All Chapters of Owned by the Ice King :He bought my debt. I never expected h: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

The breakfast crowd began to thin around eleven.Guests drifted toward the lawn, toward the beach path, toward the various activities Marcus had arranged to fill the hours before lunch. A group of investors had claimed the shaded seating near the rose garden, their voices carrying across the terrace in the particular cadence of men discussing money. Someone had started a croquet game on the east lawn—Elijah could hear the click of mallets and the occasional burst of laughter.He needed air.Not that the terrace wasn't airy—it was, with the sea breeze and the open sky and the endless blue of the Atlantic. But he needed space from the performance, from the smiling and the listening and the careful remembering of names. He needed a moment to be alone with what had happened that morning. The kiss. The way Alexander had looked at him. The words they'd exchanged on the terrace, quiet and raw and real.He slipped away through the side gate, past the herb garden, toward the roses.The rose ga

The conference room on the forty-second floor was the kind of room designed to make people feel small. Glass on three sides, Manhattan laid out below like evidence, a table long enough to seat the board of a minor nation. Elijah sat in the back row in a dark grey suit that fit him properly now, because three weeks with a stylist on call would do that, and tried to look like he belonged there.He did, roughly. He was getting better at roughly.He'd asked Marcus, offhandedly, why the board presentation required a partner's attendance, and Marcus had said, also offhandedly, that it didn't require it, but that Alexander had put him on the guest list. Elijah had absorbed this information and moved on without examining it, because examining the things Alexander did voluntarily led to a type of thinking he wasn't supposed to be doing.The board was twelve people in the kind of suits that cost money the way Elijah's rent cost money — routinely, without spectacle. They opened their folders. Th

He shouldn't have told him in the car.That was Elijah's first thought afterward, which he recognised was not a useful thought — he'd needed to tell him in the car because the car was where they debriefed, the private capsule between the event and the penthouse where they went back to being what they actually were rather than what they were performing. It was practical. It was the right call.The problem was that in the car was also the six inches of a backseat and no windows to look out of if the conversation required escaping.He explained what Claire Marsh had asked, and what he'd said, and the reading he'd taken of her — features writer, yes, but hunting something specific; the engagement question had been the tell, the way she'd leaned forward slightly, the way she'd asked it sideways rather than directly. She had a lead and she was trying to confirm it, and Elijah had given her nothing confirmable.Alexander listened. He always listened completely, which was something Elijah had

He didn't mention it. Alexander didn't mention it. The brochure remained in the magazine rack between the FT and the Economist, where it had apparently decided to live, and they both walked past it every morning as though it was entirely ordinary, as though it had always been there, as though neither of them had made a choice.Elijah had, over the last several weeks, compiled a reasonably thorough catalogue of the things they didn't mention.They didn't mention the storm. They didn't mention the night they'd spent talking in the dark about his father and the culinary school and the small things that had become large things in the absence of light. They didn't mention the almost terrible proximity, Alexander saying you should sleep in a voice that wasn't entirely steady, the hour Elijah had spent staring at the ceiling of the Hamptons master bedroom afterwards while Alexander's breathing evened out three inches away.They didn't mention the keychain, which lived on Elijah's keys and wh

The thing was, he was good at it.Elijah had been given the soup station — a three-batch production of lentil soup, which was within his capabilities the way breathing was within his capabilities — and he'd been working steadily for twenty minutes when he looked up and saw Alexander on the other side of the kitchen at the roasting station, and had to stop for a moment.Alexander Reed, CEO of Reed Capital, architect of nine-figure deals, owner of twelve hundred square feet of grey marble silence above Manhattan — was breaking down a flat of chicken thighs with the confident economy of someone who had done this before. Not awkwardly, not tentatively. Cleanly. He'd pushed his sleeves to the elbow and he was moving with the practical efficiency of the kitchen, the rhythm of it, the specific focus that commercial cooking demanded and that most people who hadn't done it underestimated.He'd shed the posture. That was the thing Elijah kept coming back to — the posture, the particular quality