Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 12

Chapter 012

SERAPHINE

I felt like I was floating.

The party was everything I had imagined it would be and more. The kind of room I had spent my whole life trying to get into. The chandeliers alone cost more than most people’s houses. The women wore jewelry that did not come with price tags because if you needed to ask, you could not afford it. The men moved through the room like they owned everything outside it too.

And I was here. On Julian’s arm. In a black dress that cost seven hundred thousand dollars and looked every cent of it.

I had won.

Leslie was back in whatever room Julian kept her in between uses, and I was here, at the most important party of the year, turning heads every time I moved. I had felt Julian’s hand tighten on mine when we walked in and I had seen the way other men looked at me and I had thought, yes. This is exactly where I belong.

I was already scanning the room. Old habit. New environment, new opportunities. Billionaires did not come to parties like this alone. There were men in this room who could make Julian look like a stepping stone, which was exactly what he was.

I leaned close to Julian and asked about the chairman. He had mentioned the reveal on the way over, something about a man nobody had ever seen, the biggest mystery in business circles for years.

Julian smiled the way he smiled when he knew something other people did not.

He told me the chairman of Veil Holdings would be unveiled tonight. That no one knew what he looked like. That he had run the largest company in the country from complete anonymity for years and tonight was the first time he would show his face in public.

I felt a small thrill move through me.

A mystery man. The richest man in the country. A man powerful enough to throw a party like this and still arrive as a surprise.

My mind went to work immediately. The way it always did.

If a man like that noticed me. If I could position myself correctly. Even as a side piece, even as one of several, a man like that would set me up for life. I would never have to calculate again. Never have to perform. Never have to kneel on a floor counting to five for a man like Julian.

I would be untouchable.

Even Julian would become irrelevant. Even Dominic and his empty promises and his modest little life and his meager little salary would become a story I told with a laugh at parties exactly like this one.

Yes.

The chairman of Veil Holdings was my target. I had decided. I did not care if he was old. I did not care if he was ugly. I would find him tonight and I would make sure he found me, and I would not leave this room until I had made an impression he could not forget.

The thought barely had time to settle before the man at the podium raised his voice.

I heard the name before I understood it.

Dominic Ford.

I stopped.

The glass in my hand went still.

Dominic Ford.

Why did he have the same name as my husband?

I looked up at the podium and the breath left my body.

He was walking toward the stage.

My husband. My Dominic. In a black suit that did not look like any suit I had ever seen him in, moving through a room full of the richest people in the country like he had built every wall of it himself.

I wiped my eyes.

I wiped them again, not caring about the mascara, not caring about anything, because this could not be real. This was a dream. I had fallen asleep somewhere and this was a dream.

Then I heard Julian’s voice beside me, low and stunned.

“Dominic Ford?”

I looked at Julian.

I looked at Dominic.

It was real

My husband was the chairman of Veil Holdings. My husband was the richest billionaire in the country. The mystery man. The ghost nobody had photographed. The man I had been plotting to seduce ten minutes ago was my own husband and I had not even known his face.

My legs stopped working.

I stood in the middle of that glittering room and felt the ground shift under my heels and I could not move and I could not speak and I could not do anything except stare at the stage where Dominic stood and let the room applause around me like a wave I was drowning in.

I should have known.

The thought came through the shock like a slap.

I should have known. Men who looked like Dominic did not stay poor. Men who carried themselves the way he did, that quiet certainty, that control, that way he had of moving through a room like nothing in it could touch him. I had mistaken it for arrogance. For delusion. For the posturing of a man who had nothing but his face and his body and his confidence to recommend him.

I had been wrong.

He had told me. How many times had he told me. Give me a little more time, Seraphine. I will give you everything you want. I just need a little more time.

I had laughed at him. Behind his back, to his face sometimes, in the quiet of my own mind every day of our marriage. I had laughed at the man who was standing on that stage accepting the applause of every important person in the country.

A wide smile broke across my face before I could stop it.

My husband was a billionaire.

I was the wife of the richest man in the country.

I was already letting go of Julian’s arm. I was already moving toward the stage. I would go to him. I would stand beside him. The whole room would know who I was, that I was Mrs. Dominic Ford, that I had been beside this man the whole time while everyone else was guessing at his face.

I had taken three steps when I heard the words Helix Research Laboratory.

I stopped.

The applause was still going but I had stopped hearing it.

Helix Research.

Why Helix.

I turned back to the stage and listened, and as Dominic spoke, as the number ten billion landed in the room and the gasps rippled outward and the whispers started, I felt the first cold thread of something move through all the warmth and the excitement. 1

Helix Research. My old lab. The lab I had broken away from. The lab I had left behind when Julian’s money gave me the means to build something bigger and better and entirely my own.

But then came the name.

Celeste

And the spotlight moved

And there she was.

I stared.

Celeste was standing in the crowd in a dress that stopped my breath.

I knew that dress. I had wanted that dress. There were only five of them in existence, made by a designer whose waitlist ran three years long, and I had looked at pictures of it on my phone and put it away because even asking Julian for something that cost five million felt like pushing my luck.

Celeste was wearing it.

Celeste, who Julian had always made cover up. Celeste, who I had watched shrink herself for two years into the shape of the wife Julian wanted. Celeste in a five million dollar dress that Julian had apparently gone out and bought for her without being asked.

The questions came fast and ugly.

When had Julian started buying his wife dresses like that. Why had I never seen it. Had he been doing this the whole time, spending on Celeste in private what he complained about spending on me in public.

But the questions dissolved when the spotlight found her face.

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