Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 547

She had been wet and shaking minutes ago. Now she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life, and she was walking toward Sparrow, and he stood at the foot of the limousine steps with both hands loose at his sides and his eyes fixed on her as though there was nothing else left in the world worth looking at. He did not move. She came to a stop in front of him and said thank you, quietly, and he still did not move, and I watched a man who had once put a whip across my back for standing too close to him look at my aunt like she had reached into his chest and taken something out of it. Lucia's fingers dug into my arm, a warning, but I did not need the warning. My heart had gone small and tight inside my ribs, and breathing around it had become work, and I held my face still so that nothing would fall out of my eyes.

"Where did you find them?" Scarlett asked. "And so fast."

"I have people."

"You have people," she repeated, and laughed, and the sound of it went through me like a needle.

Then he turned to me, and the look he gave me was the look a man gives furniture. "Tasha, you and your friends are going home. The bride does not want you at her engagement party."

I heard the words. I heard every one of them separately, like coins dropped on a table, and for a moment I could not make them add up to a sentence that applied to me. "What?"

"You heard me."

"Wait." Scarlett stepped between us with one hand out toward him, and I had never heard her voice come out that fast. "Sparrow, please. If this is about what happened at the pool, that was my fault, not hers. She did not know who Celeste was. Let Tasha come. Only Tasha. I will stay behind if that helps."

"No."

I do not remember getting into the car. Lucia put me in the passenger seat of my own car and gave her keys to the three women and told them to follow, and then she was driving me home through streets that had gone quiet, and I sat with my hands in my lap and my cheek against the cold window and cried the way you cry when you have been holding it down for hours and there is no one left to perform for.

"You saw it," Lucia said. "You saw how he looked at her."

"Stop."

"I am not saying it to hurt you. I am saying it so you stop lying to yourself." She changed lanes without signaling, both hands on the wheel, her voice low and patient, the voice of a woman explaining something obvious to a child. "He can have her whenever he wants her. That is why he keeps choosing her. A man does not chase what is already on the table. And you, sweetheart, are not on the table. You are the wife he keeps in the other room."