Glorious Rivals(33)

Grayson didn’t know whether or not she’d allowed herself to dance, but clearly, something had shifted in her. “It’s liberating in a way, isn’t it?” he said quietly. “Letting it all come.”

“I wouldn’t say all.” She was still holding back.

That’s a no, then, Grayson thought, on the dancing.

Grayson walked toward her, but before he could get too close, she turned to face him again. “We should get back to the game.” Lyra looked to the violin in Grayson’s left hand—and the bow in his right. “Can I borrow your bow?”

Unable to even guess at what she intended, Grayson lowered the violin and handed the bow to her. Lyra sank gracefully to the floor, set her music box down, and flipped it open. The expression on her face difficult to read, she dug the sharp end of the bow into the velvet lining of the box, tearing at the fabric.

“A hunch, I presume?” Grayson asked.

The velvet began to rip beneath her assault. “Maybe I just felt like taking a risk,” Lyra said. “Or doing some damage.” She set the bow down and grabbed the torn edge of the lining.

Taking a risk. Doing some damage. Grayson could not help thinking that, to Lyra, he undoubtedly looked like a risk, too. And the two of them together…

The right kind of disaster just waiting to happen.

There was another rip. “Got it,” Lyra said, tearing the velvet lining the rest of the way out of the music box.

Grayson closed the space between them and looked down at the silver of the box, at what Lyra had found beneath the lining—the reward for her risk, the result of the damage she’d wreaked.

A symbol, etched into metal.

“Infinity.” Lyra traced it with the tip of her finger, and then her eyes found their way to Grayson’s once more. “Or eight.”

Chapter 30

ROHAN

We’ve searched long enough. There are no secret compartments in this piano. No symbols. No clues.” Savannah arched a brow, as if daring Rohan to argue. He did not. There was nothing hidden in, on, or around the piano—just the instrument itself, a bench, the beach, and strings of additional lights that had burst to life the moment they’d lifted the piano’s lid.

Rohan slid onto the bench, his fingers lightly trailing the piano’s keys. “Open the music box,” he told Savannah. “Mine or yours.”

A piano like this one—a grand piano, a Steinway, by the looks of it—was meant to be played, which Rohan suspected might well be the point.

Savannah opened her music box. Rohan listened and began to play. He named the notes in the melody aloud as he did. “D, E, D, C—”

The telltale sound of Savannah unzipping her jacket caused Rohan to pause. He turned his head to see Savannah holding a permanent marker, which she uncapped as she shrugged off her white jacket. Without hesitation, she wrote the letters he’d just recited down on her bare arm in a perfect, enticing scrawl.

D, E, D, C.

That marker was decidedly not a part of the game. “Careful, love,” Rohan warned. “You never know who’s watching.”

They’d been told to bring nothing with them to the island.

“After I broke into your room this morning, I broke into Gigi’s. The marker was hers.” It was obvious to Rohan that saying her twin’s name cost Savannah, but she rather expertly pretended it hadn’t. “I’m guessing my sister found herself a loophole. She always does, and clearly, the game makers allowed it.”

From her standing position, Savannah looked down at Rohan, seated on the bench. “Tell me to be careful again as if I am ever anything but, and I will make my irritation known.”

“I assure you, love: Your irritation is always known.” Rohan stood, closed her music box, then flipped it open again, causing the sequence of songs to start playing from the beginning. He sat back down and joined in with the melody when he reached the point at which he’d last stopped.

More notes recited out loud. More letters added to Savannah’s bare arm.

Midway through the tango, Rohan shut the box again—to irritate her and to allow her time to catch up. “A truly cautious person in your shoes,” he pointed out, “would not be here.”

No one with the least bit of caution would go against the Hawthorne family or their heiress.

“Am I to believe that you don’t know the difference between being careful and being cautious?” Savannah added the last few notes—more black ink on porcelain skin—then flipped the box open again herself.

As he waited for the music to catch up, Rohan replied to Savannah’s rhetorical question. “Caution is hesitation—of which you have none.”

What are distractions, Rohan?

He joined back in with the music and forced himself to keep playing, until at long last they reached “Clair de lune.” He shut the box. He didn’t need it. Not for this song. Rohan played straight through, bits and pieces jumping out to him as he played, as Savannah scrawled the letters onto her willowy arm, heading down toward the inside of her wrist.

D, A, G, A…

E, E, F…

D, C…

B.

Rohan removed his fingers from the keys. “I’m surprised you don’t play,” he told Savannah, nodding to the Steinway.

“What makes you so certain that I do not?”