Page 40 of The Grandest Game

Chapter 31

LYRA

Lyra’s heart turned to stone in her chest.Lift me up?She knew already how Grayson’s touch could linger, how its ghost refused to be exorcised. This could not happen.

There had to be another way.

Lyra looked up at the chandelier, which was still a good twelve feet out of reach. “The furniture—” she started to say.

“The furniture is fixed to the floor.” Odette seemed to be enjoying this. “And I am neither as light nor as agile as I once was, so I am afraid this is up to the two of you.”

There had to be three hundred crystals on the chandelier.Any one of them could hold a clue.

“It could be nothing,” Lyra said, her voice tight. “A distraction.”

“It is not,” Grayson told her, “a distraction. There are patterns to this kind of game if you play enough of them. My grandfather’s last game—the one he set to begin upon his death—started with adages and a girl.”

The way he saida girlmade Lyra remember an interview she’d seen, years earlier.Grayson Hawthorne and Avery Grambs.At sixteen, Lyra had watched and rewatched that interview more times than she wanted to admit.That kiss.In truth, the interview had been the reason that Grayson was the Hawthorne that Lyra had decided to approach, the reason she’d spent more than a year trying to track downhisnumber.

Part of Lyra had hated Grayson and his entire overprivileged family, and part of her had thought—on some level—that anyone who could kiss a girl like that couldn’t be all bad.

“That same game,” Grayson continued evenly, “ended nearly a year later with a crystal chandelier. And now, inthisgame, which was designed by the very people who played my grandfather’s last one, there is again an adage and a crystal chandelier.”

“And there is, again,” Odette added, “a girl.”

Me.Lyra’s mouth was dry.Screw this.Grayson Hawthorne didn’t get to make her feel like this. He didn’t get to make her feel a damn thing. “Go ahead,” she told him curtly. “Lift me up. Let’s get this over with.”

“Over with?” Grayson repeated.

Lyra didn’t feel a need to clarify herself.

“Your hands,” Odette told Grayson imperiously, “her hips.”

Bracing herself, Lyra walked to stand directly beneath the chandelier. ShefeltGrayson follow.

“I won’t do anything unless you tell me to, Lyra.” He said her name right this time—exactlyright.

Lyra swallowed. “Go ahead.”

Grayson’s touch was gentle, but it wasn’t light. His thumbs came to rest just above the place on her waist where her hips met her lower back. His fingers wrapped around the front of her body, spanning her hipbones, reaching inward.

The layers of fabric in her gown suddenly felt far too thin.

“On three.” Grayson didn’t phrase that as a question.

Lyra ripped the bandage off and beat him to counting.“Three.”

Grayson lifted her up and over his head. Lyra stretched her arms, her eyes on the prize, feeling like an electric pulse had torn through her body. The tips of her fingers brushed the bottom of the chandelier, but it wasn’t enough.

Grayson’s hand moved upward to her back, which arched in response.A reflex, Lyra told herself. That was all.

With one hand on the small of her back, Grayson slid the other one down, gripping her thigh through the gown, the tulle compressing under his grip. Lyra’s body responded, her other leg extending backward and her hand up as Grayson lifted her completely overhead.

The position should have felt precarious. It shouldn’t have felt like a pas de deux.Swan Lake.She shouldn’t have felt Grayson Hawthorne’s touch like an invitation, a beckoning.

To him, it doubtlessly felt like nothing.

Her resolve hardening, Lyra stretched. Her hand soared into the bottom row of crystals.