“How long would you have stood here, watching them, if I hadn’t come?” Jameson asked, an odd tone in his voice.
“I already told you, I’m worried about Grayson.” My mouth felt like cotton.
“Heiress.” Jameson turned back to me. “That’s not what I meant.”
A ball rose in my throat. “You’re going to have to be more specific.”
Slowly, deliberately, Jameson pushed me up against the wall. He waited, as he always did, for my nod, then obliterated the space between us. His lips crushed mine. My legs wrapped around him as his body pinned mine to the wall.
Jameson Winchester Hawthorne.
“That was very… specific,” I said, trying to catch my breath. He was still holding on to me, and I couldn’t pretend that I didn’t know why he’d needed to kiss me like that. “I’m with you, Jameson,” I said. “I want to be with you.”
Then why do you care how Grayson looks at her? The question was alive in the air between us, but Jameson didn’t ask it.
“It was always going to be Grayson,” he said, letting go of me.
“No,” I insisted. I reached for him, pulled him back.
“For Emily,” Jameson told me. “It was always going to be Grayson. She and I—we were too much alike.”
“You are nothing like Emily,” I said fiercely. Emily had used them, both of them. She’d played them against each other.
“You didn’t know her,” Jameson told me. “You didn’t know me back then.”
“I know you now.”
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.
“That’s not paperwork.” Alisa didn’t clarify what the bag was. Instead, she fixed me with what I had termed the Alisa Look. “You should have called me. The moment someone showed up claiming to be Toby Hawthorne’s daughter, you should have called.”
I glanced at Oren, wondering if he’d changed his mind and told her about Eve. “Why?” I asked Alisa. “The will is through probate. Eve isn’t a legal threat.”
“This isn’t just about the will. That threatening note you received—”
Notes, plural. I glanced at Oren, and he gave a slight shake of his head—he wasn’t the one who had tipped her off to any of this.
Alisa rolled her eyes at the two of us. “This is the part where you tell me—erroneously—that you have everything under control.”
“I advised against calling you,” Oren told her point-blank. “This was a security issue, not a legal one.”
“Really, Oren?” For a split second, Alisa looked hurt, then she converted that to extreme professional annoyance. “Let’s address the elephant in the room, shall we?” she said. “Yes, I took a chance when Avery was in that coma, but if I hadn’t moved her back to Hawthorne House when I did, she wouldn’t have a security team. The terms of the will were ironclad. Do you understand that, Oren? If I hadn’t done what I did, Avery wouldn’t be entitled to live at Hawthorne House with all its fancy security. You wouldn’t be able to pay your men.” Alisa stared at him, hard. “She would be out there with nothing, so, yes, I took a calculated risk, and thank God I did.” She turned to me. “Since I am the only one in this room who can claim to make the good, smart decision under fire—when things start going up in flames, you damn well pick up the phone.”
I winced.
“As it was,” Alisa muttered, “I had to hear about this from Nash.”
That startled a response out of me. “Nash called you?”