The Inheritances Game (Jameson Hawthorne)

Eve in Hawthorne House

I let Eve use my shower. Avery needed to talk to Grayson, Eve wasn't going to be left alone. I neglected to consider the fact that Jameson was still in my bed. Eve didn't seem to notice him on her way to my ensuite, but Jameson definitely noticed Eve. 

The moment the bathroom door closed behind her; he swung his feet over the side of the bed. Shirtless. "Tell me everything," I searched his expression for some hint of what he was feeling, but Jameson Hawthorne was the consummate poker player. Seeing Eve had to have provoked some kind of emotion in him. The fact that he was hiding it hit me every bit as hard as the memories of the day she died.

"Eve, Toby's daughter but you knew that. You knew." I spoke. Jameson crossed to me, his strides long. 

"I didn't know she was coming. I just knew who she was."  I took a deep breath, Eve had startled me, but I wasn't really upset with Jameson I guess.

I sighed. "Avery should come soon with Gray, he was rightfully shocked when seeing her." He just nodded. Avery and Grayson walked in after a moment of silence; Jameson was still shirtless. "Eve's in the shower, we have some time to go over everything before she comes back." Avery nodded.

"Tell me what you need," Jameson said, going into puzzle mode.

Grayson finally pried his gaze away from the bathroom door. He bent, snatched an undershirt off the floor, and tossed it at his brother's face. "Put on a shirt." Somehow, the comically disgruntled look that Jameson shot Grayson was exactly what I needed. I tried to ignore the fact that my cheeks were probably very red and listened to Avery tell us everything that Eve had told her. 

"Eve wasn't able to give Oren a lot of details," she finished. "He's putting together a team to run recon on the abduction site, but—" 

"They're unlikely to find much at this point," Grayson finished. 

"Convenient, that," Jameson commented. "What?" he said when Grayson's icy eyes narrowed. "I'm just saying that all we have right now is the story of a stranger who showed up on our doorstep and talked her way inside." He was right. We didn't know Eve. 

"You don't believe her?" Grayson wasn't normally the type to ask questions when the answers were already apparent, so this one came with an undercurrent of friction. 

"What can I say?" Jameson shrugged again. "I'm a suspicious bastard." And Eve looks just like Emily, I thought. Jameson wasn't unaffected by that. Not by a long shot. Even after years, no matter how many times he pretended he barely cared.

"I don't think she's lying," I said.

"You wouldn't," Jameson told me softly. "And neither," he told Grayson in a very different tone, "would you." That was clearly a reference to Emily. She'd played them both, manipulated them both, but Grayson had loved her to the end. 

"You knew." Grayson stalked toward Jameson. "You knew she was out there, Jamie. You knew that Toby had a daughter, and you didn't say a word." 

"Gray stop."

"Lena, he told no one about her." 

"Both Jameson and Avery probably had their reasons, but that's not the priority right now." 

"Are you really going to lecture me about secrets, Gray?" 

"At a minimum," Grayson enunciated, his voice soft and deadly, "we owe that girl our protection." 

"Because of the way she looks?" Jameson threw down the gauntlet. 

"Because she's Toby's daughter," Grayson replied, "and that makes her one of us." 

"Can we please just focus on Toby?" I spoke. Grayson must have heard something in my tone because he stepped back. Stepped down. I turned to Jameson. "Pretend for a second that you trust Eve. Pretend she looks nothing like Emily. Pretend she's telling the truth. Other than Oren's search, what's our next move?"  This was what Jameson and I did: questions and answers, looking for what other people missed. If he wouldn't do this with me, if seeing Eve had thrown him off that much... 

"Motive," Jameson supplied finally. "If we want to find out who took Toby, we need to know why they took him." Logically, I could think of three broad possibilities. 

"They want something from him. They want to use him as leverage." Avery said. "Or they want to hurt him." They knew his real name. Somehow, they knew how to find him. "There has to be something we're missing," 

"You mentioned that Eve said the person who knocked her out went through her pockets." Jameson had a way of playing with the facts of a situation, turning them over like a coin spun from finger to finger. "So, what were they looking for?" What did Toby have that someone else might want badly enough to kidnap him to get it? What could possibly be worth that kind of risk? What fits in a pocket?

"The disk," Avery breathed. The door to the bathroom opened. Eve stood there, wrapped in a white towel, wet hair trailing down the sides of her neck. She wore a locket and nothing else except the towel. Grayson tried very hard not to look at her. Jameson looked at me. 

"Did you need something?" Avery asked Eve. Her hair was darker wet, less remarkable. Without it to distract from her face, her eyes looked bigger, her cheekbones higher.

"Bandage," Eve replied. If she was self-conscious about standing there in a towel, she didn't show it. "My cut split open in the shower." 

"I'll help you," I volunteered before Grayson could. I led Eve back into the bathroom. 

"What disk?" she asked behind me. I pulled out a first aid kit and handed it to her. She took it from me, her fingers brushing mine. "When I came into the room, you were talking about what happened to Toby," she said stubbornly. "You mentioned a disk." I wondered how much else she'd heard and whether she'd meant to eavesdrop. Maybe Jameson was right. Maybe we couldn't trust her. 

"It might be nothing," I said, brushing off the question. 

"What might be nothing?" Eve pressed. When I didn't answer, she dropped another question like a bomb. "Who's Emily?" 

I swallowed. "A girl." That wasn't a lie, but it was so far from the truth that I couldn't leave it there. "She died. The two of you—you're related." Eve chose a bandage and pushed her wet hair back from her face. I almost offered to help her, but something held me back. 

"Toby told me he was adopted," she said, fixing the bandage in place. "But he wouldn't tell me anything about his biological family—or the Hawthornes." She waited, like she expected me to tell her something. When I didn't, she looked down. "I know that you don't trust me," she said. "I wouldn't trust me, either. You have everything, and I have nothing, and I know how that looks." So did I. From experience, so did I. "I never wanted to come here," Eve continued. "I never wanted to ask you for anything—or them." Her voice strained. "But I want Toby back. I want my father back." Her emerald eyes locked on mine, radiating an intensity that was nearly Hawthorne. "And I will do anything—anything—to get what I want, even if that means begging for you guys help. So please, if you know something that could help us find Toby, just tell me."

"I'm sorry I don't know much about the disk. But don't worry we will find him."