Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 421

"I am worried about you, Celeste."

I softened, the anger draining out of me, leaving only tiredness and a fierce, aching love for this woman who had been my anchor through everything. "I am fine. Go."

I went inside and did not look back. But at the top, I paused at the window and watched them. Pat walking toward him, Kingsley opening the passenger door of his car, the careful way he helped her in, and I whispered more to myself, "Do not disappoint her, Kingsley Duke."

The image of Sharon's face stayed with me long after their car had turned the corner and vanished, a splinter I could not work out from under my skin. That smile, that cold beautiful arrogance, the same proud tilt of the jaw I had last seen in the years when my father was still fighting to hold our family together and losing it piece by piece. I had told myself the past was buried, that the anger had burned itself out the way fires do when there is nothing left to feed them. It had not burned out. It had only been waiting, and one afternoon of Sharon Adams had dragged every ember back to the surface.

I forced myself back to my desk and worked through the rest of the day, signing papers I could not have named five minutes later, answering emails on autopilot, because work was the only thing that kept my hands busy and my mind off my mother weeping in the past.

I had given up revenge years ago. I had told myself I was stronger than the people who had hurt us, that walking away was its own kind of victory, and I had believed it right up until the moment I saw Castro Adams's daughter standing in front of Helix.

The door swung open and Pat walked in, and the change in her was so complete that I forgot the anger for a second. She was glowing, her cheeks flushed, her eyes bright, the heaviness she had carried out, gone like it had never been there. She held up her bare left hand before I could speak.

"I know. No ring. We're holding on to it."

"Don't worry about me. Everything will work out in the end. I strongly believe so."

She told me about the party then, and I laughed until my eyes watered, the best sound I had made all day, and it chased the shadows out of the room for a while. About Vivian's face when Kingsley walked in carrying enough branded gifts to open a boutique. About her mother pushing Vivian off her own seat so Kingsley could sit down. About Kingsley kneeling in front of the whole table with a ring worth millions.

"So he just showed up?" I asked. "Out of nowhere, in the middle of your sister's birthday?"

"Celeste, he proposed to me in front of my entire family. My mother called me perfect. Perfect. She has never said that word to me in thirty years of my life."