Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 112

Chapter 112

Blood rushed to my head so fast I had to look away.

I turned toward the window and watched the city move past and told my heart to calm down and my heart completely ignored me. What was going on with him? Was this because it was our last day together? Was this him saying goodbye in the only language he allowed himself, quiet and direct and entirely without decoration?

He did not say anything else for the rest of the journey.

He did not let go of my hand either. He kept holding, and drawing slow circles on the back of my hand with his thumb.

Finally, the car stopped in front of a mansion.

Not a hotel. Not his glass-walled suite with its private exit and its closet full of clothes in my size. A house, set back from a quiet street behind a gate, surrounded by the particular silence of a property that had been chosen specifically for privacy. The building itself was wide and pale and elegant in the

restrained way of things built to last rather than to impress.

Dominic got out first. He came around and opened my door.

I stepped out and he took my hand again before I had fully straightened, his fingers finding mine with the ease of something practiced, and he led me toward the entrance.

Inside, the house was furnished simply, every room arranged with the specific intentionality of a space prepared for a purpose. I looked around the entrance hall, the high ceilings, the pale walls, the floors that caught the light cleanly.

“It is beautiful,” I told him. “Is this where you actually live?”

He shook his head. “I got it specifically for today.”

He looked at me carefully. “Are you nervous?”

I nodded.

Something moved across his face. He had misread it, I could tell. He thought I was nervous because Julian was about to catch us. The game reaching its conclusion. The trap finally snapping shut.

He was not wrong. But he was not entirely right either.

What I was nervous about was the part that came after. The part where the door opened and Julian saw us and the game ended and I had no more reason to be standing in any room with Dominic Ford. The part where I went back to being a scientist with a research grant and a pending divorce, and he went back to being the richest man in the country, and whatever this had been between us dissolved back into nothing the way arrangements did when they reached their agreed end.

I remembered then.

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“You said you had something to tell me,” I said. “In person. Earlier on the phone.”

He exhaled. Sat down on the edge of the nearest chair and rested his forearms on his knees.

“The danger on my back has been suspended,” he said. “Temporarily, but significantly.”

I furrowed my brows. “What happened?

He explained it cleanly, the way he explained everything, without unnecessary detail but without leaving anything important out. Seraphine’s press conference turning herself into bait without knowing it. The shooter in the secure location finally giving up the name Benjamin’s illegitimate son, grown now and connected, wanting to avenge a father Dominic had taken down years ago. His men going to the address and arriving to find the son already in a helicopter. The son now in hiding somewhere out of the country. with Sparrow’s contacts watching every door.

I let out a breath that I had apparently been holding for longer than I realized. “That is such a relief. I have been worried about you.”

He looked at me when I said that. Just looked at me for a moment.

“There is one more thing,” he continued. “My marriage to Seraphine is officially over. The divorce has been processed. I gave her the certificate this morning.”

I stared at him.

“She found me through Sparrow,” he said. “She paid him the best way she knows, to arrange a meeting. She showed up at the restaurant and I handed her the papers.”

He did not elaborate on what Sparrow’s f*e had been. He did not need to. I already knew, in the general shape of it, and the specific details were not something I needed in my head.

What was in my head instead was the finality of it.

Dominic Ford. Officially, legally, completely unattached. Standing in a house he had arranged specifically for today, holding my hand in the back of a car for the entire drive here, telling me without saying it directly that this was the last time and he was choosing to spend it fully present.

The silence between us stretched for a moment and I did not know what to do with it.

“Should we go up?” he said finally. “Our bedroom is upstairs.”

I nodded and followed him upstairs.

The room was arranged strangely and I noticed it immediately.

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