Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 8

Chapter 008

CALESTE

The venue was a hotel that did not have a price kat

You knew that the second you pulled to the dove No valet stand with a sign, just a man in a grey suit who took my keys without a word and trusted that a woman in this dress had not stolen the car the

I had opened the nation at homes Gold card Heary stock Hosted by Vell Holdings

I had stared at that name for a long fores

Vest Holdings was the biggest company in the country. The nichest The one everyone wanted in a room with and almost no one got The kind of company my husband, with all his status and all his careful social climbing, might have qualified to stand near at an event like this

But Dominic

How did an ordinary office worker get an invitation to a Veil Holdings party? How did he get a second

one to hand to me?

Was he working it? Was he staff? Was he somewhere in the management, far enough up to be handed two invitations and stupid enough to spend one on me?

I had not been able to answer it at home and I could not answer it now.

The invitation said I could bring a quest Dominic did not need to be my plus one. He had his own. The only other person I could have brought was Pat, and I could not bring Pat, because bringing Pat meant explaining Dominic, and I was not ready to explain Dominic to anyone.

90 I came alone

I showed the gold card to the security at the door. Two men, neither of them smiling, both of them built like they had been hired to say no.

They looked at the card. They looked at me.

They let me through

I had not felt beautiful in a long time

Not like this Not on purpose

I had spent two years dressing for a man who told me what beautiful was allowed to look like, and beautiful was always something with a higher neckline and a longer hem and less of me showing through it

Tonight I had done my own face Glassy eyes A red on my mouth that matched the dress. Diamond drops at my ears that caught the light when I turned my head. A small silver clutch and silver heels!

absolutely did not need, strapped up the ankle, the kind of shoe that made a woman walk slower because she knew she was being watched.

I stepped into the hall and I turned heads.

I felt them turn. I did not look. That was the trick Julian had trained out of me and the resort had trained

back in. You do not look. You let them.

My eyes moved across the room for one face.

Dominic.

I did not find him.

I told myself he was working it after all. I told myself I would find out. I took out my phone to call him. He

had apologized that morning for not picking me up. He had promised we would meet here.

My thumb was on his name.

And then I saw two people I knew.

My husband.

And perched on his arm like a fly that had found something to land on, my so called best friend.

Sera.

I did not feel my thumb move.

I found out later that it had.

“Hello. Celeste. Hello.”

I did not answer it.

I was looking at Julian.

I had told myself I was past this. I had lain in that resort bed and decided I was numb, that the betrayal could not reach me anymore, that I was a player now and not a victim, and I had believed it.

And then there he was, in the open, in a room full of people, with her hand on his arm, and something in

my chest reached up and squeezed anyway.

It was not the love. The love was gone. I had checked.

It was the disrespect.

Weren’t they supposed to be on their trip? Weren’t they supposed to be at the resort, the one with the balcony, the one Julian had video called me from with that careful tender face? How many of these had there been? How many parties? How many nights he told me he was closing a deal in another city while he was forty minutes away with his hand on the small of her back?

Chants 009

+15 Bonus

They had been so sure. That was the part that burned. They had been so certain that Celeste and her ordinary little life would never end up in a room like this that they had stopped being careful. They walked in together. Openly. Like a couple.

And the worst of it, the part that made my jaw tighten, was the dress.

Sera was in black. Cut low. Slit high. Bare down the back to the base of her spine. She looked incredible and indecent and Julian did not say one word about it. He stood there with her hanging off him,

comfortable, proud, smiling at someone across the room.

If it had been me in that dress, I would have heard about it in the car. I would have heard about how it made me look. How it made him look. He would have said it gently, the way he said everything, with a hand on my cheek and a sad little smile, and by the time we got home I would have changed and

thanked him for caring.

Immoral. Indecent. Not for a woman of your standing, Celeste.

Double standards in a tuxedo.

aid. “I am Dominic Ford. Chairman of Veil Holdings.”

came apart with sound.

Dominic Ford, the Veil chairman. The richest man in the country and one of the richest in the world. The ghost nobody had ever photographed, standing thirty feet from me in a tie that matched my dress.

The Dominic I had let into my bed.

The Dominic I had cried in front of in a rainstorm.

The Dominic I had thought was a man with a desk and a salary and a quiet life, who I had felt almost sorry for, who I had decided to keep around for the way he made me feel and the small revenge he could help me take

Threat Domimic..

How?

How was this real?

He kept talking and I stopped hearing it. The words slid past me. I was looking at his hands. He gestured when he spoke, slow, certain, the same hands that had held my hips hard enough to leave marks I had found in the mirror and pressed my thumb into just to feel them. I stood in a crowd of the richest people in the country and thought about exactly what those hands had done to me and felt my face go hot.

Then one phrase reached through

“Helix Research Laboratory.

I came back mo my body

Helix Research,” Dominic said, is the first recipient of the Veil Holdings Foundation grant. Five billion dollars. Weil will be partnering with Helix to bring their work to hundreds of thousands of women. In time, milicons.”

The room inhaled

Five billion. Helix My Helix. The little lab I had kept barely breathing through my marriage, the work Julian had asked me so sweetly to give up, the thing I had let shrink to almost nothing because a loving husband wanted his wife at home.

People were whispering now, hungry, asking each other who owned it, who the lucky ones were, who Helix belonged to

No. I was dreaming. I had to be. This was a dream and I was about to wake up in that too soft bed and reach for him.

Dominic’s voice came again, clear over all of it. would like to invite the representative of Helix Research to join me on this stage. Helix’s lead research scientist Celeste.”

The spotlight moved

I found me like it had been waiting for me the whole time, like someone backstage had a sheet of paper with my exact position on the floor, and it swung across the room and stopped on me and the whole party turned with it a

Hundreds of faces. Cameras lifting. Phones going up. A reporter near the front already firing off shots, the imle white flashes stuttering across my skin.

I stood there in the red dress he had sent me, in the spotlight he had aimed at me, in front of the husband who had not yet realized the woman everyone was staring at was his wife.

My heart slammed against my ribs.

I looked up at the stage.

Dominic was already looking at me.

And when our eyes met, across the whole shocked silent room, the corner of his mouth went up.

He smirked.