Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 77

Chapter 77

Chapter 77

DENISE

Three photographs arrived below the text.

I looked at them.

:

19

+10 Free Coins

Two were wide-the studio space, artfully lit, the kind of photographs that were as much about the environment as the subject. Beautiful, professional, Andrea’s eye evident in the composition.

The third was tighter. I recognized the woman in the picture, Alyssa Stone.

A woman, from behind. The angle was deliberate. A coat, dark, the cut expensive in the specific way of things that didn’t announce their expense. Her hair was up.

Beside her, half in frame, a child.

A small child, not older than two or three, holding her hand. The child’s face was mostly turned away, just the angle of a cheek, the curve of an ear. Small fingers wrapped around the woman’s. Standing with the particular focused attention of a very young child who had decided that holding on was the current priority.

I looked at the photograph for a long time.

The back of the child’s head. The small hand. Something in the proportion of it, the specific angle of the child’s profile where it caught the light.

I was doing the thing I had decided not to do. I could feel myself doing it-reaching for the thread, reading significance into proportion and angle and the vague similarity of a small face caught at distance. This was how people made things real that were not real, finding patterns in what they needed to find patterns in.

I put the phone face-down on the desk.

I picked it up again.

Looked at the photograph.

Set it down.

1/3

15:35 Fri, Sep 18

Chapter 77

19

+10 Free Coins

The question I had been deciding whether to ask was still there, in the same place I’d left it, with the same unanswered quality it had carried since Seren. He had said he’d be ready when I was. I had told him I was ready and then decided I wasn’t, without telling him that I’d changed my mind, which meant the offer still stood.

I looked at the photograph one more time.

The woman’s back. The child’s hand. The expensive coat and the careful discretion and Andrea’s note-*old money, in the city quietly, wouldn’t give her name.*

I was in a penthouse in the city on a Tuesday afternoon doing the background work of becoming someone who built things, and outside that penthouse there was a life that Kieran had been living before I arrived in it, and the pieces of that life were not mine to demand simply because the arrangement had given me proximity to them.

But they existed.

That was the thing I was sitting with.

They existed, and the photograph existed, and the history between Alyssa and Kieran existed and after what I had been through with Dante, I refused to be in the middle of that.

I needed to think about something else.

I opened the investment documents. Looked at the timeline Celina had built. Read through the first position structure and checked the figures against what I’d put together independently in my own research and found that they matched, which was satisfying in the clean, reliable way that numbers were always satisfying when they agreed with each other.

The study was quiet.

The city outside the window was doing its afternoon thing.

At six-thirty I changed for dinner and called a car, and as I was pulling on my coat I thought about Kieran’s voice saying *I’ll call tonight* in the kitchen that morning.

I thought about the question.

*Who are you in love with?*

He had said: *Ask me again in a month.*

I had waited longer than a month.

He had said he’d be ready when I was.

2/3

15:35 Fri, Sep 18

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify