Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 89

Chapter 89

CELESTE

I did not look back when I reversed out of the driveway.

I had seen Julian’s face through the windshield, red and furious, standing on his own front step like a man who could not understand why the world was not rearranging itself around his feelings. I had seen it and I had looked away and I had driven.

The morning was bright. The city was already moving. I rolled the window down and let the air hit my face and thought about Dominic’s hands and the way Julian had come flying through that gate like he had been launched.

I smiled.

The man had left the house last night, and come back this morning reeking of another woman’s perfume, with his eyes red and his jaw tight and the very particular energy of a man who had been doing something he was planning to deny. And he had stood in my guest room looking at evidence of my own actions and decided I was the one with explaining to do.

His level of hypocrisy was genuinely impressive. Artisanal, almost. The kind of thing you had to work at.

As for Elizabeth and Riley, I simply did not have the bandwidth. They were exhausting in the specific way of people who had decided that causing problems was a personality. In any other chapter of my life I might have engaged. I might have tried, the way I had always tried, to smooth things over and find a way to make everyone comfortable at my own expense.

Not anymore.

The new lab had accommodation. I had already asked Pat to prepare one of the rooms. As far as Julian’s family was concerned, they could have the house. I had better places to be.

Which brought me to the other thing sitting in the back of my mind.

The five billion.

Dominic had invested five billion dollars into my research. His reasons were his own and I was not naive enough to think it was purely altruistic, but that money was real and it was sitting in Helix’s account and it was waiting to be turned into something that actually mattered. Women with endometriosis going undiagnosed for years. Unexplained infertility cases collecting dust on underfunded lab shelves. I had spent years watching Pat keep this work alive on the budget of a small family restaurant and now we had five billion dollars and if I came out of this whole arrangement with nothing to show for it scientifically, I would never forgive myself.

Dominic had his reasons. Fine. I had mine too.

And speaking of Dominic.

What a man.

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I had thought about it more than was probably healthy, and I had arrived at the conclusion that if I had married him from the beginning, even if I had believed he was completely broke, we would have had an extraordinary time. He was the kind of man who made things interesting without trying. Who knew how to read a room and a person and decide exactly what was needed. Who showed up at your house in a fake beard with a toolbox because he missed you and made the whole absurd operation feel like the most natural thing in the world.

I caught myself imagining it sometimes.

Us. Together. Properly. Not this game we were playing but the real thing.

Then I caught myself catching myself and snapped out of it.

Unrealistic. Dumb. We had an arrangement and arrangements had end dates and I needed to keep that clearly in view or I was going to end up in a different kind of mess entirely.

I pulled into the lab car park and sat for a moment with the engine off.

Dominic had taken a risk coming to the house this morning. A real risk, with his security situation, with the assassination threat, with everything Sparrow had said about keeping a low profile. He had shown up anyway in a disguise with a toolbox because he wanted to see me.

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