Page 41 of Glorious Rivals (The Grandest Game #2)

GRAYSON

E ve. Grayson couldn’t believe that he hadn’t seen it. He’d known quite well that Eve had been given temporary access to the old man’s List. And of course she was meddling in the Grandest Game. Of course she’d handpicked a player she believed hated the Hawthorne family.

Had Eve realized that Lyra had reached out to him, that Grayson had looked for her?

It hardly mattered. Eve just couldn’t let them go—any of them but especially him .

Eve had gotten under Grayson’s skin once.

She didn’t live there anymore. That was the thing about learning to let all your thoughts and feelings come—once you did, those thoughts and feelings were also free to go .

And Grayson was free to take a moment, even after Lyra had told him what Eve had offered her, to live in the now. The chill in the night air was even greater on the ocean, but Lyra was warm. Her skin. Her breath in the air. And she’d let him give her his jacket. She’d let him take care of her.

I told you, Jamie, Lyra isn’t a threat. She isn’t Eve.

“I should have told you sooner,” Lyra said. “I should have told you immediately .”

Eve had offered her everything she wanted—information about her father, enough money to save the family home and then some—and Lyra was berating herself for taking less than an hour and a half to tell him, to put her trust in him .

“Eve has a knack for manipulating people,” Grayson told Lyra. “You did just fine.”

It took three or four seconds for her to accept him at his word. “She truly didn’t know about the lily at the helipad, Grayson. She put me in the game, but that calla wasn’t her.”

The pieces of the puzzle shifted in Grayson’s mind, and he thought about Brady Daniels and his Calla. About Jameson’s insistence that the name Alice Hawthorne not even be spoken. About the marble calla lily in the music box.

“We’ll figure this out,” Grayson told Lyra.

“I’ll search the yacht for hints—and lemniscates.” Lyra tossed her dark hair over her shoulders. “You go talk to your brothers and Avery.”

“Was that a suggestion,” Grayson said, “or an order?”

Lyra arched a brow. “Do you take orders?”

“From you?” Grayson gave her a look. “Absolutely.”