Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 73

Chapter 73

Chapter 73

KIERAN

The venue was the third on the shortlist.

The first two had been ruled out within twenty minutes each-the first because the indoor garden my mother had recommended turned out to be smaller than the photographs suggested, the second because Denise had walked through the ceremony space and said nothing for thirty seconds and I had understood from the quality of the silence that it wasn’t right.

I had not asked her to explain. I had thanked the coordinator and moved us to the car.

She had looked at me when we got in with the slight expression of someone waiting to be questioned.

“You didn’t like it,” I said.

“The ceiling was too low,” she said. “It would have felt compressed.”

“Then we go to the third one.”

She had settled back in the seat with the particular ease of someone who had expected pushback and hadn’t received it, and we’d driven to the third venue with the comfortable quiet that had become the natural texture of us in cars together.

The third venue was a converted estate house on the northern edge of the city-high ceilings, good light, with a ceremony room that opened through full-length glass doors onto a garden that worked in any season. The coordinator met us at the entrance and walked us through with the practiced warmth of someone who had done this hundreds of times and still meant it.

I watched Denise move through the spaces.

This was something I had noticed in myself over the past weeks-the particular attention I paid to how she moved through things, the way her face changed when something landed correctly versus when she was managing a polite response. She was good at polite responses, thorough enough that most people couldn’t distinguish them from genuine ones.

I had learned the difference.

In the ceremony room she stopped in the middle of the floor and looked up at the ceiling and then at the doors and then at the garden beyond them, and her face did something that wasn’t the polite version.

“This is right,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

She looked at me. “You knew before I said it.”

“I was watching your face.”

She held my gaze for a moment with the expression she had when she was deciding how to receive something. Then she looked back at the room.

“The garden works for winter,” she said. “The glass doors mean you have the view without the cold.”

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Chapter 73

The Coordinator mentioned heating elements in the flooring.” I said. “If we want the doors open.”

“That’s good.” She walked toward the windows. “The light in here in the afternoon”

“It faces west,” I said. “Late ceremony would catch it directly.”

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She turned to look at me with the slight smile that came when something surprised her. “You researched the orientation.”

“I research things I care about getting right,” I said.

The smile held for a moment longer than usual.

We had been like this since Paris-something had shifted in the texture of the arrangement, warmed and looserred in a way that neither of us had named and both of us had noticed. I had come home with the dress box and left it where she’d find it in the morning and gone to my room, and in the morning I had heard her come out of the guest room and then a long silence and then nothing, and at breakfast she had looked at me across the kitchen counter with an expression I had kept in the part of my mind I wasn’t examining.

She hadn’t said anything about the dress.

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