Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 312

Chapter 312

CELESTE

I threw my head back and laughed, the sound echoing off the high ceilings of the dressing room.

“Come on,” I said, grabbing my bag from the vanity, a black leather tote that was large enough to hold my tablet. and a few other things. “Let’s go before I lose my nerve and call in sick.”

Dominic took my hand, his fingers intertwining with mine in a way that had become so natural, so instinctive, that I could no longer remember what it felt like to walk through a door without his palm pressed against my own. When we stepped out into the morning air, the sun had fully risen above the treeline and the sky was the color of a robin’s egg, pale and clean and impossibly blue.

Dominic’s car was waiting, and his driver stood beside the open door with the practiced stillness of someone who had long ago learned that the best way to serve a man like Dominic Ford was to be invisible until you were needed, and exceptionally competent when you were.

I handed my car keys to Dominic, who tossed them in a lazy arc toward one of my bodyguards. He nodded once, a tight professional gesture, and then he was moving toward my car, while the second bodyguard climbed into their

black SUV.

I slid into the back seat of Dominic’s car, sinking into the leather and Dominic settled in beside me, his hand finding my hand and holding it in his lap like it was the most natural thing in the world, like he had been holding my hand in the back of luxury cars since the dawn of time and intended to continue doing so until the universe collapsed into heat death.

His eyes never left my face. Not once. Not for the entire drive.

Hooked away, out the window at the city sliding past, the skyscrapers and the brownstones and the early- morning joggers and the coffee shops with their neon OPEN signs flickering to life. I watched a woman in a yellow coat walking a golden retriever that was trying to chase a pigeon. I watched a street vendor setting up his cart, arranging fresh flowers in plastic buckets. I watched the city wake up around us, and then I turned back, and Dominic was still staring at me.

“Are you planning to bore a hole through my face with your eyes?”

He shrugged, entirely unrepentant. “You cannot blame me. There is nothing better in this car to look at. Who told you to be such perfect eye candy?”

“Eye candy. I am the chief scientific officer of a billion-dollar research laboratory, and you are calling me eye candy.”

“Those things are not mutually exclusive. You can be brilliant and beautiful. You can be the smartest person in any room and also the most stunning. You are living proof of that, Celeste. Every single day, you prove it just by existing.”

I turned my face back toward the window so he would not see the flush creeping up my cheeks, the heat spreading across my skin like a sunburn blooming in real time. I was a grown woman. I had presented research findings to panels of Nobel laureates without breaking a sweat.

I had negotiated funding agreements worth hundreds of millions of dollars while maintaining perfect eye contact and a perfectly neutral expression. And yet here I was, blushing in the back of a car because a man called me beautiful. It was ridiculous. It was embarrassing. It was also, I had to admit, the best I had felt in a while.

When the car pulled up in front of Helix, the familiar glass-and-steel facade rising above us like a monument to

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everything I had built and everything I still wanted to build, I felt Dominic’s grip on my hand tighten. I turned to look at him, and the smile that had been playing on his lips all morning had faded, replaced by something softer and sadder and infinitely more vulnerable.

“I don’t want to let you go,” he said, and his voice was quiet, almost petulant, the voice of a child who had been told to share his favorite toy and was not happy about it. “Do you need a temporary personal assistant? I will apply for the position. My resume is excellent. I have extensive experience in staring at beautiful women and telling them how wonderful they are.”

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