He looked at me with an expression that made me ache. “I know about the wine cellar, Heiress.”
My heart stilled in my chest, my throat closing in around a breath I couldn’t expel. I pictured Grayson on his knees in front of me. “What is it you think you know?”
“Gray was in a bad place.” Jameson’s tone was a perfect match for that expression on his face—cavernous and full of something. “You went down to check on him. And…”
“And what, Jameson?” I stared at him, trying to anchor myself to this moment, but unable to completely banish memories I had no right to hold.
“And the next day, Grayson couldn’t look at you. Or me. He left for Harvard three days early.”
Comprehension washed over me. “No,” I insisted. “Whatever you’re thinking, Jameson—I would never do that to you.”
“I know that, Heiress.”
“Do you?” I asked, because his voice had gone hoarse. He wasn’t acting like he knew.
“It’s not you who I don’t trust.”
“Grayson wouldn’t—”
“It’s not my brother, either.” Jameson gave me a look, dark and twisted, full of longing. “Trustworthiness has never really been my thing, Heiress.”
That sounded like something Jameson would have said when we first met. “Don’t say that,” I told him. “Don’t talk about yourself that way.”
“Gray has always been so perfect,” Jameson said. “It’s inhuman how good he was at just about everything. If we were competing—at anything, really—and I wanted to win, I couldn’t do it by being better. I had to be worse. I had to cross lines that he wouldn’t, take risks—the bigger and more unfathomable to him the better.”
I thought about Skye and the way she’d told me once that Jameson Winchester Hawthorne was hungry.
“I never learned how to be good or honorable, Heiress.” Jameson placed a hand on either side of my face, pushed his fingers back into my hair. “I learned how to be bad in the most strategic ways. But now? With you?” He shook his head. “I want to be better than that. I do. I don’t ever want for you —for us, for this—to become a game.” He trailed his thumb down my jawline, his fingers lightly skimming my cheekbone. “So if you decide you’re not sure about this, Heiress, about me—”
“I am sure,” I told him, capturing his hands in mine. I pressed his knuckles to my mouth and realized they were swollen. “I am, Jameson.”
“You have to be.” There was an urgency to Jameson’s words, a need.
“Because I’m terrible at hurting, Heiress. And if what we have now—if everything we have now—starts to feel like another competition between Grayson and me, like a game? I don’t trust myself not to play.”
CHAPTER 24
The next morning, I awoke to an empty bed and someone rapping on my door.
“I’m coming in,” Alisa called. She tried to open the door, but Oren stopped her from the hallway.
“I could be naked in here,” I grumbled loudly, hastily throwing on designer sweatpants before telling Oren to let her in.
“And you could count on my discretion if you were,” Alisa replied briskly. “Attorney-client privilege.”
“Was that an actual joke?” I asked. In response, Alisa placed a leather satchel on my dresser. “If that’s more paperwork for me to look over,” I told her, “I don’t want it.”
I had enough on my plate right now without thinking about the trust paperwork—or the journal Grayson had given me, its pages still blank.