Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 15

Chapter 15

Chapter 15

DANTE

I reached for my wine glass.

“You seem distracted,” Elena said, not unkindly.

“Work,” I said. “It follows me.”

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She accepted this with the equanimity she brought to most things and turned the conversation to something else-her mother, who was traveling from Silver Creek for the mating ceremony, some logistical question about accommodations. I engaged with appropriate attention, making the right responses, asking the right questions.

My phone stayed silent.

We were forty minutes into dinner-the appetizers cleared, the main course on its city still arranged prettily beyond the glass-when I looked toward the bar.

way, the

Seren’s bar was separated from the main dining room by a partial partition of frosted glass and dark wood, visible but not intrusive, the kind of architectural choice that suggested sophistication without full separation. It was populated tonight with the usual configuration: several men from industries I recognized, a few pairings that suggested either business or discretion, the particular ambient noise of expensive drinking.

I wasn’t looking for anything. I looked the way you looked when you were waiting for a course and your eyes moved without instruction.

And then they stopped.

At the far end of the bar, there was a woman in a dark green dress.

She was seated at an angle that meant I couldn’t see her face-only the line of her profile, the particular way she held herself, the set of her shoulders. Her hair was up, which was different from how she’d worn it this morning, but the shape of her, the way she occupied a stool without shrinking into it—

I set my wine glass down.

The man beside her was leaning in. Not threateningly, from what I could see, but with the particular deliberate closeness of someone who had an objective and was pursuing it with

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10:37 Wed, Sep 16

Chapter 15

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patience. He was well-dressed-suit jacket, no tie, the studied casual of someone who had chosen that combination very carefully. Large. The kind of large that suggested an Alpha, or at least someone who wanted to read that way.

I couldn’t see his face either from this angle.

She said something to him, and he leaned back slightly-not deterred, I thought, just recalibrating-and then she turned her head just enough that the light from the bar caught the line of her jaw and the curve of her cheekbone.

My stomach tightened.

I was looking at this wrong. I was in a restaurant with my fiancée, at a table I had specifically requested for its view and its privacy, and I was looking at a woman at a bar who might or might not be someone I knew. The resemblance was probably incidental. Seren was not a restaurant where Denise would have occasion to be-the membership requirement alone made it inaccessible to most people outside a very specific tier of pack society, and I had never brought her here, had never suggested she come here, had never-

The woman at the bar shifted on her stool, and the green of her dress caught the light, and I recognized it.

It was the dress she’d been wearing this morning when she left the estate.

The man beside her put his hand on the bar, not touching her, but close. Bracketing. She looked at it and then looked at him and said something that I couldn’t lip-read from this distance, and he smiled-and something about the smile, about the angle of his jaw and the particular way he held himself that I could now see more clearly as they turned slightly—

Something moved through me.

I knew that profile.

I didn’t reach for a full thought. I stopped myself before I reached for a full thought, because Elena was saying something on the other side of the table and my hand was resting on the stem of my wine glass and I was in Seren, at the best table, on a dinner I had arranged because my omega assistant had publicly committed me to it with the smooth, efficient, utterly untraceable precision of someone who knew exactly what she was doing.

“Dante?”

Elena’s voice. I turned back to her.

“Sorry.” I picked up my wine. “Work.”

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10:37 Wed, Sep 16

Chapter 15

She laughed softly. “You need to learn to leave it at the door.”

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