Glorious Rivals(88)

His brothers and Avery would have liked Lyra. They would have welcomed her, if she’d been anyone else.

Damn Alice Hawthorne. Damn Eve for bringing Lyra into the Grandest Game not knowing what she was unleashing. Damn Jameson and his secrets. But above all…

Damn me. It took everything in Grayson not to walk right into the ocean, not to submerge himself in the bitterly cold water to swim and swim and push it all down. But he’d worked too hard and too long to give in to old habits now.

Don’t fight it. Grayson’s breath went jagged as he let it all come. What he and Lyra could have been. What they should have been. Why not me?

“I should have told her everything.” Grayson said the words out loud, every muscle in his body tense, his lungs screaming like each breath was an assault on his body. No matter his intentions, the truth had still come out in the end—enough of it, anyway, to ensure that Lyra would look and look and look for more.

Grayson should have known. He had known. The piper had to be paid either way.

This is all on me. It was Grayson’s nature to carry failure with him—mistakes carved into hollow places he’d never been able to fill—but no part of him felt hollow now.

She filled him.

In his mind’s eye, Grayson could see Lyra—stretching for a chandelier overhead, the lines of her body damn near impossible; amber eyes meeting his from behind a masquerade mask.

He could hear her. Give me your jacket?

She was probably never going to forgive him. She’d told him exactly what she needed and why, and he had still denied her the truth.

My mistake.

But Grayson refused to carry this one with him, refused to let this be one more regret, refused to stand by, frozen, while she was out there somewhere, hurting, when he could at least try to make it hurt less.

You just resisted the urge to say that Hawthornes do not try. Toby’s voice rang in Grayson’s mind, and Grayson thought about other things Toby had said—about his Hannah, about regrets. Maybe if I’d learned to love differently, I could have loved her better. I certainly couldn’t have loved her more.

This close to the water’s edge, Grayson could hear the waves. He couldn’t see them in the dark, but he felt them breaking against stone, and somewhere in his mind, he heard Lyra’s voice.

Maybe some of us need to break to be whole.

“Maybe some of us do,” Grayson whispered. Maybe that was the secret to loving without reservation, without fear.

A broken man could try. And try. And try.

To love her differently. To love her better.

Grayson shuddered. He threw back his head, raising his face to the night sky, and he let it all out. There was a poem he’d always liked by Elizabeth Bishop about the art of losing things and people and dreams.

He’d lost.

And he’d lost.

And he’d lost.

And this time, he was not letting go.

Chapter 76

ROHAN

More than an hour after the spotlight had shined the word LIE into the sky, Rohan arrived at the boathouse to find that someone else had beaten him there.

“Think we’re the first?” Savannah asked, her back to him.

It had taken Rohan far too long to figure out this clue. “We?” he said.

Savannah turned around. Lightning flashed over the mainland. Thunder came after a few seconds’ delay, and Savannah seemed to take that as her cue. She walked toward him, the dim lighting of the boathouse doing nothing to disguise the set of her jaw, the tension between her upper and lower lips.

She stopped all of a foot away from Rohan. “I never gave you permission to be the one who ended things,” she said, a queen to the last.

Rohan let the words slide over him, proverbial water off the duck’s back—or a particularly wily fox’s. He was on the verge of disregarding her altogether, as much as anyone could disregard Savannah Grayson, when she spoke again.

“You were listening when Brady made me that offer, weren’t you?” Savannah was far too insightful for her own good. “I don’t know how you could have been, but logic dictates that you were.”

“Does it?” Rohan might have felt some level of admiration at her conclusion, if he’d been in the state to feel anything at all. “I suppose logic likes dictating things—as do you, Ms. Grayson.”

“I do not care for being manipulated, Rohan. Not by you. Not by Brady Daniels or his sponsor. Not by Hawthornes. Not by Eve.” This was a Savannah Grayson who’d had her fill—a dangerous Savannah Grayson indeed.

She held something up between her middle and index fingers. The photographs.

Rohan watched as Savannah walked slowly to the end of the largest dock slip, staring out at the storm, seemingly impervious to the water blowing in off the ocean. She lifted the hand that held the photographs of Calla Thorp and those damning invisible messages from Brady’s sponsor, and then her fingers parted. “Take them,” she told Rohan, as the photographs dropped to the dock. “If you want them. They’ll improve your case against Brady.”

The wind caught the edge of the pictures, and Rohan moved in a flash to catch them just in time.

“What game are you playing, Savvy?” Rohan had not meant to use the nickname, but there it was.

“All of them.” Lightning flashed behind Savannah. “You thought I was going to take Brady’s offer.” Her voice was measured. “Given that, the most strategic move on your part would have been to bide your time and wait, to pull your enemy closer than any friend. But you didn’t.”