“I’m glad,” Grayson told me, the words slow and deliberate, “that it was you.” He took a step back, clearing the way for Jameson to slide in next to me.
“Have you decided yet,” Jameson asked me, “what room you’re going to add on to Hawthorne House this year?”
I wondered if he could feel my anticipation, if he had any idea what we were counting down to. “I’ve made a lot of decisions,” I said.
Alisa hadn’t arrived yet, but she would be here soon.
“If you’re planning to build a death-defying obstacle course on the south side of the Black Wood,” Xander said, bouncing up, high off a Skee-Ball victory, “count me in! I have a lead on where we can get a reasonably priced two-story-tall teeter-totter.”
I grinned. “What would you do,” I asked Jameson, “if you were adding on a room?”
Jameson pulled my body back against his. “Indoor skydiving complex, accessible from a secret passage at the base of the climbing wall. Four stories tall, looks just like another turret from the outside.”
“Please.” Thea sauntered over holding a pool cue. She was wearing a long silver dress that left wide strips of bronze skin on display and was slit to the thigh. “The correct answer is obviously ballroom.”
“The foyer is as big as a ballroom,” I pointed out. “Pretty sure it’s been used that way for decades.”
“And yet,” Thea countered, “it remains not a ballroom.” She turned back toward the pool table, where she and Rebecca were facing off against Libby and Nash. Bex leaned over the table, lining up what looked to be an impossible shot, her green velvet tuxedo pulling against her chest, her dark red hair combed to one side and falling into her face The world had accepted my account of Will Blake’s death. The blame was laid squarely at the feet of Tobias Hawthorne. But once Toby had appeared, miraculously alive, and announced that he was changing his name to Tobias Blake, it hadn’t taken the press long to piece together that he was Will’s son—or to start speculating about who Toby’s biological mother was.
Rebecca had made it clear that she still didn’t regret stepping into the light.
She sank the shot, and Thea strolled back toward her, shooting Nash a gloating look. “Still feeling cocky, cowboy?”
“Always,” Nash drawled.
“That,” Libby said, her eyes catching his, “is an understatement.”
Nash smirked. “Thirsty?” he asked my sister.
Libby poked him in the chest. “There’s a cowboy hat in the refrigerator, isn’t there?”
She looked down at her wrists, then stalked over to the refrigerator and pulled out a pink soda and a black velvet cowboy hat. “I’ll wear this hat,”
she told Nash, “if you paint your nails black.”
Nash gave her what could only be described as a cowboy smile. “Fingers or toes?”
A yip behind me had me turning toward the doorway. Alisa stood there holding a very wiggly puppy. “I found her in the gallery,” she informed me dryly. “Barking at a Monet.”
Xander took the puppy and held her up, crooning at her. “No eating Monets,” he baby-talked. “Bad Tiramisu.” He gave her the world’s biggest, goofiest smile. “Bad dog. Just for that… you have to cuddle Grayson.”
Xander dumped the puppy on his brother.
“Are you ready for this?” Alisa asked beside me as Grayson let the puppy lick his nose and challenged his brothers to a round of hold-the-puppy pinball.
“As ready as I’m ever going to be.”
Thirty minutes to go. Twenty. Ten. No amount of winning or losing at pool, air hockey, or foosball, no amount of puppy pinball or trying to beat the high score on a dozen different arcade games could distract me from the way the clock was ticking down.