Page 31 of The Final Gambit

“No,” I insisted. I reached for him, pulled him back.

“For Emily,” Jameson told me. “It was always going to be Grayson. She and I—we were too much alike.”

“You arenothinglike Emily,” I said fiercely. Emily had used them, both of them. She’d played them against each other.

“You didn’t know her,” Jameson told me. “You didn’t know me back then.”

“I know you now.”

He looked at me with an expression that made me ache. “I know about the wine cellar, Heiress.”

My heart stilled in my chest, my throat closing in around a breath I couldn’t expel. I pictured Grayson on his knees in front of me. “What is it you think you know?”

“Gray was in a bad place.” Jameson’s tone was a perfect match for that expression on his face—cavernous and full ofsomething. “You went down to check on him. And…”

“And what, Jameson?” I stared at him, trying to anchor myself to this moment, but unable to completely banish memories I had no right to hold.

“And the next day, Grayson couldn’t look at you. Or me. He left for Harvard three days early.”

Comprehension washed over me. “No,” I insisted. “Whatever you’re thinking, Jameson—I wouldneverdo that to you.”

“I know that, Heiress.”

“Do you?” I asked, because his voice had gone hoarse. He wasn’t acting like he knew.

“It’s notyouwho I don’t trust.”

“Grayson wouldn’t—”

“It’s not my brother, either.” Jameson gave me a look, dark and twisted, full of longing. “Trustworthiness has never really beenmything, Heiress.”

That sounded like something Jameson would have said when we first met. “Don’t say that,” I told him. “Don’t talk about yourself that way.”

“Gray has always been so perfect,” Jameson said. “It’s inhuman how good he was at just about everything. If we were competing—at anything, really—and I wanted to win, I couldn’t do it by being better. I had to beworse. I had to cross lines that he wouldn’t, take risks—the bigger and more unfathomable to him the better.”

I thought about Skye and the way she’d told me once that Jameson Winchester Hawthorne washungry.

“I never learned how to be good or honorable, Heiress.” Jameson placed a hand on either side of my face, pushed his fingers back into my hair. “I learned how to be bad in the most strategic ways. But now? With you?” He shook his head. “I want to be better than that.I do. I don’t ever want for you—for us, forthis—to become a game.” He trailed his thumb down my jawline, his fingers lightly skimming my cheekbone. “So if you decide you’re not sure about this, Heiress, about me—”

“Iamsure,” I told him, capturing his hands in mine. I pressed his knuckles to my mouth and realized they were swollen. “I am, Jameson.”

“You have to be.” There was an urgency to Jameson’s words, aneed. “Because I’m terrible at hurting, Heiress. And if what we have now—ifeverythingwe have now—starts to feel like another competition between Grayson and me, like a game? I don’t trust myself not to play.”

CHAPTER 24

The next morning, I awoke to an empty bed and someone rapping on my door.

“I’m coming in,” Alisa called. She tried to open the door, but Oren stopped her from the hallway.

“I could be naked in here,” I grumbled loudly, hastily throwing on designer sweatpants before telling Oren to let her in.

“And you could count on my discretion if you were,” Alisa replied briskly. “Attorney-client privilege.”

“Was that an actual joke?” I asked. In response, Alisa placed a leather satchel on my dresser. “If that’s more paperwork for me to look over,” I told her, “I don’t want it.”

I had enough on my plate right now without thinking about the trust paperwork—or the journal Grayson had given me, its pages still blank.

“That’s not paperwork.” Alisa didn’t clarify what the bagwas. Instead, she fixed me with what I had termed the Alisa Look. “You should have called me. The moment someone showed up claiming to be Toby Hawthorne’s daughter, you should have called.”