I stared at my birth certificate. At the signature. This made no sense. None. Every single clue had pointed in the same direction. Toby had sought me out after my mother’s death. He’d signed my birth certificate. He and my mom had been in love. Tobias Hawthorne had left me his fortune.
I have a secret, my mother had told me, about the day you were born. How was it even remotely possible that Toby wasn’t my father?
“Upside, downside, inside, outside, left side, right side.” Jameson Hawthorne stood in the doorway. When I saw him, something clicked. It was the feeling of a wave crashing over me—at last. “What’s missing?” Jameson asked. He walked toward me, and I tracked every step. He repeated his riddle. “Upside, downside, inside, outside, left side, right side. What’s missing?”
He stopped next to my bed, right next to it. “Beside,” I whispered.
He stared at me—at my eyes, at the lines of my face, like he was drinking it in. “I have to say, Heiress, I’m not a big fan of comas.” Jameson sounded just the same, wry and darkly tempting, but the expression on his face was one I’d never seen before.
He wasn’t joking.
I flashed back to something like a dream. Well, joke’s on me, because somewhere along the way, I stopped playing. Jameson Hawthorne and I had an understanding. No emotions. No mess. This wasn’t supposed to be an epic kind of love.
“I came to see you,” Jameson told me. “Every day. The least you could have done was wake up while I was here, tragically backlit, unspeakably handsome, and waiting.”
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.
Who’s there?
“Every day?” I asked, my voice foreign in my throat. I remembered standing at the edge of the ocean. I remembered a voice. Jameson Winchester Hawthorne.
“Every single day, Heiress.” Jameson closed his eyes, just for an instant. “But if I’m not the one you want to see…”
“Of course I want to see you.” That was true. I could say it. “But you don’t have to—” Tell me I’m special. Tell me I matter.
“Yes,” Jameson cut in, “I do.” He sank down beside my bed, bringing his eyes level with mine. “You aren’t a prize to be won.”
I wasn’t hearing this. He wasn’t saying this. He couldn’t be.
“You’re not a puzzle or a riddle or a clue.” Jameson had laser focus. On me. All on me. “You aren’t a mystery to me, Avery, because deep down, we’re the same. You might not see that.” He gave me a long, searing look. “You might not believe it—yet.” He held up his hands, his fingers curled into a loose fist. “But there’s no one besides the two of us who would have gone back in the wake of that bomb to look for this.”
He uncurled his fingers, and I saw a small metal disk in his palm.
Every muscle in my body tightened. Everything in me wanted to reach out to him. “How did you—”
Jameson shrugged, and that shrug, like his smile, was devastating. “How could I not?” He stared at me a moment longer, then pressed the disk into my hand. I felt his fingertips on my palm. He left them there for a moment, then trailed them along the inside of my wrist.
I sucked in a breath and looked from Jameson’s face to the disk.
Concentric circles ringed the metal on one side. The other was smooth.
He was still trailing his fingers down my arm.
“Have you figured out what it is?” I asked, every nerve in my body alive.
“No.” Jameson smiled, that crooked, devastating Jameson Hawthorne smile. “I was waiting for you.”
Jameson wasn’t patient. He didn’t wait. He lived with his foot on the gas. “You want to figure it out.” I stared at him, feeling his stare on me. “Together.”
“You don’t have to say anything.” Jameson stood. I could still feel the ghost of his touch on the inside of my arm. I could see the vein in my wrist
and feel my heart pumping. “You don’t have to kiss me now. You don’t have to love me now, Heiress. But when you’re ready…” He brought his hand to the side of my face. I leaned into it. His breath went ragged, and then he pulled his hand back and nodded to the disk in my hand. “When you’re ready, if you’re ever ready, if it’s going to be me—just flip that disk. Heads, I kiss you.” His voice broke slightly. “Tails, you kiss me. And either way, it means something.”
I stared at the disk in my hand. It was the size of a coin. Every clue we’d followed, every trail that had been left, led to this.
I swallowed and looked back up at Jameson. “Toby wasn’t my father,” I said, and then I corrected the tense. “He isn’t my father.”
Toby Hawthorne was out there somewhere. He still didn’t want to be found.
Beside me, Jameson cocked his head, eyes sparking. “Well then, Heiress. Game on.”
