spine, and ice.
“Hi, Mark,” I said pleasantly. “The boys wanted to say hello. Say hello to your father, boys.”
Leo and Liam looked up at him.
They didn’t run to him. They didn’t cry. They simply stood there, one on each side of me, holding our hands.
“Hello, Father,” Leo said, exactly as we had practiced.
The humiliation Mark had planned for me began boomeranging back toward him in spectacular fashion.
The reception turned into a sea of whispers.
As we walked toward our table, I could feel the eyes of Mark’s colleagues on me. These were people who had dismissed me for years, people who treated me like an accessory to a rising executive.
Now they were whispering about how that same rising executive looked small beside Julian Vane.
Mark tried to recover. He retreated to the head table with Tiffany, but he couldn’t stop looking at us.
And what he saw was unbearable.
Julian leaning in to laugh at something I said.
Julian helping Leo fold his napkin.
Julian listening to Liam chatter about dinosaurs with more patience than Mark had shown in years.
Julian wasn’t just playing a role.