It was Jameson’s idea to rebuild the tree house. Every now and then, as they worked, he dropped tantalizing bits of information about the father he’d met, the castle he’d won, the duchess he’d saved—not in that order.
He didn’t tell his brothers about the Devil’s Mercy, but he did tell them about the Game—not about the prizes at stake or the powerful figures behind it, but about the riddles, the cliffs, the stone garden, the chandelier, the bell tower.
The silver ballerina.
It took his brothers the better part of a day to figure out the final answer, though Jameson knew they would have been much quicker if they’d seen the silent silver music box themselves.
After that riddle had been solved, Grayson offered up a challenge of his own. “Another riddle,” he told them. “What begins a bet? Not that.”
No matter how much Jameson prodded, Grayson wouldn’t tell them where he’d heard the riddle, but one night, Jameson caught him looking at a file, one of their grandfather’s, which he quickly hid away.
A bet began with a challenge, a wager, an agreement, a risk. A handshake? Jameson’s mind turned the possibilities over, examining them from every angle. Not that. So what’s the opposite of a handshake?
The night the tree house restoration was completed, Jameson found himself alone with Avery in one of the towers, looking out over the Hawthorne estate.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said.
Jameson smiled. “Thinking is a good look for you, Heiress.”
She put her hand on the tower wall behind him—almost, but not quite pinning him in. “About the Game.”
Jameson knew her—and the look in her eyes. “It was fun, wasn’t it?”
“It was,” Avery agreed. “It always is when we play.” His gaze was drawn to her mouth, the slight curve of her smile. “You told me once,” she continued, “that your grandfather’s games weren’t designed to make you extraordinary—”
“But to show us,” Jameson murmured, “that we already were.”
“Do you believe it now?” Avery asked him. “That you are extraordinary?” The way she said the word made him feel like he was, like he always had been.
Like winning might never be enough, but he was. Together, they were. “I do,” Jameson told her.
Avery brought her fingertips to the edge of his mouth, then traced it lightly over the edge of his jaw. “Ask me again what I’ve been thinking about.”
Jameson narrowed his eyes. “What exactly have you been thinking about, Heiress?”
“It doesn’t seem fair, does it?” Avery said with a quirk of her lips. “That only the rich and powerful get the chance to play the Game?”
Jameson’s own lips turned upward. “Not fair at all.” “What if there was another game?” Avery asked.
“Not hidden,” Jameson murmured. “Not secret. Not just for the rich or powerful.”
“And what if we designed it?” Avery said, her voice electric. “Every year.”
Jameson loved playing—but designing a game? Making the puzzles?
Showing other people what they were capable of? “Cash prize,” Avery told him. “A big one.”
“The game would have to be complicated,” he told Avery. “Intricate.
Perfectly designed.”
She grinned. “I’m going to be pretty busy with the foundation,” she told him. “But everyone needs a hobby.”
He knew that she knew—this wasn’t going to be just a hobby for him. “The Grandest Game,” he murmured. “That’s what you should call it.”
“What we will call it,” Avery replied.
And in that moment, staring at her, imagining this future with her, Jameson knew: He was going to tell her everything. If he’d learned one thing from the Game he’d played—and won—it was that he could trust himself to tell her. He was more than hunger, more than want, more than drive, more than what Tobias Hawthorne had raised him to be.
And he wanted to be more with her.
“I went out that night,” he said, his voice hushed and liquid, “and I came back at dawn, smelling of ash and fire.” The memories were right there—as vivid as they’d always been. Jameson reached forward to take Avery’s hand in his. He pressed her fingers to the place where his collarbone dipped, right at the base of his neck. “I had a cut here.”
Avery’s fingers curled slightly, stroking skin that hadn’t scarred. “I remember.”
He wondered if she could feel the pounding of his pulse. Was he imagining that he could feel her heartbeat? Feel her?
There are some things, he thought, that shouldn’t be said out loud.
On the floor of the tower, there was a box—a game one of them must have left up here way back when. Scrabble. Jameson knelt and took out the board.
“Are you sure?” Avery murmured.
He was—achingly sure, so sure that he could taste it. This wasn’t a mystery that either of them could risk trying to solve. They’d make their own mysteries instead, their own Game. But he didn’t want a damn thing standing between the two of them in the meantime.
Trusting her. Trusting himself. It was all the same.
So Jameson spelled out his secret, the truth he’d discovered that night in Prague, what he’d written down on that scroll for the Proprietor. Four words. An H. The word is. The letters v and e.
Avery took in the message on the Scrabble board and stared at him.
ALICE HAWTHORNE IS ALIVE.
SIX YEARS
TEN MONTHS, AND
THREE WEEKS AGO
When you’re old enough, when you’re ready, be warned: There is
nothing frivolous about the way a Hawthorne man loves.”
Jameson thought suddenly of the grandmother he’d never even met, the woman who’d died before he was born.
“Men like us love only once,” the old man said quietly. “Fully. Wholeheartedly. It’s all-consuming and eternal. All these years your grandmother has been gone…” Tobias Hawthorne’s eyes closed. “And there hasn’t been anyone else. There can’t and won’t be. Because when you love a woman or a man or anyone the way we love, there is no going back.”
That felt like a warning more than a promise.
“Anything less, and you’ll destroy her. And if she is the one…” The old man looked first at Jameson, then at Grayson, then back at Jameson again. “Someday, she’ll destroy you.”
He didn’t make that sound like a bad thing.
“What would she have thought of us?” Jameson asked the question on impulse, but he didn’t regret it. “Our grandmother?”
“You’re still works in progress,” the old man replied. “Let’s save my Alice’s judgment for when you’re done.”
