Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 225

Chapter 225

PAT

I sat at my desk long after everyone else had gone home, staring at a spreadsheet I had not actually read in twenty minutes, my mind stuck on the same question circling over and over like water going down a drain.

Why had Kingsley left like that? He had seemed happy here, genuinely happy, the way people are when they have found something they did not expect to find. He had not even collected his final paycheck, and people who quit jobs in a hurry usually still want the money owed to them. He had not.

I picked up the resignation letter from where I had set it down, his signature at the bottom in that neat, deliberate handwriting I had memorized over the past few days, and I read his name like it might give me answers if I stared at it long enough.

Was it me? Was it because we had slept together? Had there been someone else in his life this whole time, some girlfriend or fiancée I knew nothing about, and the guilt had caught up to him and chased hip out the door? But that did not sit right either, because if there was guilt to assign, it was not mine to carry.

He was the one who had called me. He was the one who had asked for my help. He had been inside me, his mouth on my skin, his fingers in my hair, his cock buried so deep I had felt him in my throat, and I had not asked him for a single promise afterward. I had not asked him to take responsibility for me, had not asked for a ring or a title or a conversation about where this was going.

I was a grown woman. I knew how to have a moment without turning it into a referendum on my worth. Still, if I was honest with myself, some small stubborn part of me had hoped it might turn into something more, and that hope was exactly what made his silence sting.

I thought back further, trying to find the thread I was missing, and landed on something he had said right before he disappeared. Watch your back. Seraphine is out to get you. I had not thought much of it at the time. Now it sat in my chest like a stone. How would Kingsley know anything about Seraphine, let alone know her well enough to warn me about her specifically? Was that why he had left? Did his disappearance have something to do with her?

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