Gigi Grayson was not obsessed! She was not over-caffeinated! She certainly wasn’t about to fall off the roof! But try telling a Hawthorne that.
A steady hand caught her elbow. A suit-clad arm encircled her waist.
The next thing Gigi knew, she was safe in her bedroom. That was the way it was with her Hawthorne half brother: He made things happen in an instant. Grayson Hawthorne bled power. He won arguments with a single arch of his sharply angled blond brows!
And there was a teeny, tiny chance that Gigi had been about to fall off the roof.
“Grayson! I’ve missed your face! Here, have a cat!” Gigi swooped up Katara—her large Bengal cat, practically a leopard, really—and dumped the cat in Grayson’s arms.
Cats were an excellent way of disarming people.
Grayson, however, was impossible to take off guard. He stroked a hand firmly over Katara’s head. “Explain.” As the second-eldest of the four grandsons of deceased billionaire Tobias Hawthorne, Grayson was prone to issuing orders.
He also had a bad habit of forgetting that he was three and a half years older than she was, not thirty.
“Why I was on the roof, why I haven’t been returning your calls, or why I just handed you a cat?” Gigi asked cheerfully.
Grayson’s pale gray eyes roved over her room, taking in the hundreds of
pieces of scratch paper that littered every surface: her mattress, her floor, even the walls. Then his gaze returned to Gigi. Without a word, Grayson gently pushed up her left sleeve. Notes danced across her skin, freshly inked in Gigi’s loopy, haphazard scrawl.
“I ran out of paper. But I think I’m getting close!” Gigi grinned. “I just needed a little change in perspective.”
Grayson gave her a look. “Hence, the roof.” “Hence, the roof.”
Grayson set Katara gently down. “I thought you were going to use your gap year to travel.”
And that was why she’d been avoiding his calls. “I’ll have plenty of time to go all Gigi Without Borders later,” she promised.
“After the Grandest Game.” Grayson did not phrase that as a question.
Gigi didn’t deny it. What was the point? “Seven players,” she said, her eyes alight. “Seven golden tickets—three to players of Avery’s choosing and four wild cards.”
Those wild card tickets had been hidden in secret locations across the United States. A single clue had been released to the public less than twenty-four hours earlier. Gigi Grayson, puzzle solver, was on the case!
“Gigi,” Grayson said calmly.
“Don’t say anything!” Gigi blurted out. “It’s already going to look iffy enough that I’m your sister, when everyone knows the Grandest Game is a group effort.”
A group effort between the Hawthorne brothers and the Hawthorne heiress, between Tobias Hawthorne’s four grandsons and the seemingly random teenager who’d inherited the eccentric billionaire’s entire fortune.
“As it happens,” Grayson said, “I’ve had no involvement whatsoever in designing this year’s game. Avery and Jamie requested I be boots on the ground. I’ll be running things; thus, to protect the integrity of the puzzles, I’m going in with no foreknowledge whatsoever.”
Can’t tip your hand if you don’t know the cards, Gigi thought. “I love that for you,” she told Grayson. “But still! Shush.” She gave him her firmest look. “I have to do this on my own.”
Grayson responded to Gigi’s attempt at firmness with exactly two seconds of silence, followed by a single question: “Where is your bed?”
Gigi hadn’t been expecting the subject change. Very tricky, Grayson.
Offering him her sunniest grin, Gigi gestured to the mattress on her floor. “Voilà!”
“That,” Grayson told her, “is a mattress. Where is your bed?”
The bed in question had been mahogany, an antique. Before Gigi could summon up a suitably chaotic distraction to deflect the question, Grayson strode toward her closet and opened it.
“You’re probably wondering where the rest of my clothes are,” Gigi said brightly. “And I would be happy to tell you—after the game.”
“In five words or less, Juliet.”
The use of her given name was probably a sign that he wasn’t going to let this go. In the year and a half since she’d met her brother, Gigi had gathered—through her powers of inference and also snooping—that Grayson was the grandson that billionaire Tobias Hawthorne had molded from childhood to be the perfect heir: formidable, commanding, always in control.
With a roll of her eyes, Gigi gave in to his demand, ticking the words off on her fingers as she went: “Reverse heist.” She grinned. “I did it in two!”
Grayson responded to that with another dreaded arch of his brow.
“Reverse heist,” Gigi clarified helpfully, “all the breaking, all the entering—but you leave something behind instead of stealing.”
“Am I to take it that your mahogany bedframe is now residing in someone else’s home?”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Gigi said. “I sold it for cash and reverse-heisted that.” Making an executive decision, Gigi squatted and called Katara toward her.
Anticipating—correctly—that he was about to have a very large cat placed on his head, Grayson knelt and laid a light hand on Gigi’s shoulder. “Is this about our father?”
Gigi kept right on breathing. She kept right on smiling. The trick to pretending that THE SECRET was just a secret and that she excelled at keeping them was never to even think about Sheffield Grayson.
Besides, smiling made you happier. That was just science.
“This is about me,” Gigi said. She gave Katara some neck scritchies and used one of the cat’s paws to gesture to the door. “Vamoose.”
Grayson did not vamoose. “I have something for you.” He reached inside the jacket of his Armani suit and produced a black gift box: an inch
tall and maybe twice the length of a Pop-Tart. “From Avery.”
Gigi gazed at the box intently. As Grayson lifted the lid, her mind raced, her heart pounding loudly in her ears: Seven golden tickets—three for players chosen by Avery.
“It’s yours if you want it,” Grayson said gently. He wasn’t known for being gentle, which told Gigi that this offer was serious. It was Avery’s way of trying to make amends for—
Don’t dwell on it. Just keep smiling.
“I’m not going to tell anyone,” Gigi assured him, though a lump formed in her throat. “Avery knows that, right?”
Grayson met her gaze. “She knows.”
Gigi inhaled deeply and stepped back. “Tell Avery thank you—but no.” She didn’t want anyone’s guilt or pity. She didn’t want Grayson to think she was weak or deserving of sympathy.
“If you don’t take it,” Grayson said, “I’m supposed to give this ticket to Savannah.”
“Savannah’s busy,” Gigi replied quickly. “With college. And basketball. And world domination.” Her twin didn’t know the secret. Savannah was the smart one, the pretty one, the strong one—focused and thriving in college.
And Gigi was… here.
She looked back to the writing on her arm, banishing Grayson’s presence from her mind. She could do this—all of it.
Keep THE SECRET.
Protect Savannah.
Break the code and obtain a ticket of her own.
And prove, for once in her life, that she had what it took to win.
