Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 79

Chapter 79

DENISE

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A woman who was in the city quietly, who declined to give her name, who tipped generously and had the particular posture of someone who had money old enough to have stopped requiring demonstration.

Kieran had entered into a contract marriage with a woman who had needed an exit from her own situation.

I ran the arithmetic a second time with the deliberate, honest attention I gave to things I needed to understand correctly rather than the way I needed them to be.

The result was the same.

I lay down on the bed without pulling the covers back, which was not particularly comfortable and also suited me, because comfortable was not what the next hour of my brain was going to be regardless of what I did with my body.

He had told me, at Seren, that the arrangement was a contract between two people with things the other needed. He had been honest about his reasons. He had not told me there was no one else, because I hadn’t asked, because the arrangement as constructed hadn’t required that of either of us.

This was all true. I had known it at Seren and I had known it at the Grand Aldric and I had known it every morning I’d come down to a kitchen where someone had already made coffee and eggs, and knowing it had not stopped me from coming down to the kitchen.

The terms were clear.

I was not owed his history. I was not owed the content of his calls at two in the morning or the name he used for a child who may or may not have been his or the specific shape of a life that had been fully formed before I arrived in it. I had signed a document that outlined what I was owed and what I was providing and neither of those columns contained anything about late- night phone calls or children named Eli or the way I had felt when he’d said *I research things I care about getting right* in a venue ceremony room and looked at me with the grey eyes that had stopped being startling somewhere around week three.

The arrangement was the arrangement.

I believed this approximately sixty percent of the way through myself.

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15:36 Fri, Sep 18

Chapter 79

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The remaining forty percent was awake and unhelpful in the dark, doing the thing it did when I tried to apply logic to something that had stopped being entirely logical without my full authorization.

I had not authorized this.

That was the specific, slightly absurd thing I kept returning to. I had entered this with clear eyes and documented terms and the firm intention to use it for exactly what it was and nothing more. I had looked at Kieran Nightshade across a restaurant table in Seren and thought: useful. Strategic. Safe, in the way of something that didn’t require you to hand anything over.

Somewhere between Seren and this bedroom at two in the morning, something had shifted without my permission and I had not noticed it shifting because it had done so in the small, unremarkable increments of daily proximity-the coffee already made, the eggs without asking, the car twelve minutes away before I’d sent the location, the dress box left where I’d find it in the morning, the way he said *don’t give him that* in a venue on the day Dante had tried to burn the ground between us and he had held still because I’d asked him to.

I pressed my palms flat against the bed.

He had a life. He had a woman in that life who called at two in the morning and about whom he said *of course I want to see him*, and the him in that sentence had a name that was two syllables and could belong to a child who stood in a photographer’s studio holding someone’s hand.

And I was in the guest room.

The guest room.

This was the fact I kept arriving at-the thing that was simple and plain and should have been more grounding than it was. I was in the guest room of his penthouse. I had been in the guest room for weeks. We did not share a bed together, despite being engaged and it was practical, in the penthouse, we were not performing for Kieran as parents, neither was I performing for Dante, the guest room was mine to live in, and be comfortable without having to think about modesty all the time or if this was appropriate considering the nature of the engagement we had,

The guest room with its good mattress and its thoughtful appointments and its complete, clear communication that I was a guest, which was exactly what the arrangement had specified and exactly what I had agreed to and which had been entirely adequate until approximately the moment it stopped feeling adequate,

I was not going to be this person.

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15:36 Fri, Sep 18

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