Glorious Rivals(45)

Lyra felt those words like an ache in her soul. “Avery is your family.” Lyra could understand that, and just saying the words out loud made Savannah’s warning matter that much less. Life wasn’t a competition about being loved more.

Love didn’t work that way.

Grayson looked at Lyra through his new mask. “And speaking of my family,” he said, reaching to touch her face, “I made you a promise. I have brothers to track down, and you have a hint to look for.”

Tell him.

Back at the boathouse, when Lyra had kissed Grayson, it hadn’t been because she’d let go and given in to this thing between them. Kissing him, in that moment, had been about reclaiming control, about proving to herself that Eve had chosen the wrong pawn.

But right here, right now, in the last moments of before, Lyra wanted more than that. She wanted something real. She wanted to let go, even if it was only for a moment.

She wanted him, even if it didn’t last.

“Grayson?” His name felt familiar on her lips. “Before you go… It’s a little cold.” Lyra raised her chin and looked at him—just looked at him. “Give me your jacket?”

There was that smile again, bringing the world to its knees. Grayson undid his tuxedo jacket. He slipped it off and put it over her shoulders.

It smelled like him. Cedar and fallen leaves.

Grayson raised a hand to the side of Lyra’s face, and Lyra let herself lean into it, let herself look at him and only him.

“May I kiss you, Lyra Kane?” That question. That voice. Grayson Hawthorne.

“Kiss me,” Lyra said, “one last time.”

“I assure you,” Grayson replied, “it will not be.” He brought his lips slowly down to hers, and this time, when they kissed, it wasn’t timeless. It wasn’t desperate or a revelation or an attempt to prove anything. This kiss was raw and long, aching and brutal, and every bone in Lyra’s body said the same thing.

This wasn’t a mistake.

And when it was over, when their lips finally parted, Lyra didn’t even hesitate. “There’s something I have to tell you.” With a before like that, she could just almost believe in a different kind of after. “I know who put me in the game.”

Chapter 40

GRAYSON

Eve. Grayson couldn’t believe that he hadn’t seen it. He’d known quite well that Eve had been given temporary access to the old man’s List. And of course she was meddling in the Grandest Game. Of course she’d handpicked a player she believed hated the Hawthorne family.

Had Eve realized that Lyra had reached out to him, that Grayson had looked for her? It hardly mattered. Eve just couldn’t let them go—any of them but especially him. Eve had gotten under Grayson’s skin once. She didn’t live there anymore. That was the thing about learning to let all your thoughts and feelings come—once you did, those thoughts and feelings were also free to go.

And Grayson was free to take a moment, even after Lyra had told him what Eve had offered her, to live in the now. The chill in the night air was even greater on the ocean, but Lyra was warm. Her skin. Her breath in the air. And she’d let him give her his jacket. She’d let him take care of her.

I told you, Jamie, Lyra isn’t a threat. She isn’t Eve.

“I should have told you sooner,” Lyra said. “I should have told you immediately.”

Eve had offered her everything she wanted—information about her father, enough money to save the family home and then some—and Lyra was berating herself for taking less than an hour and a half to tell him, to put her trust in him.

“Eve has a knack for manipulating people,” Grayson told Lyra. “You did just fine.”

It took three or four seconds for her to accept him at his word. “She truly didn’t know about the lily at the helipad, Grayson. She put me in the game, but that calla wasn’t her.”

The pieces of the puzzle shifted in Grayson’s mind, and he thought about Brady Daniels and his Calla. About Jameson’s insistence that the name Alice Hawthorne not even be spoken. About the marble calla lily in the music box.

“We’ll figure this out,” Grayson told Lyra.

“I’ll search the yacht for hints—and lemniscates.” Lyra tossed her dark hair over her shoulders. “You go talk to your brothers and Avery.”

“Was that a suggestion,” Grayson said, “or an order?”

Lyra arched a brow. “Do you take orders?”

“From you?” Grayson gave her a look. “Absolutely.”

Chapter 41

GRAYSON

A spiraling black and silver staircase took Grayson from the third floor of the yacht to the fourth. The uppermost level was nothing but a deck, as close to a roof as one could get on a ship.

Jameson was exactly where Grayson had expected to find him: standing at the edge, leaning on the railing but not standing on top of it anymore.

“We need to talk,” Grayson said.

“Ominous,” Jameson replied without turning around, his nothing-risked-nothing-gained, push-the-limits tone one that Grayson recognized all too well. “Planning to explain why you requested a perimeter run of the island?”

“That,” Grayson said. “And I have questions.”

“No, Gray. You don’t.”