Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 560

She smiled at me in the glass.

"And tonight," I went on, "you are also the sexiest."

She turned in my arms and put one finger against my chest. "Do not start, Dominic. I know exactly what you are working toward, and I am not falling for it. I have to get dressed for the yacht."

"Who said I was working toward anything?"

"Your face said it. Your hands said it. The whole estate heard it." She turned back around and finished the zip herself, then stepped out from behind the screen, and I got my first real look at her in the white dress.

It was the plainest thing she had worn all day and it undid me more than the emerald had.

She looked just like an angel.

She had kicked off the emerald heels and stepped into a pair of silver sandals with thin straps, and she bent to fasten the buckles, and the light came through the cotton across her back.

"Well?" she said.

I did not answer straight away, and she took that as an answer.

"Are you not going to change?"

I helped Celeste into the first boat, one hand at her elbow and one at the small of her back, and then I stepped in after her and the man at the tiller pushed off. The engine caught with a low rumble and we swung out into the black water, and behind us the estate rose out of the dark with every window lit, spread along the shore like something out of a story. Celeste leaned into me.

"It is beautiful," she said, but she was not looking at the estate. She was looking at the yacht, and the yacht was getting bigger. We came alongside at the stern where the boarding platform had been lowered and lit, and I took her hand and walked her up the steps. Her sandals clicked on the teak. Two of my men stood at the top with champagne, a steward took her wrap, and then we were through the doors and into the main deck.

Inside, the yacht was pale wood and white leather and glass. The ceiling had been paneled in strips and lit from the edges so it seemed to float above us. A bar ran the length of one wall, staffed and stocked. The buffet had been laid out along the other, long tables of silver and ice and flowers, and somewhere past all of it the orchestra had set up again and was playing something slow enough to dance to.

Servers moved with trays. Somebody had already cut the cake, a five tiered thing of white and gold, and set it on a stand in the middle of the room under its own small light.

The guests came up the steps behind us one launch at a time, and the deck filled, and the noise of it filled with it. I took Celeste to the buffet and we ate standing up, a little of everything, and then a little of the cake, which was better than I had any right to expect. She had just set her fork down when the MC found us.