“You lied to the press.” Jameson didn’t look away. He didn’t blink, and neither did I. “What you told them… itwasa lie, wasn’t it?”
“Of course it was.” If I’d known why Tobias Hawthorne left me his fortune, I wouldn’t have been working side by side with Jameson to figure it out.
I wouldn’t have lost my breath when I’d seen that map at the foundation.
“It’s hard to tell with you sometimes,” Jameson commented. “You’re not exactly an open book.” He fixed his gaze somewhere in the vicinity of my lips. His face inched toward mine.
Never lose your heart to a Hawthorne.
“Don’t touch me,” I said, but even as I stepped back, I could feel something—the same something I’d felt when I brushed up against Grayson back at the foundation.
A thing I had no business feeling—for either of them.
“Our thrill ride last night paid off,” Jameson told me. “Getting out of my own head let me look at the puzzle with new eyes. Ask me what I figured out about our middle names.”
“I don’t have to,” I told him. “I solved it, too. Blackwood. Westbrook. Davenport. Winchester. They’re not just names. They’re places—or at least, the first two are. The Black Wood. The West Brook.” I let myself focus on the puzzle and not the fact that this room was lit only by lamplight and we were standing too close. “I’m not sure about the other two yet, but…”
“But…” Jameson’s lips curved upward, his teeth flashing. “You’ll figure it out.” He brought his lips near my ear. “Wewill, Heiress.”
There is nowe. Not really. I’m a means to an end for you.I believed that. I did, but somehow what I found myself saying was “Feel like a walk?”
CHAPTER 46
This wasn’t just a walk, and we both knew it.
“The Black Wood is enormous. Finding anything there will be impossible if we don’t know what we’re looking for.” Jameson matched his stride, slow and steady, to mine. “The brook is easier. It runs most of the length of the property, but if I know my grandfather, we’re not looking for something in the water. We’re looking for something on—or under—the bridge.”
“What bridge?” I asked. I caught sight of movement out of the corner of my eye.Oren. He stayed in the shadows, but he was there.
“The bridge,” Jameson replied, “where my grandfather proposed to my grandmother. It’s near Wayback Cottage. Back in the day, that was all my grandfather owned. As his empire grew, he bought up the surrounding land. He built the House but always kept up the cottage.”
“The Laughlins live there now,” I said, picturing the cottage on the map. “Emily’s grandparents.” I felt guilty even saying her name, but that didn’t stop me from watching his response.Did you love her? How did she die? Why does Thea blame your family?
Jameson’s mouth twisted. “Xander said you’d had a little chat with Rebecca,” he said finally.
“No one at school talks to her,” I murmured.
“Correction,” Jameson replied. “Rebecca doesn’t talk to anyone at school. She hasn’t for months.” He was quiet for a moment, the sound of our footsteps drowning out all else. “Rebecca was always the shy one. The responsible one. The one their parents expected to make good decisions.”
“Not Emily.” I filled in the blank.
“Emily…” Jameson sounded different when he said her name. “Emily just wanted to have fun. She had a heart condition, congenital. Her parents were ridiculously overprotective. They never let her do anything as a kid. She got a transplant when she was thirteen, and after that, she just wanted tolive.”
Not survive. Not just make it through.Live.I thought of the way she’d laughed into the camera, wild and free and a little too canny, like she’d known when that picture was taken that we’d all be looking at it later. At her.
I thought about the way that Skye had described Jameson.Hungry.
“Did you take her driving?” I asked. If I could have taken the question back, I would have, but it hung in the air between us.
“There isnothingthat Emily and I didn’t do.” Jameson spoke like the words had been ripped out of him. “We were the same,” he told me, and then he corrected himself. “I thought that we were the same.”
I thought about Grayson, telling me that Jameson was a sensation seeker. Fear. Pain. Joy. Which of those had Emily been—for him?
“What happened to her?” I asked. My internet search hadn’t yielded any answers. Thea had made it sound like the Hawthornes were somehow to blame, like Emily had diedbecauseshe spent time at Hawthorne House. “Did she live at the cottage?”
Jameson ignored my second question and answered the first. “Grayson happened to her.”
I’d known, from the moment I’d said Emily’s name in Grayson’s presence, that she had mattered to him. But Jameson seemed pretty clear on the fact that he’d been the one involved with her.There isnothingthat Emily and I didn’t do.
