Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 397

SPARROW

I walked out of the Beaumont hotel with Tasha trailing behind me like a ghost, her footsteps so soft on the floor that I almost forgot she was there.

The car sat where I had left it, black and gleaming under the hotel awning, and I slid into the driver's seat while she climbed in on the passenger side with the care of someone afraid of breaking something. The door closed with a click. Then silence.

I pulled out of the lot and onto the main road, and that was when I noticed her hands. They were shaking in her lap, fingers twisting together like she was trying to wring water out of them. She had not looked at me once since we left the penthouse. Her eyes stayed fixed on the window, on her lap, anywhere but on me.

I could not understand it. I had been good to her. Better than good. I had pulled her out of a life that was slowly killing her, promised to handle the man who had been poisoning her, handed her a future she could not have imagined a week ago. I was doing things for her and her aunt that I would not do for anyone on this earth, and she knew it. So why did she sit there trembling like I was the danger she had been running from?

If she had been any other woman, I might have assumed she was playing a part, performing fear because she thought it was what I wanted. But Tasha was not clever enough for that kind of game. This was genuine terror, rolling off her in waves so thick I could nearly taste it.

The whole thing was a turn-off. Completely. Even if I had been interested in taking her to my bed, this wimpish cowering would have killed the thought stone dead. I did not want a woman who flinched when I moved. I wanted someone with spine, someone with teeth, someone who would bite back and enjoy it.

Someone like her aunt.

I pushed the thought away before it could take root and kept driving.

Then she came out for the last time, and I understood why the manager had been smiling.

The transformation was simple, and simple was exactly what made it perfect. A long white dress that fell to her ankles, modest in every way that mattered, cut to make her look like she had been poured out of morning light. The heavy makeup was gone, her face clean and fresh, her skin glowing the way skin did when it had never known a lifetime of paint. Her hair had been styled into something soft and plain, the kind of hairstyle a man imagined on the girl he brought home to his mother.

The old hag would eat this up. She would look at Tasha and see everything she wanted for a granddaughter in-law; a good girl, an innocent girl, a bride out of a storybook.

I took Tasha's hand. She startled at the touch but did not pull away, and I examined her fingers, small, delicate, unadorned. I scanned the glass case beside us and dismissed the diamonds immediately. Diamonds were loud, flashy, the kind of stone a woman picked for herself. For the image I needed, nothing said quiet virtue like gold. Simple. Warm. Unassuming.