Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 562

"You hum."

"I do not."

The MC put a hand over his microphone and leaned in toward me, deadpan. "Sir, she has the ring. She wins."

"I hum," I said. The deck came apart laughing, and the MC wiped his eyes and turned his card over.

"Last one," he said. "Where do you see yourselves in thirty years?"

Celeste answered before I could.

"Right here," she said. "Exactly like this. Him carrying me up a hill somewhere and complaining that I am heavy."

"I have never once complained," I said.

"You will."

The room laughed again, and the MC stepped back and gave the floor to us, and the orchestra took the cue and started up something with a bit of swing to it. We danced.

I was not a good dancer, and she knew it. But she led me through it, like she did when we first danced, with one hand on my shoulder and her mouth at my ear telling me where to put my feet. Around us the other couples drifted out onto the floor, including Pat and Kingsley, and the deck filled with moving bodies and the smell of salt and cake and wine, and I stopped counting how many people were watching.

We stayed out there through three songs. Then Celeste pulled me off the floor and we went out through the doors at the stern and climbed the stairs to the top deck. It was empty up there. The wind came off the water cool and clean, and the lights of the estate lay along the shore like a spilled necklace. Celeste walked to the rail and put both hands on it and looked out at the sea. "It is beautiful," she said.

Then she turned her head toward the beach, and her whole body went still. The estate sprawled along the coast in the dark, house after house after house, terraces and towers and lit windows climbing the hill, gardens, courtyards, a whole small city of stone and glass with the water at its feet. "Oh, my," she said. "Dominic. Look at it. It is enormous."

"I have looked."

"Where, exactly," she asked, "did you have in mind as our castle?"

I stepped up behind her and pointed past the beach, past the terraces, up to the highest house on the ridge, the one standing alone above everything else with its windows lit and the sea on three sides.

"That one."

"I love you too, my queen," I said. "And this is only the beginning." I pulled her into my arms and she pressed her face into my collar, and I held her there while the wind moved around us and the party went on below. When she lifted her head, her eyes had dried and gone soft.

"I want to see it," she said. "Our home. The one you prepared."

I looked at her. "Now?"

She nodded. "Now."

I took her hand.

"Then let me take care of you," I said, and before she could argue I bent and lifted her off her feet.

She yelped and grabbed my neck. "Dominic. There are hundreds of people down there."

"They can watch." I carried her down the stairs and across the main deck, past the guests who turned and clapped and laughed as we went by, and down the boarding steps to the platform, where the launch was already waiting. The man at the tiller took one look at us and did not ask any questions.