Well,” Max said, flopping down on my bed. “That could have gone better.” She’d seen the interview. The whole world had. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
Grayson had warned me, from the very beginning, not to pull at this thread. He warned me against telling anyone about Toby, and how many people had I told?
When we’d arrived back at Hawthorne House, I had tried to talk to him, but my mouth had refused to say a single word.
“Grayson didn’t have to kiss me,” I told Max, the words bursting out of my mouth, like I didn’t have much bigger things to think about. “He could have cut me off.”
“Personally, I find this turn of events delightful,” Max declared. “But you look like a motherfaxing deer caught in motherfaxing headlights.”
I felt like one. “He shouldn’t have kissed me.” Max grinned. “Did you kiss him back?”
His lips. Mine. “I don’t know!” I bit out.
Max gave me her most innocent look. “Would you like me to pull up the footage?”
I’d kissed him back. Grayson Hawthorne had kissed me, and I’d kissed him back. I thought about the night before in the hedge maze. The way he’d corrected my form. How close we’d been standing.
“What am I doing?” I asked Max, feeling like I was in a maze now. “Jameson and I are…”
“What?” Max probed.
I shook my head. “I don’t know.” I knew what Jameson and I were supposed to be: adrenaline and attraction and the thrill of the moment. No strings attached. No messy emotions.
So why did I feel like I’d betrayed him?
“Close your eyes,” Max advised me, closing her own. “Picture yourself standing on a cliff overlooking the ocean. The wind is whipping in your hair. The sun is setting. You long, body and soul, for one thing. One person. You hear footsteps behind you. You turn.” Max opened her eyes. “Who’s there?”
 |
The problem with Max’s question was that it assumed I was capable of longing, body and soul, for anything. Anyone. When I pictured myself on that cliffside, I pictured myself alone.
Late into the night, long after Max had retired to her room, I pulled up news searches to see what people were saying about that disastrous interview. Most headlines were calling Toby “the lost heir.” Skye was already giving interviews.
Apparently her NDA didn’t cover this.
In the comments section of nearly every article, there was speculation that I’d slept with Grayson to get him on my side. Some people were claiming that he wasn’t the only Hawthorne I’d slept with. It shouldn’t have mattered that strangers were calling me a slut—or worse—but it did.
The first time I’d ever heard that word, another kid in elementary school had used it to describe my mom. I couldn’t ever remember her even dating anyone, but I existed, and she’d never been married, and for some people that was enough.
I walked over to my closet and pulled out the bag with the postcards— the ones my mom had given me. Hawaii. New Zealand. Machu Picchu. Tokyo. Bali. I flipped through them as a reminder of who I was, who she’d been. This was what we’d daydreamed about—not being swept off our feet.
Not some kind of epic seaside love.
I wasn’t sure how long I’d been sitting there when I heard a noise. Footfalls. My head whipped up. The last I’d checked, Oren was stationed outside my room. He’d warned me that this news getting out could put me in danger.
A voice spoke, on the other side of the fireplace. “It’s me, Heiress.”
Jameson. That should have been a relief. Knowing it was him, I should
have felt safer. But somehow, as I locked my hand around the candlestick on the mantel, the last thing I felt was safe.
I triggered the passage. “I take it you saw the interview?” Jameson stepped into my room. “Not your best showing.”
I waited for him to say something about that kiss. “Jameson, I didn’t—”
He held a finger up to my lips. He never actually touched me, but my lips burned anyway.
“If yes is no,” he said, his eyes on mine, “and once is never, then how many sides does a triangle have?”
That was a riddle he’d thrown out at me, the first day we’d met. At the time, I’d solved it by converting everything to a number. If you coded yes— or the presence of something—as a one, and no—or the absence of that thing—as a zero, then the first two parts of the riddle were redundant. If one equals zero, how many sides does a triangle have?
“Two,” I said now, just as I had then, but this time I couldn’t help wondering if Jameson was talking about a different kind of triangle—about him and Grayson and me.
“A girl named Elle finds a card on her doorstep. The front of the envelope says To, the back says Elle. Between them, inside the envelope, she finds two identical letters, then spends the rest of the day underground. Why?”
I wanted to tell him to stop playing games, but I couldn’t. He’d thrown out a riddle. I had to solve it. “The front of the card says To, the back says Elle.” I thought as I spoke. “She spends the whole day underground.”
There was a gleam in Jameson’s eyes, one that reminded me of the time we had spent underground. I could practically see him, torch-lit and pacing. And just like that, I saw the method in Jameson’s particular brand of madness. “The two letters inside the envelope were N,” I said softly.
There were probably a thousand adjectives to describe Jameson Hawthorne’s smile, but the one that felt truest to me was devastating. Jameson Winchester Hawthorne had a devastating smile.
I kept going. “The front of the envelope said ‘to’—spelled t–u,” I continued, resisting the urge to step forward. “The back said ‘Elle,’ spelled
—”
“E-l,” Jameson finished my sentence. Then he took a step forward. “Two
n’s make tunnel, which is why she spent the day underground. You win,
Heiress.”
We were standing too close now, and a warning siren went off in the back of my head, because if Jameson had seen Grayson kiss me on air, if he was here now, moving toward me—then what were the chances that this wasn’t about me?
What were the chances that I was just another prize to be won? Territory to be marked.
“Why are you here?” I asked Jameson, even though I knew the answer, had just thought the answer.
“I’m here,” he said with another devastating smile, “because I’d be willing to wager five dollars that you aren’t checking the messages on your phone.”
He was right. “I turned it off,” I replied. “I’m thinking of chucking it out that window.”
“I’ll bet you another five dollars that you can’t hit the statue in the courtyard.”
“Make it ten,” I told him, “and you have a deal.”
“Sadly,” he replied, “if you did throw your phone out the window, you wouldn’t get the message from Libby and Nash.”
I stared at him. “Libby and Nash—”
“They found something,” Jameson told me. “And they’re on their way home.”
