Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 86

Chapter 86

KIERAN

:

RG 19

+10 Free Coins

The city moved past the windows in the flat, grey way it moved on afternoons that hadn’t decided what they wanted to be.

I had the Kellerman documents open on my phone-the revised terms that Marcus Webb had sent through this morning, which I had been intending to review before the meeting and had not yet reviewed because the morning had produced three other things that needed attention first. I was reading them now, in the car, with the particular focused efficiency of someone using transit time rather than letting it pass.

Twenty minutes to the meeting location.

The Kellerman situation was resolvable. It had always been resolvable-the pause had been a signal rather than a withdrawal, the kind of thing that happened when a party wanted better terms and chose atmospheric pressure over direct negotiation. I understood the technique because I used it myself, and I had been allowing the pressure to build for two weeks with the patience of someone who knew that the longer Kellerman waited, the more the waiting cost them relative to what they were asking for.

Today’s meeting was the resolution.

I put the document away and looked at the city.

I was thinking about the cheek.

This was not useful and I was aware it was not useful, and the awareness did nothing to redirect the thinking, which was its own information about where I currently was relative to where I had planned to be when the arrangement had been constructed.

It had been a natural thing. That was the specific quality of it that I kept returning to-not decided, not deliberate, not the result of any particular intention. She had been standing in the entrance hall with her coat and her bag and the focused quality of someone whose afternoon had organized itself, and I had said what I’d needed to say about the meeting, and then I had turned back and it had been natural in the way of things that had been building toward natural for long enough that when they arrived they felt inevitable rather than new.

She had not moved away.

This was the fact I was keeping.

1/4

15:37 Fri, Sep 18

Chapter 86

A

19

+10 Free Coins

She had not moved away, and she had not performed a response to it, and when I had looked at her in the half-second before I turned to go, her face had been doing the thing it did when something had arrived that she was deciding how to hold.

She was deciding how to hold it.

That was enough, for now. That was more than I had budgeted for when I had agreed to this arrangement four months ago with the particular clarity of someone who believed he knew exactly what he was constructing.

I looked at the city and did not examine what I had actually constructed.

My phone rang.

Alyssa’s number.

I picked up on the second ring.

“I’m sorry.” Her voice had the particular quality it had when she was managing several things simultaneously-quick, slightly compressed, the warmth in it real but running underneath something else. “I have to cancel.”

“What’s happened?”

“Eli.” A brief pause, the kind that existed when someone was deciding how much to say and settling on the direct version. “He’s been sick since this morning-I thought it was something he ate, he had the lunch yesterday and something about it wasn’t right, but it didn’t improve and this afternoon he-” She stopped. “I’m at the hospital. They’ve taken him in.”

“Which hospital.”

“The Sainte-Claire. It’s close to the apartment.” Her voice had shifted-the management quality dropping out of it into something more unguarded. “The doctor said something about his appendix. They’ve taken him to theatre.”

Theatre.

I looked at the window.

Eli was two years and eight months old. He had a specific way of holding on to things-I had observed this on three visits, the focused grip of a small person who had decided that holding on was the current priority. He liked the particular blue blanket that Alyssa’s housekeeper washed every Tuesday and that smelled like something specific to him. He said my name with the consonants in the wrong order, which produced a version of it that was entirely his own.

2/4

15:37 Fri, Sep 18

Chapter 86

เรย

$19

+10 Free Coins

“Do you need me there,” I said.

“Not yet.” Her voice was doing the careful thing it did when she was managing emotion in a public space. “The doctors are-they seem confident. It’s caught early enough, they said. But I don’t-” She stopped again. “I don’t want to be alone with it when there’s news. Whatever the news is.”

“Then I’ll come.”

“Kieran-”

“When they’re out of theatre,” I said. “You call me when they’re out and I’ll be there.”

A silence of several seconds.

“Yes,” she said. “Alright.” And then, quieter: “Thank you.”

I stayed on the line for another thirty seconds-not speaking, just present, which was what the moment required-and then she said she needed to go back inside and I said I’d wait for her call, and we ended it.

I lowered the phone.

The car was still moving toward the meeting location.

“Turn around,” I said.

My driver looked at me in the mirror. “Sir?”

“The meeting. I’ll have Marcus reschedule.” I was already opening my phone to send the message. “Take me back to the company.”

The car turned.

I sent the Kellerman message-brief, professional, the standard language of a rescheduled engagement that communicated no urgency and no apology-and then put the phone on my knee and looked at the city moving past the windows in the other direction now, the afternoon unchanged by the turn.

Eli in a theatre at Sainte-Claire.

Two years and eight months.

I thought about what I had not examined on the plane home from Paris-the thing I had looked at directly in the dark and then folded back into the part of my life that required the

3/4

15:37 Fri, Sep 18

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify