Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 78

Chapter 78

My name. Attached to her narrative. Publicly. Without my consent.

I had been planning to wait. To let things unfold at the right pace. To be strategic and patient and controlled, the way I was strategic and patient and controlled about everything.

But not anymore. I was done.

I picked up my phone and called my lawyer.

He answered on the first ring. “Sir.”

“The divorce document I gave you,” I said. “Process it today. I want it finalized before this evening.”

There was silence on the other end. Then, carefully, “Sir, given the current public situation, the optics of filing for divorce while Mrs. Ford is in the hospital after an attempted murder might…”

“Today,” I insisted.

“Sir…”

“I am not asking for your opinion on the optics. I am giving you an instruction. Finalize the divorce. Send both copies to me when it is done. I will handle the delivery personally.”

There was another pause. “Understood, sir.”

I ended the call.

I wanted to be there when she found out.

That was perhaps not my most dignified motivation, but I had been patient and strategic and controlled for a very long time and I felt I had earned one moment of watching Seraphine Ford’s face when she realized that she was not getting a single coin from me after the divorce. Not a percentage of Veil Holdings. Nothing.

I was looking forward to it with a pettiness that I felt completely at peace with.

And then, the way it always happened when I was thinking about one woman, my mind drifted to the

other one.

Celeste.

She could have done exactly what Seraphine was doing. She was associated with me now, publicly, her name attached to the Veil Holdings grant, her face in the cameras at that announcement. She could have leveraged that association. She could have asked for more. She could have used the proximity to position herself.

She had asked for nothing.

She showed up with gratitude and wit and that particular directness she had that made me feel like she

1/3

+15 Bonus

was the only person in any room who was actually telling me the truth.

She was remarkable.

And I was going to show up at her house with a fake beard, which was the most undignified thing I had done in at least a decade.

The thought of it had been making me vaguely mortified since Sparrow suggested it the night before. A disguise. A toolbox. Me, the chairman of the largest company in the country, pretending to be a

handyman so I could see a woman I was dying to see.

Desperate, said the small reasonable part of my brain.

Worth it, said every other part.

I turned the idea over in my head while I dealt with the afternoon’s correspondence, and the more it lived in my head, the more I became genuinely excited about it in a way I was not prepared to examine too

closely.

There was something about the absurdity of it that I liked. The chairman of Veil Holdings, disguised as a handyman, carrying a toolbox into a house where people who hated each other were presumably arguing about something, just to spend time with a woman who made me feel like a person rather than a

position.

It was either romantic or unhinged.

Possibly both.

I was not sure there was a meaningful difference at this point.

I waited until it was almost dark before I called her.

She picked up immediately.

“I am sending you a surprise tomorrow morning,” I told her. “A handyman. He will be your messenger.”

“A handyman.” Her voice was doing the thing it did when she was trying to sound neutral and was not entirely succeeding. “What kind of message requires a handyman?”

“The confidential kind,” I replied. “Take him into your bedroom. Lock the door. The message is for your

eyes only.”

She paused. “You are being very mysterious, Dominic Ford.”

“I am a very mysterious man.”

She laughed. That sound. I had been storing that sound somewhere I did not want to examine too carefully.

2/3