Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 333

Chapter 333

I had proposed the affair in the first place, had I not? I was the one who suggested the arrangement, back when I still believed I could separate my body from my heart and keep one safe while offering up the other. I had broken my own rules by falling for him, and if this was the price, then so be it. There was no loss here. I had to look at the bigger picture.

The bigger picture: I had received five billion. I had easily gotten divorced from Julian. I had enjoyed what it meant to be pleasured by a real man, to reach the highest peak of excitement with someone who cared about my pleasure as much as his own. I had benefited. I had come out ahead.

There was no loss here.

I repeated it to myself like a mantra, like if I said it enough times it would become true. But even as I told myself all of this, even as I laid out the cold, rational evidence in my mind with the precision of a laboratory report, I could not bring myself to start the car. My hands were still trembling on the steering wheel, a fine vibration that could see more than feel, and my chest was so tight I had to take shallow breaths through my mouth.

The suffocating weight of it pressed down on me until I could not sit in that car for one more second. I shoved the door open and stumbled out, gulping the afternoon air like a woman who had been underwater for too long. I stood beside my car with one hand braced against the roof and the other pressed flat against my chest, feeling my heart hammer against my palm like a trapped bird, and I tried to breathe.

That was when I noticed the black SUV still idling at the edge of the parking lot. My bodyguards, sitting in the front seats, pretending not to watch me. Dominic’s bodyguards. Were they still mine? Was Dominic giving me one more day of grace before withdrawing them, the way a man might let a former employee keep their company car for the weekend before repossessing it on Monday?

I walked toward their vehicle on legs that felt disconnected from my body, and I tapped on the passenger window with two knuckles. The window rolled down. The one in the driver’s seat looked up at me with an expression of careful neutrality, the look of a man who had seen his employer’s girlfriend do many strange things and was not about to comment on any of them.

“I am feeling sleepy.” I held out my car keys, and my hand did not tremble because I was gripping the keys so hard the metal bit into my palm. “One of you, drive me back to Helix. The other can follow in this vehicle.”

He took the keys without a word and climbed out of the SUV. The other one slid into the driver’s seat of their car, and I got into the passenger side of my own vehicle, letting the designated driver adjust the seat and the mirrors and the steering wheel while I stared out the window at the sky and focused very hard on not falling apart.

At Helix, I thanked the bodyguards with a nod that I hoped looked dignified rather than robotic, took my keys, and went straight to the lab without stopping to speak to anyone. I told myself I would not sulk. I would not wallow. I would focus on the samples I had been working on, the Pat collection that had been sitting in the refrigerated storage unit for nearly a week now, waiting for me to run the analysis I had been too distracted to complete.

The lab was quiet, the hum of the freezers and the soft hiss of the ventilation system the only sounds. I pulled on my gloves and my safety glasses and I got to work. Pipetting. Centrifuging. Running gels. The familiar rhythms of laboratory work, the rituals I had performed thousands of times, the motions that required just enough concentration to keep the surface of my mind occupied. Each time a thought of Dominic surfaced, his smile, his voice, the weight of his hand on the small of my back, I pushed it under with the same brute-force determination I had once used to push through my doctoral dissertation.

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