Glorious Rivals (The Grandest Game, #2) (34)

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?”

Rohan stood, removing her ability to look down at him. “I could tell you, but where would the fun be in that?” He moved toward her, resisting the urge to run his fingers along the letters on her arm. “On the topic of caution,” he said, letting his gaze do the exploring for him, “I was approached by Jameson Hawthorne.”

She did not need to know the details, but for Rohan’s purposes, she did need to take care.

“Jameson is wary—uncharacteristically so. It seems the game makers suspect there are larger forces of some sort at play here. Some kind of threat.” Rohan shifted his gaze to Savannah’s face, and she shifted hers to the ocean—what little of it they could see with such delicate light.

“Does it bother you? Being out here at night?” Savannah asked. “So close to the water?” That was a subject change—a deliberate one.

“Does it bother you,” Rohan replied, “using a marker that belonged to your sister?”

Savannah didn’t say a word about Gigi. Rohan didn’t expect her to. But in the contours of her silence, he had his answer.

“You love her, fiercely.”

Savannah kept her gaze trained on the water. “I was our father’s favorite,” she said. “And Gigi was mine.”

Was. Rohan rolled that over in his mind. Gigi knows exactly how your father died, doesn’t she, love? She kept it from you. Rohan couldn’t help thinking that some people didn’t feel pain.

Some people channeled it.

“I never did learn to swim all that well,” Rohan said—tit for tat, a truth for a truth. “But well enough, I suppose.” He let his gaze travel from Savannah’s face back to her arm to her wrist. He lifted his hand and stroked two fingers, feather-light and daring, over the place on her wrist where he could feel her pulse.

“Is this the part where the claws come out?” Rohan said.

“The claws are always out.” Savannah arched her brow. “As I’m sure you remember.”

“I have an excellent memory.” He stroked her wrist once more.

Savannah raised her chin. “I want the photographs. The one you stole from Brady Daniels and the one we found in his room.”

“A way to divert suspicion should the game makers start to think that you might be up to something?” Rohan guessed. “One photo, a person could excuse as sentimentality. Two identical photos, on the other hand…” He trailed off meaningfully.

“Two is something,” Savannah agreed. “May I have them or not?” She’d yet to take her wrist from him. Rohan could still feel her pulse.

He decided to oblige her—for strategic reasons, of course. He gave her the photographs. “Fair warning, love: I’ll just steal them back.”

“You’re welcome to try.” Savannah turned and started walking away. “I hope you memorized the sequence on my arm,” she called back. “It’s high time we both tried working this puzzle on our own.”

“Rest assured,” Rohan called after her, “I know every inch of it.” Every inch of you. “First one to a breakthrough gets to make the other one grovel.”

Distractions were weakness, but motivation? Motivation was gold.





Chapter 31





GIGI


As it turned out, it took a very long time for even a highly motivated individual to cut through silk bindings with a jagged rock, but there were two kinds of optimists in the world: those who hoped and those who madly persevered.

Gigi was the latter. At long, long last, a small rip gave way to a larger large one, which gave way to a strip of silk fabric falling to the floor. “Huzzah!”

Despite her optimism, Gigi had not thought much past step one of her plan. The obvious step two was to free her ankles, which she did, but as for step three…

Gigi felt her way to the door and tried throwing herself bodily against it a couple of times. No go. She changed tactics. It took her a full five minutes of crawling around in the dark, searching the wood floor with her hands to find the iron candle holder. Even without any light, she was ninety-nine percent sure that she could climb the stone stairs if she hugged the wall and took her time. And once she got to the top…