Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 45

Chapter 45

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What if it had not been his arm?

What if it had been his head, or his neck, or his chest? What if he had opened that door half a second sooner or been standing half a step to the left? What if the shot had not grazed him but gone straight through?

I shuddered.

I pressed the gauze carefully against the wound and taped it down and sat back and looked at my work.

And then, because I was apparently incapable of staying on task, my eyes traveled up his arm. To his shoulder. To the bicep that the singlet did nothing to hide. To the architecture of him, the muscle and the line of it, the way he was built in a way that suggested the body was not decorative but functional.

He is jacked, I thought, with absolutely no dignity whatsoever. Such strong arms. So incredibly, unfairly

sexy.

“Hey.” His voice, quiet and close. “Are you okay?”

I blinked.

He was watching me with that careful attention, his eyes on my face.

“I’m worried about you,” I said, after a pause that was slightly too long.

He studied me. “Why?”

“Well.” I stopped. Started again. “I don’t know. Shouldn’t I be worried about you?”

He looked at me for a moment. Then his other arm came around my waist and he pulled me close, his

lips near my temple.

“Where were we,” he murmured, “before we were so rudely interrupted?”

I pulled back and slapped his arm. Not the injured one. “Stop it.”

He kissed me anyway.

And then the sound changed.

It was not a single shot this time. It was everything at once, a full exchange of gunfire that filled the air from every direction, so loud and so close that I felt it in my chest. My eyes went wide. My hands went to his arms without thinking.

He moved before I could process it, both his hands coming up to cover my ears, holding them gently but firmly, his eyes on mine.

I looked at him.

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He looked at me.

His hands were warm against the sides of my head and the sound was reduced to a muffled roar and his eyes were steady and I focused on them the way you focus on a fixed point when the ground is moving under you.

The minutes passed.

And then, gradually, the sound faded.

It stopped.

Complete silence.

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warning you. Stay away from my husband. Otherwise, I will destroy you.”

The message ended.

I stood in the upstairs bedroom of a bulletproof mansion on a private island, in a man’s white shirt, with a fresh first aid dressing on the arm of the man downstairs, having just survived a shooting, listening to my former best friend threaten me on a voicemail.

I scoffed.

Then I smiled.

Stay away from her husband.

I saved the voicemail.

Something told me I was going to want it later.

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