Glorious Rivals(60)
“They’re fine, but between you and me, Nash has always been a bit of a mother hen.”
“Are we talking about the same Nash Hawthorne?” Lyra asked. “Cowboy hat. Yea high.”
Grayson’s lips curved up on the ends. “Trust me.”
I do. Lyra should have found that unsettling, but as she fixed her gaze on the ocean sunrise once more, Grayson did the same beside her, and they fell into an in easy silence, far easier than it should have been—until it was broken by the familiar thump of helicopter blades.
Back so soon? Lyra looked up. In the sky, a different helicopter hooked toward the yacht’s helipad, coming in for a landing.
“How many helicopters does your family have?” she yelled.
Before Grayson could answer, Xander’s voice sounded from the yacht’s many speakers. “Players! Your chariot has arrived. Make your way to the bow of the ship. And if I may offer a few parting words…”
Xander paused for dramatic effect, and Lyra thought about that fact that there wouldn’t be another interlude like this one. No more events. No more ballgowns. No more masks. Just clue to clue to clue—until the end.
“Live long. Prosper. Hydrate.” As Xander’s voice echoed over the bow, the helicopter touched down. “Make good choices. We’ll see you at the finish line. Xander Hawthorne, out.”
One by one, the other players arrived on the front of the yacht. The helicopter’s blades stopped spinning, and the pilot’s door opened. A man stepped out. He was wearing tattered jeans. Facial hair covered the bottom half of his face, a deeper brown than his hair, which had the faintest red tint to it, closer to mahogany than auburn.
She felt Grayson register the man’s presence.
“Who’s that?” Lyra asked, her voice low.
“That,” Grayson told her, “is Toby Hawthorne.”
Chapter 51
GRAYSON
It was an achievement, feeling like the world’s biggest liar while staring at a man who’d once faked being dead for twenty years. But Grayson had always been an overachiever—though technically, he’d dealt with all of Lyra’s questions with a minimal number of lies. Each deceptive truth had come more easily than the last.
The old man would have approved. Grayson let that grating thought come as he took in the sight of his grandfather’s namesake and only son: Toby Hawthorne—Toby Blake now, to the world at large. To Grayson, his mysterious uncle would have been little more than a stranger were it not for Avery, for the fact that Toby loved her like a daughter because he’d loved Avery’s mother in that undying, infinite, Hawthorne kind of way.
What the hell is he doing here?
“We’re one seat short in the back,” Toby called, his gaze locking on to Grayson’s. “You can ride in the cockpit with me.”
Grayson waited until the chopper was booted back up to speak. “I take it Avery called you.”
Thanks to the headphones he and Toby were wearing, Grayson’s words were delivered directly to the other man’s ears. A divider between the cockpit and the passenger section of the chopper provided additional assurance: No one else could hear them.
“Nash called, actually.” Toby tossed a glance in Grayson’s direction, pulling the helicopter into the air as casually as if he were driving a car. “Your brother seemed to be under the impression that the rest of you could use a little extra adult supervision, though he would not tell me why.”
Mother hen, Grayson thought. “I’m twenty-two,” he told Toby. “Hardly in need of adult supervision.”
“I remember twenty-two.” Toby curved the helicopter around in a long arc, setting them back on the path toward Hawthorne Island. “I spent a good portion of twenty-two working on a fishing crew in Thailand. I hate boats. Hate the water.” Toby’s voice was gravelly in a way that suggested it didn’t get all that much use. “I suppose you could say that I was trying to hate being twenty-two as much as I loathed myself.” Toby’s eyes flicked toward Grayson. “You just resisted the urge to say that Hawthornes do not try.”
Grayson had to admit: The man wasn’t wrong.
“My father did a number on you boys,” Toby commented, and Grayson thought again about how easy it had been for him to build a wall in his mind around everything he needed Lyra not to know. He sat with the discomfort of that thought until it began to dissipate—and then he changed the subject.
“Did Nash also tell you that Eve is interfering with the game?” Grayson asked.
“He did.” Toby’s brow furrowed then smoothed with the air of a man who’d spent far longer than Grayson had learning to let things come. “I really thought I was getting somewhere with her, but the only version of me that Eve wants is the version that has nothing to do with Avery at all.”
Eve was Toby’s daughter, but Avery was Hannah’s, and that meant that Avery would never be nothing to the man. Toby had been there the night Avery was born. He’d loved Avery long before she’d known that he existed, and Grayson knew that Eve looked at Avery and saw everything that should have been hers. Toby. The Hawthorne fortune. Acceptance as one of them. Incredible, undying love.
“Avery is Eve’s target.” Once Grayson verbalized the obvious, it was like a line of dominoes had been knocked over in his mind. If Eve wanted Lyra to lose, that strongly suggested that she wanted a different player to win. There were limited suspects, and even fewer who could pose a threat to Avery, and Grayson knew for a fact that Eve had everything she needed to manipulate one player in particular.