Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 8

Chapter 8

Chapter 8

Chapter 8

DENISE

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The dining room had been laid out for a late breakfast-the kind of spread that appeared effortless because someone had spent a considerable number of hours making it look that way. Pastries, sliced fruit, soft cheeses, a silver pot of coffee, juice in a crystal pitcher. The table was long enough for eight but had been set at one end, intimate by design.

Elena gestured to a seat and I sat, reaching for the bread basket before anyone had quite settled.

I helped myself. Properly, without asking, the way you ate when you were hungry and had decided that being a guest in this house didn’t require performing smallness. I loaded my plate -bread, fruit, a slice of the soft cheese-and poured myself coffee before anyone spoke.

Elena’s eyes tracked me for a moment. Then, lightly: “Denise, are you alright?”

“Hungry,” I said. I looked at Dante, who was pulling out Elena’s chair across the table. “Someone came to pick me up before I’d had the chance to eat breakfast. Very efficient. Very thorough.”

Elena looked at Dante. “You didn’t let her eat first?”

Dante’s expression remained smooth. “I wanted to make sure we weren’t late starting.”

“I didn’t realize I was the kind of person who needed to be collected personally,” I continued, spreading butter on my bread with the focus of someone discussing the weather. “I would’ve come on my own. It’s not like I have any personal reason to say no to an order from my employer.” I picked up my bread and looked at Elena with a pleasant expression. “I work for Alpha Blackwood. When he says to be somewhere, I’m there. Simple professional obligation.”

The silence that followed was the particular kind that had shape to it.

Elena smiled, careful and unreadable. Lyra, who had taken the seat at the far end of the table, was watching me with narrowed eyes.

Dante picked up his coffee cup and said nothing.

Good. I ate my breakfast.

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10:36 Wed, Sep 16

Chapter 8

46

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After the plates were cleared, Elena led us into the sitting room that had been converted, temporarily, into what I could only describe as a wedding war room. Swatches of fabric pinned to a corkboard. Photographs torn from magazines. A laptop open to a florist’s website. Binders of venue photographs. Two mood boards propped against the sofa, labeled in marker: *Ceremony* and *Reception.*

Elena’s college friends were already there-four of them, arranged on the sofas with tablets and portfolios and the easy intimacy of women who had known each other for years. I recognized two of them immediately.

I kept my face perfectly neutral.

Sable Park and Mina Cho. I’d known them at the academy, which was to say I’d known them the way you knew the people who made your life difficult in a structured, daily way. They hadn’t been the ones who locked me in the crate. That had been Lyra’s project. But they’d been present, and present counted.

Sable looked up when I entered and something crossed her face-recognition, then a rapid calculation-before she smiled. “Oh, Denise. I didn’t know you’d be helping today.”

“Elena asked me,” I said.

“How fun.” The smile stayed. The eyes

didn’t change.

I sat down on the edge of the armchair nearest the mood boards and folded my hands in my lap. Dante settled beside Elena on the main sofa, his arm resting along the back behind her shoulders, the posture of a man who was exactly where he was supposed to be. Lyra arranged herself near the window, one leg crossed over the other, watching me with the patient expression of someone waiting for me to make a mistake.

Elena opened a binder. “Okay, so I wanted some outside perspective today because I’ve been staring at these options for so long everything is starting to look the same to me.”

Mina laughed. “That’s what we’re here for.”

“Denise especially,” Elena added, glancing at me. “You have such a good eye for detail. I noticed at the office-everything you organize is always so clean and considered.”

I smiled. “Thank you.”

“So.” Elena pulled out a laminated page of ring photographs. “Let’s start here. I’ve narrowed it down to three settings, but I genuinely can’t decide.”

She spread them on the coffee table, and everyone leaned in. The three rings were each extraordinary in their own way-a cushion-cut solitaire in a pavé band, a vintage-style setting

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10:36 Wed, Sep 16

Chapter 8

N46

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with a halo of smaller stones, and a clean emerald-cut in a plain gold band, modern and architectural.

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