Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 38

Chapter 38

CELESTE

I woke up before the sun.

The room was quiet and dark and for a moment I lay there, the sheets too soft and too expensive to be my own. Then I remembered. The party. The stage. The glass room. The closet full of clothes in my size with price tags I had turned my face away from.

Dominic.

I turned my head on the pillow and looked at him.

He was asleep on his back, one arm across his stomach, the sheet pulled to his waist. In sleep he looked different. The controlled stillness he carried when he was awake became something softer, something unguarded. His jaw was relaxed. His breathing was slow and even.

He looked like an angel who had appeared in my life from nowhere.

I looked away.

That was exactly the kind of thinking I could not afford. I knew better. I had told myself I knew better, and then I had spent the night in his bed, and now I was lying here at five in the morning watching him sleep and thinking about angels.

I needed to be careful.

Whatever this was, it was a game. It had always been a game. We had agreed on that from the beginning. A game with rules and an end date and no room for the kind of soft, stupid feelings that got

women like me hurt.

I was not going to get hurt.

I got up slowly, careful not to disturb him, and padded across the room to where my phone was charging

on the kitchen counter.

The screen lit up.

Fourteen missed calls from Seraphine. Eight from Julian. Two from my mother. One from my brother.

I stared at the screen for a moment. Then I set it back down and went to shower.

The bathroom was warm and quiet, the marble still faintly steamed from the night before. I stood under the water and let it run hot across my shoulders and tried not to think about the fact that I was showering in Dominic Ford’s private hotel bathroom at five in the morning while my husband called my phone from somewhere in the city.

I tried not to think about how little I cared.

Dominic had bought underwear. Toiletries. Everything. The same designer, the same sizes, arranged on

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the shelves like a shop display. Silk sets in black and cream and deep burgundy. Toothbrush still in the packaging

I stood there holding a black lace bra and matching panties and felt something warm move through my chest that I did not have a name for.

What kind of man was Dominic Ford?

When had he planned all of this? When had he stood in some designer’s showroom and chosen underwear in my size and toiletries I actually used and lined them up in a closet in a private hotel room as though he had known all along that I would end up here?

If I had not been the one to suggest the affair, I might have suspected he had planned the whole thing from the beginning.

But I was the one who had suggested it. Half out of my mind with grief and rage. He had not planned it.

Had he?

I shook the thought away and got dressed. The royal blue pantsuit from the rack fit like it had been tailored for me, because it had been.

I did my makeup in the mirror and told myself to stop thinking about angels.

When Dominic stirred, I was standing at the kitchen counter with coffee.

He sat up slowly, rubbing his face, and when his eyes found me across the room his gaze traveled down the length of me in that unhurried way he had, the way that always felt like being read rather than looked

Something moved in my chest.

Something I was ignoring.

His eyes dropped lower than the jacket. Lower than the pants. They stopped somewhere that made my face warm and my brain supply roll, completely unbidden, with a highlight reel of the previous twelve hours.

I almost put the coffee down and walked across the room and did something I would not have been able to justify

I did not.

When the cab pulled up outside Helix Research, they were all waiting.

They had lined up outside the entrance. All of them. Pat had clearly rallied the entire team from the moment my message had gone out the night before.

There was the junior research scientist who had been with us since her postdoc and who regularly turned down better-funded positions because she believed in the work.

Beside her stood the second junior researcher, quiet and meticulous, the kind of scientist who triple- checked everything and was usually right.

Behind them were the lab technician, who kept the equipment running through what could only be described as mechanical intuition, and the data analyst, who processed our trial results with a speed and precision that still impressed me after three years.

At the end of the line stood the grants and administration coordinator, who had submitted more rejected funding applications than any of us wanted to count, and beside her the lab assistant who had joined us six months ago and was already indispensable.

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And Pat.

Pat was at the center of all of them, and she was crying.

They applauded when I stepped out of the cab.

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