The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games, #3)(64)

I hoped, for Xander’s sake, that he really wasn’t involved in any of this.

“Need a hand?” Xander offered. When some people got nervous, they clammed up. Xander babbled. “I’m pretty good with mechanical things, unless or maybe especially if they’re flammable.”

That got a chuckle. “Spoken like someone with too much time on their hands.” Isaiah Alexander rolled out from underneath the car and stood. He was tall like Xander but broader through the shoulders. His skin was a darker brown, but their eyes were the same.

“You looking for a job?” he asked Xander, like wayward teenagers showed up here all the time with a trio of teenage girls and several bodyguards in tow.

“I’m Xander.” Xander swallowed. “Hawthorne.”

“I know who you are,” Isaiah said, his tone no-nonsense but somehow gentle. “Looking for a job?”

“Maybe.” Xander shifted his weight from foot to foot and then resumed nervous babbling. “I should probably warn you that I’ve dismantled four and a half Porsches past the point of no return in the last two years. But in my defense, they had it coming, and I needed the parts.”

Isaiah took that in stride. “Like to build things, do you?”

The question—and the slight upward curve of his lips—almost undid me, so I couldn’t imagine how hard it hit Xander.

“You’re not surprised to see me.” Xander sounded stunned—this from a person who could literally stun himself and proceed without missing a beat. “I thought you would be,” he blurted out. “Surprised. Or that you wouldn’t know who I was. I prepared a mental flowchart that geared my reaction toward your exact level of surprise and knowledge.”

Isaiah Alexander looked at his son, his expression steady. “Was it three-dimensional?”

“My mental flowchart?” Xander threw his hands up in the air. “Of course it was three-dimensional! Who makes two-dimensional flowcharts?”

“Nerds?” Thea suggested, and then she stage-whispered, “Ask me who makes three-dimensional flowcharts, Xander.”

“Thea.” Rebecca nudged her.

“I’m helping,” Thea insisted, and sure enough, Xander seemed to steady a little.

“You knew about me?” he asked Isaiah, quiet but more intense than I’d ever seen him.

Isaiah met Xander’s eyes. “Since before you were born.”

Then why weren’t you there? I thought with a ferocity that stole my breath. My own father had been mostly absent, but this was Xander, king of distractions and chaos, BHFF, who’d known about this man for months but had only come here for me.

I couldn’t bear the idea of him getting hurt.

“Do you want me to go?” Xander asked Isaiah hesitantly.

“Would I have asked you if you wanted a job,” Isaiah replied, “if I did?”

Xander blinked. Repeatedly. “I came here because we need to talk to you about Vincent Blake,” he said, like that was the one thing he could say of the thousands pounding through his brain.

Isaiah cocked an eyebrow. “Sounds like a want more than a need to me.”

“That’s what people say about second lunch,” Xander replied, reverting to babble mode, “and it’s a dirty lie.”

“On the lunch bit,” Isaiah told him, “we agree.” Then he turned, eyeing a nearby car. “I worked for Blake for just over two years, beginning shortly after you were born.”

Xander took a deep breath. “Right after you worked for my grandfather?”

Isaiah seemed to steel himself at the mention of Tobias Hawthorne. “The entire time I worked for Hawthorne, competitors tried to steal me away. Each time, your grandfather would sweeten my contract. I was twenty-two, a prodigy, on the top of the world—and then I wasn’t.” Isaiah popped the hood of the car. “After Hawthorne fired me, the offers dried up pretty damn quick. I went from young, rash, and flying high with a mid-six-figure salary to untouchable overnight.”

“Because of Skye,” Xander bit out.

Isaiah looked up from the engine to pin Xander with a look. “I made my own decisions where your mother was concerned, Xander.”

“And the old man punished you for them,” Xander replied, like a kid pushing on a bruise to see how much it hurt.

“It wasn’t a punishment.” Isaiah returned his attention to the car. “It was strategy. I was a twenty-two-year-old who’d been so flush with cash that I’d never imagined it would stop coming. I’d blown through most of what I’d made, so once I was fired and blacklisted, I conveniently didn’t have the resources to put up much of a fight for custody.”

It wasn’t about Skye. I realized with a start what Isaiah Alexander was saying. Tobias Hawthorne fired Isaiah because of Xander. Not because the old man had been unhappy about his youngest grandson’s conception but because he’d refused to share him.

“So you just gave up on your son?” Rebecca asked Isaiah sharply. She wasn’t a person who knew how to fight for herself, but she’d fight for Xander every time.

“I managed to scrape together enough for a third-rate lawyer to file suit when Xander was born. The court ordered a paternity test. But wouldn’t you know, it came back negative.”