Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 55

Chapter 55

Chapter 55

DENISE

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The food was good. He hadn’t asked what I wanted and had made something I would have chosen, which was either coincidence or the result of three weeks of paying attention to what I ate and decided to go with it.

I suspected coincidence less.

We ate without talking for most of it, and the silence was the comfortable kind-not loaded, not waiting for something, just two people having breakfast in a kitchen before the day asked things of them.

He didn’t mention the article.

I didn’t mention the article to him, because if he felt this was something that didn’t warrant him talking to me, then it was going to remain in the background.

I decided, somewhere around the second cup of coffee, that not mentioning it was itself a kind of communication, and that the communication was: “I trust you to bring things to me when you’re ready and I’m going to do the same. Whether that was what he intended or whether I was constructing a meaning that suited me was a question I kept in view without resolving it.

He cleared the plates and refilled my coffee and stood on the other side of the counter.

‘Are you busy today?” he asked.

‘Nothing scheduled,” I said. “I have the Voss follow-up to send Elena-” I stopped, briefly, at the particular strangeness of that sentence. “The jeweler’s photographs. I said I’d send them.”

‘That can wait,” he said.

‘It probably can’t, given the circumstances.” I wrapped my hands around the coffee cup. “But I’ll send them this morning and it’ll take twenty minutes to do, it’s not something that would take time, just that and I would be free for the rest of the day.”

He nodded. “After that-if you wanted-I’ll be at the company today. There are things I need to be present for after the Tokyo trip.” He paused. “You could come with me. If you wanted.”

I looked at him over my coffee cup.

The company. The Nightshade Group skyscraper with its thirty-second floor and its elevators and its very committed workforce, a significant portion of which had demonstrated, in my one previous visit, an intense personal investment in their CEO that extended well beyond professional admiration and went straight into how far the employees could get away with sexualizing their CEO and thinking of him with lesser clothes than what was appropriate for a workplace discussion,

“Am I being used as a deterrent to keep the horny women away from you?” I asked.

He had the grace to pause for approximately half a second before answering,

“Half the reason,” he said.

Something unwound slightly in my chest-the tight residue of the morning, the article and Dante’s text and the fury I’d talked myself down from and the general weight of being a person in a complicated situation before eight in the morning. The laugh that

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Chapter 55

came out was genuine and small and surprised me slightly.

“Fifty percent deterrent said. What’s the other fifty?”

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“I’d like you to meet a few people/properly,” he said. “Not at a party, not in a social context. In the actual environment, just to get to know them, on a day to day basis.” He looked at me with the direct grey attention that I had stopped finding startling and started finding grounding. “You’re going to be associated with the Nightshade name publicly. It makes sense for you to know the operation.”

“That’s the practical version,” I said.

“I’m a practical person.”

“You also just admitted to using me as a human shield against your own staff.”

“Half,” he said. “Half shield. The rest is legitimate.”

I looked at him for a moment.

The article was sitting in the back of my mind, not resolved, not dismissed-just present, a thing I was keeping in view the way I kept things that required more information before they could be properly assessed. Kieran had secrets. Dante had said so, which was not a reliable source, but the article had existed and had been pulled quickly and the question I’d asked at Seren-*who are you in love with–remained unanswered.

I was going to keep it in view.

But I was also going to go to his company today, because I was not someone who let unresolved questions stop me from doing the next useful thing, and because the fifty percent that wasn’t about déterrence was actually a reasonable offer and I was interested in the operation.

“I need to send the Voss photographs first,” I said.

“Take your time,” he said, and began washing the breakfast dishes with the same competent efficiency he brought to everything.

The Voss email took thirty minutes rather than twenty because I found, when opened the photographs, that I had genuine opinions about three of the pieces and wrote them out properly rather than attaching without comment.

I sent it and did not think about who was going to read it or in what context.

Then I pulled on my coat, checked my bag, and came back to the kitchen where Kieran was finishing a call.

He saw me and ended it cleanly, the way he ended things-without dragging.

“Ready?” he said.

“Before we go,” I said.

He looked at me.

“The article this morning,” I said. “Your PR team pulled it fast.”

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