Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 549

The man was tall. His shirt was open at the collar and his cuffs rolled back off his forearms, and he smelled of cedar with something sweet underneath it, and he came to a stop beside my stool and put his elbow on the bar like he had been standing there all night. "You are the best thing in this room, and I have been in this room for an hour, so I know what I am talking about."

I smiled at him, because that was what I had come here to do. "That is a very serious compliment."

"It is a very serious dress."

His hand came down on my bare thigh, warm and heavy and unhurried, and slid up an inch, and I made myself keep the smile and let him do it, because this was the reason I was sitting there.

Lucia leaned in close to my ear. "Good enough," she whispered. "Better than good. He smells expensive, he is not ugly, and look at him." Her eyes went down and back up. "He is built like a man who knows what to do with you. That is what you need tonight. You need to be opened up properly the first time so you are not afraid of the second."

My face went hot and I kept my eyes on his collar and my drink. He asked what I did, and I told him nothing worth talking about, and he said then we would not talk about it. He asked if I wanted to go somewhere quieter, somewhere we could hear each other, and I nodded before he finished the sentence, and he took a keycard out of his back pocket and folded my fingers around it.

"Room twenty," he said. "Two minutes. I will be waiting."

The room was small. A bed with a grey cover, one lamp, a window with the blind pulled down. Nobody in it.

Then I heard the water running behind the bathroom door. I let out a breath and sat down on the edge of the bed and set the condoms on the nightstand, and told myself that Trey, which was the name he had given me, was taking a shower.

Of course he was. He had smelled of cedar and soap and he wanted to be clean for this, which was more consideration than anyone had shown me all evening. I checked my phone. Nothing. No call, no message, not one word from Scarlett since the drive, and I sat there with the screen lighting up my hand and felt the last small thing inside me go quiet and hard. So much for the unselfish love.