The bubbles obscured what I didn’t want to see—but just barely.
“You waltzed into my suite with my shirtless, grieving son by your side. A mother has concerns, and Jameson is special. Brilliant, the way my father was. The way Toby was.”
“Your brother,” I said, and suddenly, I had no interest in leaving this room. “What happened to him?” Alisa had given me the gist but very few details.
“My father ruined Toby.” Skye addressed her answer to the rim of her champagne glass. “Spoiled him. He was always meant to be the heir, you know. And once he was gone… well, it was Zara and me.” Her expression darkened, but then she smiled. “And then…”
“You had the boys,” I filled in. I wondered, then, if she’d had thembecauseToby was gone.
“Do you know why Jameson was Daddy’s favorite when, by all rights, it should have been perfect, dutiful Grayson?” Skye asked. “It wasn’t because my Jamie is brilliant or beautiful or charismatic. It was because Jameson Winchester Hawthorne ishungry. He’s looking for something. He’s been looking for it since the day he was born.” She downed the rest of the champagne in one gulp. “Grayson is everything Toby wasn’t, and Jameson is just like him.”
“There’s no one like Jameson.” In no way had I meant to utter those words out loud.
“You see?” Skye gave me a knowing look—the same one Alisa had given me my first day at Hawthorne House. “You’re already his.” Skye closed her eyes and lay back in the tub. “We used to lose him when he was little, you know. For hours, occasionally for a day. We’d look away for a second, and he’d disappear into the walls. And every time we found him, I’d pick him up and cuddle him tight and know, to the depths of my soul, that all he wanted was to get lost again.” She opened her eyes. “That’s all you are.” Skye stood up and grabbed a robe. I averted my eyes as she put it on. “Just another way to get lost. That’s what she was, too.”
She.“Emily,” I said out loud.
“She was a beautiful girl,” Skye mused, “but she could have been ugly, and they would have loved her just the same. There was just something about her.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.
“You,” Skye Hawthorne stated emphatically, “are no Emily.” She bent to pick up the champagne bottle and refilled her glass. She padded toward me, barefoot and dripping, and held it out. “I’ve found bubbles to be a bit of a cure-all myself.” Her stare was intense. “Go on. Drink.”
Was she serious? I took a step back. “I don’t like champagne.”
“AndI”—Skye took a long drink—“didn’t choose my sons’ middle names.” She held the glass up, as if she were toasting me—or toasting to my demise.
“If you didn’t choose them,” I said, “then who did?”
Skye finished off the champagne. “My father.”
CHAPTER 40
Itold Jameson what his mother had told me.
He stared at me. “The old man chose our names.” I could see the gears in Jameson’s head turning, and then—nothing.“He picked our names,” Jameson repeated, pacing the long hall like an animal caged. “He picked them, and then he highlighted them in the Red Will.” Jameson stopped again. “He disinherited the family twenty years ago and chose our middle names—all of them but Nash’s—shortly thereafter. Grayson’s nineteen. I’m eighteen. Xan will be seventeen next month.”
I couldfeelhim trying to make this make sense. Trying to see what we were missing.
“The old man was playing a long game,” Jameson said, every muscle in his body tightening. “Our whole lives.”
“The names have to mean something,” I stated.
“He might have known who our fathers were.” Jameson considered that possibility. “Even if Skye thought she’d kept it a secret—there were no secrets from him.” I heard an undertone in Jameson’s voice when he said those words—something deep and cutting and awful.
Which of your secrets did he know?
“We can do a search,” I said, trying to focus on the riddle and not the boy. “Or have Alisa hire a private investigator on my behalf to look for men with those last names.”
“Or,” Jameson countered, “you can give me about six hours to utterly sober up, and I’ll show you what I do when I’m working a puzzle and I hit a wall.”
Seven hours later, Jameson snuck me out through the fireplace passageway and led me to the far wing of the house—past the kitchen, past the Great Room, into what turned out to be the largest garage I’d ever seen. It was closer to a showroom, really. There were a dozen motorcycles stacked on a mammoth shelf on the wall, and twice that many cars parked in a semicircle. Jameson paced by them, one by one. He stopped in front of a car that looked like something straight out of science fiction.
“The Aston Martin Valkyrie,” Jameson said. “A hybrid hypercar with a top speed of more than two hundred miles per hour.” He gestured down the line. “Those three are Bugattis. The Chiron’s my favorite. Nearly fifteen hundred horsepower and not bad on the track.”
“Track,” I repeated. “As inracetrack?”
“They were my grandfather’s babies,” Jameson said. “And now…” A slow smile spread across his face. “They’re yours.”
