Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 544

The woman stopped two feet from Sparrow. She did not apologize. She did not so much as glance at me with anything but the flat, bored contempt of somebody looking at a stain on a rug. Then she turned to him and spoke, and she did not lower her voice.

"I know I have no right to meddle in your personal life," she said. "But as someone who cares about you, I will say it anyway. By marrying this woman, you have made a very big mistake."

Then she stepped past him and folded into the limousine like the seat had been built for her, and the door shut behind her with a soft, expensive click.

Sparrow looked at me. There was suspicion in it, plain and cold, and I stood under that look with my face stinging and my chest full of things I could not say out loud. Then he turned and walked toward the pool.

I followed him.

Scarlett was at the shallow end trying to work the clasp of her necklace closed with wet fingers, and it kept slipping, and Sparrow stopped in front of her and took it out of her hands. He turned her by the shoulder, gentle, and fastened the chain at the back of her neck and let it settle against her collarbone. Then he stepped back.

"Why are you wet?" he asked.

She smiled at him. "I got clumsy. I was trying to catch my necklace when it came off and I ended up going into the pool with it."

"Clumsy."

"Very."

He shrugged out of his jacket and put it over her shoulders, and it hung past her hips and dripped at the hem, and she pulled it closed with both hands.

"Wait inside," he said. "It is hotter in there. I will be back in no time."

He did not look at me. He did not say a single word to me. He walked back to the limousine and got in, and the car pulled away, and I stood there with a knot in my stomach the size of my fist.

Who was that woman to him?

"Old, huh? I hope you feel better about yourself now."

The photograph inside was small and faded, and it was my mother, our resemblance was completely striking.

"I had no idea."

"You knew that necklace mattered to me." She snapped the pendant shut. "That made no difference to you, right? You were taking advantage of my love to humiliate me, and for whose sake? Those girls who do not give a fuck about you?"

"Lucia cares about me. She was just trying to help me. You wouldn't understand."

Scarlett laughed again, and it came out sharp as glass. "Lucia cares about you, and yet she was the one who egged you on to insult a woman who matters to Sparrow. Do you know who that woman is? That is the bride. That is the woman whose engagement you are all dressed up for."