Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 407

"We are supposed to be cleaning up."

"We are."

"That was not cleaning."

I looked at her, at the water streaming off her red hair, at the flush spreading down her chest, and something shifted inside me, a wall I had not known I was standing behind. "No," I said. "It was not."

We finished the job properly after that, and it was its own kind of strange. She washed me and I washed her, and this time we kept our hands honest, mostly, and the steam wrapped around us until my skin pricked with heat and the water ran cold at the edges.

I had never dried a woman either. She stood on the bath mat, dripping, and let me run the towel over her shoulders, her breasts, her stomach, her hips, and when I was done she took another towel and did the same for me, and it was the strangest thing I had ever done with a woman, stranger than the sex, stranger than the kissing, and I did not hate it. I did not hate any of it.

We went back into the bedroom, and I stripped the sheets off the bed, the evidence of what we had done earlier still pressed into them, and I pulled fresh white linen from the wardrobe and made the bed the way I had been taught, corners tight, hospital neat. She watched me work with that pleased smile of hers, and then she picked up a towel and nodded at the chair by the window.

"Sit."

I stopped at the bottom of the stairs.

Scarlett was in the dining room with Madam Lily and two of the maids, setting the long table, and she was laughing at something, her head tipped back, and the sound of it, bright and easy, stopped me where I stood. She said something to one of the maids and the girl smiled back at her, and the picture of it, the redhead in my dining room at seven in the morning, laughing with my staff like she belonged here, did something to my chest that I did not have a name for.

And then the alarm bells went off. She was handling the food. The food I was going to eat. The food that went into my body. I had spent my whole life not trusting anyone with my back, except they had been thoroughly verified, and here she was, a suspicious woman I had known for a handful of days, a woman who had lied her way through half the city, a woman whose entire life was a series of calculated moves, standing in my kitchen, touching my food.