Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 16

Chapter 016

CELESTE

I stopped on the pavement of Helix and looked at them, all of them, lined up in the early morning light, clapping for me, and something cracked open in my chest in a way I was not prepared for.

I walked down the line. I shook hands. I accepted the hugs. I said thank you, genuinely, to each of them, because they had kept this place alive through years when keeping it alive had seemed like stubbornness rather than strategy.

When I reached Pat she pulled me into a hug so tight I felt it in my spine.

“I don’t know how you did it,” she said, her voice muffled against my shoulder. “I don’t know how, but thank you. Thank you, Celeste.”

I hugged her back. “We did it,” I said. “All of us.”

She pulled back and looked at my face with wet eyes. “Was it Julian? Did he pull strings?”

I laughed. I could not help it. The question was so far from the truth that it came out as a laugh before I could shape it into anything else.

“No,” I said. “It was not Julian.”

“Then how?”

“I promise I will tell you everything. Once everything is in place. The whole story.” I squeezed her hands. ” But not yet.”

She searched my face for a moment. Then she nodded.

I thought about the day Seraphine had left. I had not been there for it properly, had been too caught up in Julian’s world to see how much it had broken Pat, how much she had absorbed the loss of her colleague and just kept going because there was no other option. Pat had held Helix together in the years of my marriage almost single-handedly, had kept the research moving forward on a budget that should have made it impossible, had refused to let the work die.

Seeing her face this morning was worth every single thing I had done that brought me here.

An hour later, the grants and administration coordinator appeared in the doorway of the meeting room where Pat and I were going over preliminary plans.

“It dropped,” she said.

We both looked at her.

The money It just dropped. Into the account.”

Pat made a sound I had never heard her make before. Something between a gasp and a laugh. She

covered her mouth with both hands.

+15 Bonus

I stared across the table.

I had not signed the contract yet. Dominic had told me it was prepared and I could sign whenever, and I had assumed that meant after signing, not before. But the money was there In the account. Five billion dollars sitting in Helix Research Laboratory’s bank account on a regular morning before nine o’clock.

I called a meeting immediately.

The whole team crowded into the conference room that had never felt so small I told them the grant had transferred. I watched their faces do the same thing mine had done, the disbelief, the recalculation, the slow dawning understanding that everything was different now

We talked for over an hour New facility Higher pay Better equipment Research expansion. Hiring The possibility of taking the work further than we had ever been able to take it. The women who would benefit, eventually, from the treatments and therapies that proper funding would finally let us develop

I sat at the head of the table and listened to my team talk about the future and somewhere in the middle of a discussion about laboratory locations I thought about Dominic pressing me against the glass while Julian moved through the crowd outside, searching, and felt the warmth of it move through me like a

second heartbeat.

I pushed the thought away

It came back.

I pushed it away again.

My phone buzzed on the table. I glanced at the screen

Dominic

I excused myself from the meeting.

“Seraphine is in my lobby,” he said when I picked up. “She has been here since this morning and she is refusing to leave Would you like to come and irritate her a little?”

I looked back through the glass panel at my team, still talking, still planning, still flying.

“With all pleasure,” I said

I told Pat I needed to go and review the contract documents with Veil Holdings. She nodded without question I took a cab straight from Helix to Veil Holdings.

I saw Seraphine the moment I walked through the lobby doors

She was in the waiting area, her posture rigid, her jaw tight, the expression of a woman who had been

sitting somewhere too long and was furious about it. She looked tired. She looked, for the first time in all

He set a box on the desk and opened it atared at what was inside

“A gift,” he said. “I bought it for you.”

“I have never used one before,” I said.

“There is always a first time.”

He pushed the things on his desk to one side and took off his jacket and lifted me onto the edge of the desk and kissed me, and the clever thing I had been going to say about Seraphine dissolved completely

I lay on the desk after we were both spent.

He had pushed off me gently and was straightening his clothes. I sat up slowly, my legs still unsteady. and looked around for mine.

The office had been tidy when I walked in. It was slightly less tidy now I gathered my clothes from where they had ended up, and started putting myself back together

He was at the desk already, moving papers back to where they belonged, restoring the order I watched him for a moment. The same controlled efficiency Like nothing had happened Like he had not just made me cry on his desk.

I reached for my blouse

My hand touched paper.

I looked down

A document Several pages, held together with a metal clip. It had been under my clothes, face down, and when I lifted my blouse it turned over in my hand

I saw two names.

Dominic Ford.

Seraphine Ford

I turned it over fully My eyes moved across the page. The formal language. The date. The signatures.

Both of them

I sat up on the desk and looked at him.

“You and Seraphine are already divorced?”