Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 563

The ride to shore took a few minutes. The beach slid closer, the bulbs and the tables and the dancing silhouettes, and then the hull scraped the sand and I stepped out into the shallows with Celeste still in my arms and carried her up onto dry ground. I did not put her down.

I walked straight past the party. Past the tables and the dancing and the music, past the guests who stopped mid sentence to stare, up the path through the dunes and the gardens, along the terraces, all the way up the hill to the house standing alone above everything with its lights on and the sea behind it. She did not say a word the whole way. She just watched my face.

The house sat at the top of a flight of stone steps, and the steps were bordered with gardens on both sides, jasmine and bougainvillea and something white that smelled like rain after a long day of heat, and the walls of the house were pale stone with deep windows, and there were more windows than any house needed, and every one of them was lit.

At the door I stopped. "You will have to do it," I said. "My hands are full."

She reached out and pressed her thumb to the panel, and the lock clicked, and the door swung inward. I carried her over the threshold and set her down on the floor of the entrance hall. She turned in a slow circle, and then she just stood there with her mouth open.

The floor was white tile veined with grey, and the ceiling above it rose two stories, and a staircase swept up the far wall and turned and went up again. There was a chandelier above the stairs, new and enormous and lit with actual candles, and it threw a warm, uneven light across everything. Through the arches on the right I could see the living room, long and low, with sofas and a fireplace big enough to stand in. Through the arches on the left, the dining room with a table that could seat twenty. Beyond that, through the glass at the back, the sea.

"Oh, my," she said. "Dominic. This is a castle."

"Yes."

"You built a castle."

She turned to look at me, and there was something in her face I could not name.

She shook her head slowly. "That is too far. I don't think I can wait that long."

And then she crossed the tile and took my face in both hands and kissed me. She kissed me like she had been holding it in since the yacht.

Her mouth opened under mine and her tongue came in hot and sure, and her hands slid from my face down to my shoulders and then into my hair, and she pulled me down into her like she meant to keep me there. I got one arm around her waist and the other across her back, and we went backward until her spine met the newel post at the foot of the stairs, and she made a low sound against my mouth that I felt in my chest.

I broke the kiss long enough to breathe and she used the gap to go for my jacket.

It came off and hit the floor. My tie went next, then the buttons of my shirt, her fingers working down the front of it fast and impatient, and I let her do it because I liked watching her do it. When the shirt was open she put both palms flat on my chest and dragged them down over my stomach, and then she leaned in and kissed the middle of my chest, and then lower, and lower, and then she went down onto her knees on the cold floor.