Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 295

Chapter 295

SCARLETT

The car smelled of leather and the driver’s cheap cologne, a combination so aggressively masculine it practically had chest hair. I sat in the back seat with my hands folded in my lap like a good little captive, watching the city lights smear past the window in long amber streaks while Julian’s two gorillas sat up front saying absolutely nothing.

My jaw ached. My knees were sore from kneeling on that penthouse floor for what felt like half the night. And my throat, God, my throat felt like I had swallowed a fistful of sandpaper and then chased it with a shot of hydrochloric acid.

Sparrow had not been gentle with my mouth, which was precisely what I had expected from a man with his reputation, but expecting something and experiencing it were two very different animals. I ran my tongue oyer my teeth and tasted him still, salt and something sharper underneath, and wondered briefly whether the universe had a complaint department I could file a grievance with.

But beneath the physical discomfort, beneath the exhaustion that had settled into my bones like lead, there was something else moving through me, something that felt dangerously close to hope. I had found him. After all these years of planning and scheming and spreading my legs for men I would have rather kneed in the groin, I had finally found the one person on this earth who could bring Big Bryan to his knees, and he had agreed to help.

Granted, his agreement came with a price tag that involved handing over myself and my girls like party favors, but in my experience, men who did things out of the goodness of their hearts were either lying or running for public office, and Sparrow was neither.

“You okay back there?”

The driver’s voice cut through my thoughts like a butter knife through granite, clumsy and not particularly effective. I glanced at the rearview mirror and caught his eyes, small and suspicious, the kind of eyes that reported everything back to Julian with the enthusiasm of a teacher’s pet.

“Just tired,” I said, and let my voice carry the kind of weariness that required no further explanation. “Your boss works a girl hard.”

The driver grunted. The other one, the one in the passenger seat who had not spoken a single word since I got onto the car, shifted in his seat but did not turn around. I filed that away, the silent one was the one to watch. The talkative ones were always easier to read.

I closed my eyes and let my head fall back against the leather seat, but my mind was moving at a sprint. Tomorrow. Sparrow wanted Tasha tomorrow. The thought of it made something twist in my stomach, a knot of dread and fury and helplessness that I had become intimately familiar with over the years. Tasha, my Tasha, the girl I had spent my entire adult life trying to protect, was going to have to walk into that penthouse and get on her knees for a man who would use her and discard her like all the others. Unless I could find a way around it. Unless I could outsmart him the way I had outsmarted everyone else who had tried to own me.

But Sparrow was not Julian. Julian was a narcissist with more money than sense and a libido that did most of his thinking for him. Sparrow was something else entirely; sharper, colder, more dangerous.

The kind of man who looked at you and saw every angle, every weakness, every lie you had ever told. I had knelt before him with tears on my face and he had not been moved. He had been amused. That was the difference. Julian wanted to possess me; Sparrow wanted to see what I would do next.

By the time the car pulled into the garage of Julian’s apartment building, I had the skeleton of a plan forming in

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