Glorious Rivals(82)

“What are you doing?”

Lyra would have thought that was obvious. “Taking your pulse.” He looked so calm, so steady, but his heart—it was racing. “If I turn your wrist back over,” Lyra whispered, “if I look at your watch, what am I going to see?”

She didn’t wait for an answer. She tried to turn his wrist back over, and Grayson’s free hand caught hers. For the longest time, the two of them stayed there in the bed, in a silent standoff, her hand on his arm and his on hers, neither one of them saying a word.

“Don’t look.” Grayson broke first—and so did his voice. “I am asking you not to look,” he said, his entire body taut now, “the way that I asked Emily not to jump.”

Lyra’s heart twisted, but in the back of her mind, all she could hear was Savannah and her warning, a warning Lyra had set aside, a warning that hadn’t come back to her even once since the yacht.

When all is said and done, when it matters most…

Lyra bowed her head to look.

Chapter 70

GRAYSON

Grayson twisted his wrist, angling the face of his watch out of Lyra’s view. He had no idea what the message he’d just received said, but the last messages he’d sent had indicated that Toby knew—and not just about Eve.

About Alice. Alice, whom if Lyra was to be believed—and he did believe Lyra Kane, body and soul—might have been there the night that Lyra’s father had died. Grayson’s mind went to Jameson saying that he’d been drugged, saying that his memory of what had happened to him in Prague was minimal, fractured—all feelings, few specifics. Grayson remembered thinking that Jameson knew more than he consciously remembered—the calla lily, for one—but Grayson hadn’t made the connection between Jameson’s splintered memory and Lyra’s.

What if she didn’t repress that night because of the trauma? What if someone repressed it for her?

Across from him, Lyra Catalina Kane was looking down, but she still couldn’t quite see the face of his watch—not yet. Grayson let loose of her arm and twisted his wrist as far as he could without fully breaking her hold.

“It’s funny,” Lyra said, bringing her amber eyes back up to his face. “Playing the Grandest Game, you start to get a sense for when you’re missing something.” She swallowed.

Grayson went to pull his arm back, and Lyra’s grip tightened.

“Don’t you dare,” she said.

“Lyra.” Grayson couldn’t bring himself to say more than that. No more lies. No more half-truths.

“Show me what your watch says.” Lyra’s voice shook. “Show me, Grayson.”

Words threatened to lodge themselves in his throat, but he forced them out. “I cannot do that, Lyra.”

She dropped Grayson’s wrist. “You know something. Your brothers and Avery know something, don’t they? About Alice. Back on the yacht, after you talked to them about the calla—I believed you when you said that it was nothing, that they knew nothing. I trusted you.”

“I know.” Grayson wanted nothing more than to touch her now. “If you will just—”

“Don’t,” she bit out. “Show me your watch, Grayson.”

He’d asked her not to look. She had, but he’d twisted his arm before she could read the message. And now, she was the one asking, telling him what she needed.

Slowly, Grayson turned his wrist back over. A message stared up at them both: O.M. LOCATED.

Alisa had found Odette. The message itself was less damning than Grayson had feared it would be, but Lyra scrolled back.

“Toby knows something,” Lyra read. “Not about Eve, apparently. So what exactly does your uncle Toby know, Grayson? Something about his mother? About Alice?”

I was trying to protect my family, and I was trying to protect you. Grayson knew that Lyra Kane would not thank him for that.

“And Odette has been located? Was she missing?” Lyra fired questions off, one after another. “I don’t understand. Make me understand, Grayson.” Lyra gave him a second—just one—to reply. “Why does your family consider me a liability? A threat.”

“They do not think you are a threat.” Grayson’s voice stayed even, no matter the sensation in his chest: a tightening of muscles, a ripping of something at his core.

“If I’m not the threat…” The expression in Lyra’s golden brown eyes shifted as she realized the full implication of that. “Alice. She’s the threat. And I’m a liability because I know she’s alive. I guess that makes Odette a liability, too, since she’s the one who told us. And you—”

Grayson cut her off. “I,” he told Lyra, his voice breaking, “am forever pulling people back from cliffs.”

Lyra just looked at him. “I don’t want your protection.”

Grayson knew that. She wanted him. And though he knew exactly how this was going to play out, he could not stop his reply. “You have it nonetheless.”

For the longest time, Lyra just stared at him, and then she left the bed and stood, her feet shoulder width apart, beside it. “I have a game to play.”

For years, Grayson had not been capable of running to anything or anyone. The risks of losing someone else were too great. But this time, he was out of the bed in a heartbeat.