Page 19 of Glorious Rivals (The Grandest Game #2)

LYRA

A n H cut in crystal. Five and three, six and two. A golden dart. Lyra drained the last of the liquid in her champagne flute. Grayson had been right, there was a floral taste—a little bitter, a little sweet. Like honey and roses.

“Tune out everything but the dart,” Grayson said beside her on the mosaic floor.

“Is that a suggestion or an order?” Lyra replied.

“Do you take orders?” Grayson asked archly.

“Not very well.”

“And do you think that fact has escaped me?”

Lyra gave a little shrug. “Probably not.”

“Then I suppose,” Grayson told her, “that logic dictates it was a suggestion.”

Lyra picked up her golden dart. “The design,” she said, running her thumbnail along the shaft of the dart, stopping when she hit the first slash she’d felt back in the Great Room. “Rings cut through with diagonal lines.”

Grayson made quick work of inspecting his own dart. “There are ten diagonal slashes, equally sized, dispersed around the dart’s circumference. What’s the pattern?”

There’s always a pattern, isn’t there? Lyra closed her eyes, rotating the dart in her fingers, feeling for the slashes—ten of them, just as Grayson had said.

“You are forever doing that,” Grayson commented. “Closing your eyes.”

“I’m not a visual person.” For Lyra, that was an understatement. “I need to feel things.” With her eyes closed, Lyra couldn’t even summon an image of Grayson’s face to her mind, but the way the contours of his body felt against hers, the way he smelled faintly of cedar and fallen leaves—

“One mark every four rings.” Lyra clipped her words and opened her eyes. “That’s the pattern.”

“Four rings. A diagonal line.” Grayson’s voice shifted. “Tally marks.”

Twisting the dart in her fingers, Lyra saw that he was right. Viewed from any one perspective, she could see what looked like hashmarks: four lines with a fifth cutting through the diagonal. “Five, ten…” She stopped counting and leapt straight to the answer. “Fifty.”

“Bull’s-eye,” Grayson said beside her. “In darts, the only way to get fifty points with a single throw is to hit the bull’s-eye.”

Adrenaline flooded Lyra’s veins. “So we’re looking for a bull or an eye or a target.”

“A target.”

Lyra’s heart leapt in her chest. “What do you know, Hawthorne?”

“Where on this island have we seen a target?” Grayson replied.

Lyra pushed down the urge to grab him by the front of the shirt and request he get on with it. “I told you, I’m not a visual person.”

Grayson laid his dart to the side and picked up his champagne flute.

“The answer’s right here, a very Hawthorne kind of hint.

” He reached for Lyra’s hand, and she allowed him to bring both his and hers to touch the champagne flute, tracing their thumbs in a slow circle around the H cut into the crystal.

Lyra had told him that she needed to feel things. He’d listened, and right now, eyes wide open, she felt far too much.

“An encircled H ,” Grayson told her, “is the typical marking for a helipad.”

Lyra thought back to landing on Hawthorne Island. She couldn’t see the helipad in her mind, but she remembered thinking that Jameson Hawthorne had touched down dead center.

Right on target.