Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 62

Chapter 62

Chapter 62

DENISE

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“It’s real,” I said.

She stared at me for a moment.

“Denise,” she said.

“I know.”

“Kieran Nightshade.”

“I know.”

“That man is-” She stopped, apparently deciding that whatever she’d been about to say required more precision. “He came to speak at a council function in Paris last year. The whole room restructured itself when he walked in. And you’re-” She gestured at me. “When did this happen? How did this happen?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “A recent one.”

She accepted this with the easy faith of someone who trusted that the long story would be available eventually and didn’t need it all right now. This was one of Andrea’s best qualities-she was curious without being extractive.

“You look happy,” she said, and then reconsidered. “Not happy exactly. Settled. Like someone who’s figured out where the floor is.”

‘Something like that,” I said.

She looked at me over her cup with the particular attention of someone who had known you before you’d learned to manage yourself. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“A lot,” I said. “The same amount everyone doesn’t tell anyone.”

She accepted this too.

“I’m coming to the wedding,” she said. “I want that stated clearly now so there are no scheduling conflicts. I will move things.”

“There’s no date yet.”

“I will move things retroactively once the date is set,” she said. “Figure it out however you need to.”

I laughed, and it was the easy kind-the kind that came from a history with someone rather than from any particular effort.

We talked for a while about smaller things. Her Paris apartment, which was tiny and beautiful. A project she was working on. Her family, who were all still in the same configuration they’d always been in, which she described with the fond exasperation of someone who had learned to love the consistency of it.

Then she said, with the particular shift of tone of someone moving to something they’ve been holding for a while: “Can I ask about Dante?”

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Chapter 62

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Hooked at her.

“I always thought there was something there,” she said carefully. “In school. I didn’t know the details-I still don’t, if there’s nothing to know-but I thought saw something.” She paused. “Whatever happened, is it resolved? Are you-are you okay about

it?”

I thought about how to answer this.

“It didn’t work out,” I said. “Between me and Dante.”

She nodded slowly. “I’m sorry. I thought-” She paused again. “There was a time in high school. Do you remember when Lyra and her friends were giving you trouble and Dante found out?” She looked at me. “He was furious with Lyra. I saw him, Denise. He was genuimely angry, the kind you can’t perform-and then he pulled back, and acted like nothing happened, and I always wondered.” She wrapped both hands around her cup. “I thought if Elena hadn’t been in the picture-if she hadn’t been the one he’d grown up knowing, the one the families expected-maybe something would have happened differently.”

I was quiet for a moment.

Maybe something would have happened differently.

I sat with the sentence and thought about what was true. Dante had been angry with Lyra in high school. He had been angry again when she’d put me in the hospital at sixteen, angry enough to visit me, angry enough to say he wouldn’t let anyone hurt me again. And then four years later, when she’d poured coffee on my head in a public office and I’d shown up to work the next day with the stain still on my blouse because I only had the one, he had sent fifty thousand dollars and told me to buy something.

The anger had never been the problem.

What he did with it afterward had always been the problem.

“Maybe,” I said. Because maybe was honest. Maybe was the territory of things that had actually existed, even if they hadn’t gone anywhere.

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