Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 43

Chapter 43

When I got out I went back to the wardrobe and looked at it again.

Then I took one of his white dress shirts off the hanger and put it on.

It swallowed me. The shoulders dropped halfway down my arms and the hem stopped at the tops of my thighs. I rolled the sleeves up twice and looked at myself in the mirror.

It would do.

He was in the living room when I came downstairs, sitting on the sofa with his laptop open, his jacket gone, wearing only a white singlet and his trousers. I stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked at him for a moment before he heard me.

The singlet. The way his arms looked in it. The way he sat, relaxed and focused at the same time, his brow slightly furrowed at whatever was on his screen.

I was biting my lip before I realized I was doing it.

I shook the thought off and walked toward him.

He heard my footsteps and looked up. His eyes went immediately to my legs, to the hem of his shirt stopping at my thighs, and I watched his throat move as he swallowed.

I liked that.

I liked it more than I should have.

“You look beautiful,” he said. His voice was slightly lower than it had been upstairs. “You wear it better

than I do.”

I laughed and sat beside him. “Thank you.” I leaned over and kissed his cheek, close to the corner of his mouth, and felt him go very still for a half second before he relaxed again.

He picked up a folder from the table and handed it to me.

I opened it.

The contract. All the terms laid out cleanly, the investment structure, the conditions, the timeline. I read through it carefully, every clause, every paragraph, taking my time.

It was fair. More than fair. It was the kind of contract that protected Helix rather than extracting from it, that gave us the funding without surrendering control of the research direction.

I looked up at him.

“This is good,” I said.

“I know.”

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I signed it. He signed his portion. We looked at each other across the table with the signed contract between us and something settled in the room, something that felt like the end of one thing and the beginning of something else.

He moved closer.

He kissed me, soft and unhurried, his hand coming up to the side of my face.

When he pulled back he looked at me with that quiet, intent expression.

“Stay tonight,” he said.

My heart picked up.

spinning away from the door and dropping to the floor beside it, his back against the wall, his hand going. to his arm.

Blood.

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I saw the blood on his arm and I was already moving, already across the room and on my knees beside him before I had made the decision to move.

“What is going on?” My voice came out high and strange. My hands were on his arm, on the wound, trying to see how bad it was. “What is happening?”

He looked at me. His breathing was controlled but fast, his jaw tight, his back flat against the wall beside

the door.

He looked at me with those eyes that never gave anything away and gave everything away.

“Someone wants me dead,” he said.

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