“It’s what you’ve always wanted. An arrogant, duty-bound asshole who tries to be honorable and would die to protect the girl he loves.”
I froze. Logically, I knew that my heart was still beating. I was still breathing. But it didn’t feel like it. I could see the others in my peripheral vision, but I couldn’t move, couldn’t ask Jameson to lower his voice, couldn’t focus on anything but the green of his eyes, the lines of his face.
“I’m not Grayson,” he told me, ravaged by the words.
“I don’t want you to be,” I said, pleading—for what, I wasn’t even sure.
“Yes, you do,” Jameson insisted quietly. “And it doesn’t even matter because I’m not putting on a show here, Heiress. I’m not playing at being overprotective or pretending that, for once in my life, I want to do the right thing.” He brought his hands to the side of my face, then the back of my neck, and I felt his touch through every square inch of my body. “I love you. I would die to protect you. I would make you hate me to keep you safe because damn it, Avery—some things are too precious to gamble.”
Jameson Winchester Hawthorne loved me. He loved me, and I loved him. But I didn’t know how to make him believe that when I said I didn’t want him to be Grayson, I meant it.
“This is who I want to be,” Jameson said, his voice hoarse, “for you.”
I wished suddenly that neither one of us was standing on the lawn of Hawthorne House. That it was my birthday again or that the year mark had passed and we were halfway around the world, seeing everything, doing everything, having it all. I wished that Toby had never been taken, that Vincent Blake didn’t exist, that Eve had never come here— Eve, I thought suddenly, and then I realized something that I should have realized much sooner. If Vincent Blake’s son was Toby’s father, that made Eve the man’s great-granddaughter.
Eve and Vincent Blake are family. The words exploded in my mind like shrapnel. I thought about Eve telling me about doing a mail-in DNA test, about the way that she’d first earned my trust because I’d thought I understood what Toby meant to her, how it must have felt for her to finally be wanted, to finally have family who wanted her.
But what if that family wasn’t Toby?
What if someone else had found her first?
I thought back to showing her Toby’s wing, to the moment when I’d mentioned “A Poison Tree” and said the poet’s name: William Blake. Eve had dropped to her knees, reading the poem over and over again. She recognized the name.
“Heiress.” Jameson was still looking at me, and I knew, just from the way he let his thumbs skim lightly over my cheekbones, that he knew my mind had taken flight. He didn’t blame me for it. He didn’t ask me for anything else. All he said was “Tell me.”
So I did.
And then he told me that Eve was at Wayback Cottage—with Grayson.
CHAPTER 63
Oren and two of his men drove Jameson and me to Wayback Cottage.
Rebecca didn’t come with us, didn’t want to come with us. Thea and Xander stayed with her.
I rang the bell—again and again until Mrs. Laughlin answered.
“Grayson and Eve,” I said, trying to sound calmer than I felt. “Are they here?”
Mrs. Laughlin pinned me with a look that had probably been used on generations of Hawthorne children. “They’re in the kitchen with my daughter.”
I made my way there, Jameson on my heels, Oren directly to my left, his men only steps behind him. We found Eve sitting across a worn wooden table from Mallory. Grayson stood behind Eve like a wayward angel keeping watch.
Eve swiveled her gaze toward us, and I wondered if I was imagining the canny look in her eyes, imagining her assessing the situation, assessing me, before speaking. “Any updates?”