Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 525

SPARROW

An hour later I got up, showered and dressed. I had a full day ahead of me and I wanted Scarlett in it. So I went down to her room and knocked. She opened the door looking fresh and clean and entirely pleased with herself, her hair damp, and her mouth shiny.

"Morning."

"Morning."

"Come with me today. I want you next to me the whole day."

"I'm sorry." She pulled a small apologetic face. "I already made plans with Tasha."

That took more wind out of me than it should have. I nodded, took the black card I had prepared out of my wallet and held it out to her.

"Take this. It has no limit. Buy whatever you want."

She looked at the card in surprise, then at me. "Thank you."

"You're welcome." I told her as she took the card from me.

"Goodbye."

I left the house and drove straight to my doctor's appointment. The hospital sat on a quiet street behind a private garden.

There was no waiting room full of other people, because I paid for exactly that. The injection I took was rare enough that most men had never heard of it and expensive enough that most men would never afford it: one shot a month that shut down sperm production and threw a wide net over a long list of infections at the same time. As long as I took it on schedule I could not put a child in anyone and could not catch anything worth catching. I had not missed a shot in five years.

I sat on the examination table with my sleeve rolled up and the tray already open beside me, and then I thought about the night before. We had gone two rounds and were starting the third when I asked Scarlett whether she was not worried about getting pregnant.

She told me she never intended to be a mother, ever, and that she took a medicine every two days that made certain of it and protected her from disease at the same time. I had been impressed. I never planned on children either, and I had always hated the interruption of a condom, and here was a woman who had solved both problems without being asked. It made me feel warm, that small piece of common ground, the two of us built the same way underneath.

"Not today," I said, and rolled my sleeve back down.

The doctor looked up. "Are you certain?"

"I'm certain."

He wrote something on his chart and said nothing, which was why I paid him. I took my jacket and left. Until the contract ran out, or until my interest in Scarlett moved on to somebody else, I did not need it. She was the only woman I wanted right now and she was already protected. The arithmetic was simple.

Xander corporation took the rest of my morning. The company had started as a joke. Dominic pushed it on me for years, telling me I needed something legal with my name near it, something a banker could look at without flinching, because he was worried the world would only ever see me as a thug with a good tailor. I built it to shut him up. Then I came to like it. It was the cleanest thing I owned, a company that made its money out of contracts and meetings instead of the other kind of business, and I ran it the way I ran everything else, which meant it ran well.

And then there was the day Scarlett came here with me. She walked through the lobby with her chin up, counted the floors in the elevator, looked at the brass on my door, and something behind her eyes shifted. She looked at me differently after that. She looked at me like I might be something more than the man who owned her contract. That change landed on me like sunlight and I carried it. Even now, sitting behind my desk with a stack of papers in front of me, the memory of it made me feel good about myself in a way that had nothing to do with money.

"Ah. The aunt of your fake wife."

I sighed. "Yeah. I'm sure you remember the story of how we met. In case you've forgotten, she walked into a booth in a club and put her mouth on me inside five minutes."

Dominic whistled. "So tell me, how does she make you feel?"

I gave that one more room than I meant to. "Quiet," I said finally. "When she is beside me, I feel at peace. When she is angry with me I cannot breathe properly until I have fixed it, and I have never cared enough about anybody's mood to fix it in my life. I look at other women now and feel nothing. They might as well be chairs."

"Go on."

"I look at her once and immediately get an erection. Her face is etched in my memory even when I'm away from her."

"How much does she affect you?"

I stood at the window with the city spread out below me and made myself say the true thing. "I don't know how to say it, and I don't know how to stop it. I have tried. I would like to put her down the way I put everything else down when I am done with it, and I cannot. She is not something I can put down. More than anything else, I want her to be happy. Always."

The line went quiet for a while. Then Dominic made a small sound, almost a laugh, but softer.

"Sparrow," he said. "That is easy. You have fallen in love with Scarlett."