Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 313

Chapter 313

I opened my mouth, then closed it, then opened it again. No words came out. What could I possibly say to that? What could anyone say to a man who looked at her like she was the sun and he was a planet that had finally, after eons of drifting through the cold emptiness of space, found something worth orbiting?

His expression shifted into something approaching a pout, his lower lip pushing forward just slightly, his brows drawing together in a way that made him look less like a billionaire tycoon and more like a puppy who had been denied a treat. “I know I am being clingy. I know it. I am self-aware enough to recognize that I am being clingy and that clinginess is not an attractive quality in a man my age. But I cannot help the way I feel, Celeste. I have tried. It is impossible.”

I caught the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror, saw the barely suppressed smile playing at the corners of his mouth, and felt my cheeks flush again, this time with embarrassment rather than pleasure. I was fairly certain he had driven Dominic to countless business meetings and never once witnessed his employer pout like a child who had dropped his ice cream cone.

But then I looked back at Dominic, at the ridiculous, wonderful, infuriating, beautiful man who was currently holding my hand like I was a helium balloon and he was afraid I would float away if he loosened his grip for even a second, and I felt the embarrassment melt away, replaced by something that felt an awful lot like joy.

I leaned closer, close enough that my lips brushed the shell of his ear, and whispered so that the driver could not hear. “Between the both of us, I like it when you are clingy.”

I pulled back and fixed him with my most serious expression, the one I reserved for meetings and disciplinary hearings and moments of extreme professional gravity. “Dominic Ford, you are not allowed to ever change. You are perfect exactly the way you are. Do you understand me?”

Then I kissed his cheek, a quick press of lips against skin that left the faintest imprint of berry gloss on his freshly shaved jaw, and I pulled my hand free and slid out of the car before he could respond, before he could pull me back and kiss me properly and make me even later than I already was.

I was smiling as I took my keys from one of my bodyguards, who was waiting on the sidewalk with stoic patience.

The smile was still on my face when I pushed through the revolving doors and crossed the gleaming lobby of Helix, and it was still there when I stepped into the elevator and pressed the button for my floor, and I was still smiling when the elevator doors slid open and I walked into an office and everything went immediately, catastrophically wrong.

Pat was not at her desk.

This was not, in itself, unusual. Pat was sometimes late. Pat was sometimes very late. Pat had once shown up to work at eleven in the morning carrying a coffee cup that had clearly been purchased from a cafe on the other side of the city and a sheepish expression that suggested she had a very good excuse that she was not going to share.

But Pat had also been through something terrible. I had told her I would handle it, and I had handled it, but that did not mean Pat was okay.

I pulled out my phone, went to my office, and was about to call her when my screen lit up with an incoming call. Sierra.

I stared at the name for a long moment, my thumb hovering over the answer button. Sierra was not my favorite person in the world. She had been calling me with increasing frequency now that Felix had decided to become Seraphine’s personal knight in shining armor.

But Sierra was pregnant. And pregnancy, whatever else you could say about it, was not something I was willing to

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hold against a woman who was probably just as confused and frightened and alone as I had felt when I had just caught Julian and Seraphine together.

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