Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 69

Chapter 69

KIERAN

0:09

+20 Free Coins

“She’s right that they’re different,” I said. “She has been right about that specific distinction for as long as I can remember. I once told her I couldn’t see the difference and she brought it up at every format dinner for eight months.”

“Eight months?”

“She has an excellent memory and a deep commitment to being correct.” I looked out the window. “Let her win the shade debate.”

“She’ll bring it up anyway.”

“She’ll bring it up less.” I paused. “She’ll still bring it up. Probably in a significant moment five years from now when you’re least expecting it.”

“Like when?”

I thought about this. “She once told my father she’d told him so about something in the middle of a very formal council dinner. The something had occurred eleven years prior. She’d been waiting for the right moment.”

Denise laughed again.

I leaned back in the seat and let the conversation continue-small, unhurried, the kind of talking that didn’t require anything from either of us except presence. She told me about the third shop and the eleven dresses and the neckline situation. I listened and asked the occasional question and outside the car, Paris gave way to the airport approach.

“You said you had something to ask me,” I said, when a natural pause arrived. “Before I left.”

A brief silence.

“It’s not urgent,” she said.

“You said it was important.”

“I said I was ready to ask it,” A pause. “I’m still ready. It can wait until you’re back.”

I thought about pushing. Decided against it.

“When I’m back,” I said.

“When you’re back,” she agreed.

We ended the call somewhere over the tarmac.

On the flight home, I did something I had been avoiding with the particular discipline of someone who knows that the thing they’re avoiding has weight.

I thought about the alpha bond.

1/3

1:28 pm P P P P

Chapter 69

+20 Free Coins

Every wolf carried it-the specific, biological dimension of being what we were, the part that didn’t respond to suppressants entirely, that existed underneath the modern city version of ourselves. I had been on suppressants since I was seventeen, which was standard. Everyone was. The old ways-running in wolf form, the full expression of pack bonds, the particular intimacy of an alpha sharing territory in the complete sense-still existed, still mattered, but they existed now alongside the adapted version of ourselves that lived in penthouses and flew on private planes and ran companies from glass offices on thirty-second floors.

Denise had done it once. I knew this because I knew more about her history than she’d told me directly, because I had been paying attention for a year before I approached her and some of that attention had been thorough.

With Dante.

The thought arrived without drama and I looked at it honestly.

She had shifted with him. That was an intimate act in the way that certain things were intimate regardless of the modern context around them-you didn’t share that with someone without it meaning something without the wolf part of you making a claim that the human part of you might be trying to manage.

I was not going to ask her for that.

Not now, possibly not for a long time. Not because I didn’t want to-I was going to be honest with myself in this plane at forty thousand feet since I was apparently not doing it anywhere else-but because asking would be applying a pressure that the arrangement hadn’t included and that she hadn’t signed up for.

She was in this for the education, the stability, the name. The chance to build something real. The particular satisfaction of being someone Dante Blackwood couldn’t reach.

All of those were real and valid and I had agreed to provide them.

What I had not agreed to was the other thing–the part that had been developing without my authorization since approximately the second evening at Seren, when she’d looked at me across the table and said she was going to find out who I was in love with and I had felt, for the first time in three years, like someone had asked a question I might actually want to answer.

I could not afford to get attached.

The thought was present and I examined it with the same honesty I’d been applying to everything else in this hour at forty thousand feet.

It was too late for that.

I had been attached since the police station footage..

Possibly before.

I looked at the box across from me–the dress that Céleste had said was the kind of thing people killed for, that I had commissioned by pretending it was practical, that I had carried from Paris with more care than I was willing to examine-and accepted, in the specific quiet of a private plane over the channel, that I had been building something I hadn’t budgeted for.

The question was what Denise was building.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify