Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 79

Chapter 79

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“I do not have a problem taking the handyman into my room,” she said. “But I hope the message is worth

the drama.”

“I guarantee it,” I told her.

I also wanted to make sure the timing was right. Early morning, before the house woke up fully, when both of us would be fresh and alert and could still attend to everything else the day required afterward. A man in disguise arriving at noon was suspicious. A handyman arriving at seven in the morning was just a handyman.

After the call ended I sat in the quiet of my hotel room and thought about her face when she realized the handyman was me.

I was already smiling.

Which was embarrassing.

I was the chairman of Veil Holdings. I had survived multiple assassination attempts, buried my parents, built an empire from nothing, and operated in complete anonymity for years. I was not a man who smiled at ceilings because a woman said she did not have a problem taking him into her room.

And yet.

I set an early alarm, which I rarely did, and went to sleep.

–

The next day came like a flash.

Celeste was extraordinary, and there were moments in that room, moments I had not planned for and could not have anticipated, when I understood for the first time what people meant when they said someone made them feel at home. Not the building. Not the location. The person.

I had not felt at home anywhere since I was fourteen years old.

I left before I could think too carefully about what that meant.

When Sparrow pulled the car away from the gate, I looked back at the house through the tinted window.

Riley and Elizabeth had tried to break down the door with, of all things, a hammer and a fire poker. I had heard them through the door, the dull rhythmic thudding of two women who had committed to a plan that was not working and lacked the self-awareness to stop. The door had held. It was a good door. I made a mental note to compliment Celeste on her choice of guest room.

But those two women hated her. That was not the comfortable low-level dislike of in-laws who thought their son had married beneath them. That was the specific, targeted hatred of people who had decided that Celeste was an obstacle and were actively looking for leverage.

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And then Julian had come flying through that gate like a man who had been personally called by God to address the situation.

“Three against one,” I said, not to Sparrow specifically. Just to the air.

“She handled it before you got there,” Sparrow pointed out from the driver’s seat.

“That is not the point.”

“What is the point?”

I did not have a satisfying answer for that.

“Boss, Sparrow said, his eyes still on the road. “Put your beard back on.”

I looked at him in the rearview mirror.

“We are not at the hotel yet,” he added. “Until we catch whoever wants you dead, you do not go anywhere without the full disguise. Not even in a moving car.”

I picked up the beard from the box beside me and put it back on.

Sparrow watched me do this in the rearview mirror with the expression of a man who had many thoughts he was professionally obligated to keep to himself.

We went back to the hotel. I wanted sleep. I had earned sleep. I had been a handyman all morning and I

deserved to lie down.

But then, my phone rang.

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