Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 68

Chapter 68

KIERAN

The dress was perfect.

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I stood in the atelier on the third floor of a building in the eighth arrondissement and looked at it on the mannequin in the afternoon light, and perfect was the only accurate word for it. Not perfect in the way of things that had been made with technical skill alone–perfect in the way of things that had been made with understanding. The designer, Céleste Moreau, had taken the measurements my mother had sent through and the reference points I’d provided and produced something that was entirely specific to one person.

Céleste was looking at me with the particular expression she used when she’d done something she was satisfied with and was waiting for the other person to catch up.

“Well” she said.

“It’s right,” I said.

“Of course it’s right.” She moved around the mannequin, adjusting something at the hem that appeared, to me, to already be perfect. “The structure here-” she indicated the bodice, “-works because of the way she carries herself. Upright, centered. Most women i make for lean slightly. She doesn’t. That changes everything about where the seaming needs to go.”

I looked at the dress.

She had built it from the measurements and from what I’d described-which had been, I realized as I was describing it, more specific than I’d expected to be. The color, the line, the way I wanted it to move. Céleste had listened and asked two questions and gone to work.

“You hired me for the Grand Aldric piece,” she said, moving to the other side of the mannequin. “And now this.” She looked at me with the direct, amused attention of a woman who had been making clothes for people in significant relationships for thirty years/ and had developed comprehensive pattern recognition. “Whatever woman has you coming back to France twice in a season, she has you very thoroughly.”

“It’s a professional arrangement,” I said.

Céleste looked at me.

“The measurements,” I said. “Can you box it carefully for transport?”

“Kieran.” She said my name with the particular patience of someone who found me mildly exasperating. “I have made wedding dresses for thirty-one years. I have made them for people who were marrying for money, for family alliances, for convenience, for love, for combinations of all of those things.” She gestured at the dress. “I can tell, from what someone asks me to make, which category they are in.” She paused. “This is not a professional arrangement.”

I said nothing.

“This is the kind of thing,” she said, “that people kill for. In the old stories. In the good ones.”

“Box it carefully,” I said. “I have a flight at seven.”

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1:28 pm P P P P

Chapter 68

She smiled-the smile of someone who had made their point and was content to let it sit-and called her assistant.

040

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The package was loaded with more care than it probably required and less than I felt it deserved, and I was in the car by four-thirty with the box secured and Paris moving past the windows in the particular golden-grey way it moved at that hour in this season.

I thought about Alyssa.

I had been in this city for four days and I had not seen her. This was deliberate-not avoidance, not cowardice, but the recognition that seeing her would complicate something that I had already decided didn’t need to be complicated further. What had needed doing was done. The company, the CEO, the specific situation that had prompted the urgent message-all of it resolved through the channels I had access to, efficiently and without requiring her direct involvement.

She knew I’d been here. She would know, through the same network, what had been done and on whose instruction. We had an understanding that had been operating for three years, and the understanding included the particular form of care that looked like not adding to what was already difficult.

I thought about what that meant.

I had cared about Alyssa Stone for three years in the specific, careful way of someone who understood that the caring was real and also that it existed in a context that couldn’t accommodate it fully. She wasn’t ready for what I needed. I wasn’t willing to wait indefinitely for what she wasn’t ready for. The impasse had produced the arrangement with Denise, which had been logical and practical and was becoming something I was finding increasingly difficult to hold at the planned distance.

I looked at the box on the seat across from me.

The designer had said it was the kind of thing people killed for.

pulled out my phone and called.

She answered on the second ring.

‘You’re coming back,” she said, and her voice had the particular quality it had when she was pleased about something and not performing the pleasure-just present in it.

‘Tonight,” I said. “I have something for you.”

“What kind of something?”

“The kind you have to see.”

A pause. “Kieran.”

“Yes?”

“That’s very unsatisfying as an answer.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s why I gave it.”

I heard her exhale-the small, specific sound of someone accepting a situation they’ve decided not to fight. “Fine. When do you land?”

“Late. Don’t wait up.” A pause. “I’ll leave it somewhere you’ll see it in the morning.”

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