Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 70

Chapter 70

Chapter 70

DENISE

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I had lied to him.

Not dramatically-not in the way that required significant planning or produced significant guilt in me, because I had intentionally manipulated someone. No, it was just a small lie of someone who had looked at an honest answer and decided the honest answer was more than the moment required and shouldn’t be spoken carelessly.

His mother had asked about the milk shades. That part was true. But the question I’d been ready to ask, the one I’d told him was no longer urgent-that had nothing to do with ivory versus cream and everything to do with a name I’d decided, over four days of thinking, to leave where it was.

Alyssa Stone.

I had made the decision somewhere in the middle of the second day, sitting with the feeling of someone who has seen the thread and refused to pull it. If Kieran wanted me to know about Alyssa Stone, he would tell me. Dante had brought her up and so had Lyra in order to scare me. But Kieran had pretended she didn’t exist to me and I knew what I walked in. There were contract terms stated clearly, only known to me and Kieran, so I knew whoever he had in his life, he couldn’t attain. That had nothing to do with me. I was his wife on paper, not in his heart and after everything that I had suffered with Dante, this was the perfect choice for me.

He had said he would answer when I was ready and he was ready. I had been ready but decided against it.

I was not going to spend it conducting surveillance on his emotional history.

I had made my decision and was comfortable with it, which was what I told myself while I sat in the penthouse on a Thursday morning with Kieran’s unlimited black card on the coffee table and nothing in particular to do.

The card had been there since the first week.

I had used it twice. Once for the taxi to return his jacket-which, technically, predated the card but had been the reason why he had given it to me to be using. Once for coffee with Andrea, which I had paid for myself and then realized afterward that I could have used the card and hadn’t because the habit of using my own money was stronger than the habit of accessing someone else’s

resources.

I looked at it now.

Unlimited. He had said it when he gave it to me, with the directness of someone issuing information rather than making a gesture. *For whatever you need.” And then he had moved on to the next topic because for him it was administrative rather than significant.

I was not using a card I hadn’t earned.

That was the core of it, and I sat with it long enough to be honest about whether that was principle or pride. It was both, which meant it was real.

What I needed was something to do.

Not shopping. Not more wedding dress appointments-Rosaline had two more scheduled but they were next week and this week needed to produce something more substantive than measuring my tolerance for ivory versus cream. Not the penthouse, which was comfortable and well-appointed and was slowly making me into someone who watched television at eleven in the morning

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1:28 pm P PPP

Chapter 70

and called that a life.

I needed to work.

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The degree first. That had been the original plan–the education that Kieran had agreed to fund, the foundation I’d been building toward since before I understood that building was even an option. I pulled out my laptop and opened the document I’d started two weeks ago, the one with the program research, and looked at it with fresh eyes.

Three universities had part-time programs in business administration that could be completed alongside other commitments. Two of those had online components that made the scheduling manageable. One had a specific concentration in financial management that covered exactly what I wanted-investment structures, fund management, the machinery of building wealth rather than just participating in it.

I had been circling this document for two weeks without committing to it.

I committed now. Opened the application portal for the financial management program and started filling it out with the focused efficiency of someone who had decided that today was the day the circling stopped.

An hour later I had completed the initial application, uploaded the academic records I’d requested three weeks ago when I’d first started considering this, and written a personal statement that was, I thought, honest without being either apologetic or performative. I submitted it before I could revise it into something worse.

Then I looked at the investment document.

This one was more personal. I had been thinking about it since the days when I was redirecting fifty-thousand-dollar credit card payments into resale accounts and orphanage funds, when I had understood that money moved differently depending on whose hands it passed through and what structures sat around it.

I needed structures.

Not complex ones to start-treasury bills, a mutual fund with a decent track record, maybe a REIT once I understood the market well enough to make a decision I was confident in rather than a decision I was hoping was right. The private account at the credit union had enough in it now to start something real, not just sit there as emergency infrastructure.

I needed someone who knew this space.

I picked up my phone.

Andrea answered before the second ring.

“You’re up early for someone who’s living in a luxury penthouse,” she said.

“I’m going insane in the luxury penthouse,” I said. “I need to do something productive.”

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