The kiss ended as the two of us were shuffled off-camera and into an elevator. My heart was thudding. My brain was a mess. My lips felt… my whole body felt…
There were no words.
“What the hell was that?” Alisa waited for the elevator door to close before she exploded.
“That was an ambush,” Landon replied, her posh accent doing absolutely nothing to soften the words. “If you keep information from me, I can’t keep you from being ambushed. Alisa, you know how I operate. If you won’t allow me to do my job, then it is, simply put, no longer my job.”
The elevator door opened, and Landon left.
As Max would say: fax. My eyes found their way to Grayson’s, but he wouldn’t even look at me. It was like he couldn’t.
“I am going to ask one more time,” Alisa said, her voice low. “What the hell was that?”
“You’ll get your answer,” Oren told her. “In the car. We need to move out now. I’ve sent two of my men to the car and deployed the decoy. We’ll go out the back. Move. ”
We made it out of the parking lot before the vultures descended. Alisa let us marinate in silence for a full minute before she spoke again. This time she didn’t ask what was going on. “Who knew?” she demanded instead. “Who knew?”
I looked down. “I did.”
“Obviously.” Alisa shifted her gaze to Grayson. “Are you going to lie
and tell me you didn’t?” Then she glanced to the driver’s seat. “Oren?”
My head of security didn’t reply.
“This will be easier if we start at the beginning,” Grayson said, sounding calmer than he should have. Like we never kissed at all. “You will recall that Avery asked you to locate an acquaintance of hers, to whom she was hoping to give economic aid?”
“Harry.” Alisa’s memory was a sieve—and I knew in my bones that she would never forget what had just happened. She probably wouldn’t forgive it, either.
“Toby,” I corrected. I looked over at Grayson. You can’t do this for me.
You can’t protect me the way you did back there. “I didn’t know who he was at the time,” I continued, “but then I saw a picture of him in Nan’s locket.”
“You should have told me. Immediately.” Alisa was angry, furious enough that she let loose an impressive string of curse words of her own—
some in English and some not. “And you shouldn’t have told anyone else.”
She shot dagger eyes at Grayson, so it was pretty clear who she was referring to.
“Xander already knew,” Grayson said quietly. “My grandfather left him a clue.”
That took the wind out of Alisa’s sails, but only slightly. “Of course he did.” She let out a breath, then took in another, and then repeated the process two or three times. “If you had told me, Avery, I might have been able to get a handle on this. We could have hired a team to—”
“Find him?” I said. “Your team already looked.”
“There are teams,” Alisa told me, “and there are teams. I have a fiduciary duty to the estate—to you. There is no way I could license millions to find Harry, but to find Toby?”
I dug my phone out and pulled up the picture Libby had sent me of Toby’s message. “He doesn’t want to be found.” I passed the phone into her hands.
“Stop looking. ” She read the words aloud, completely unimpressed.
“Who took this? Where was it taken? Have we verified the handwriting?”
I answered the questions in the order she’d asked them. “Libby. New Castle. The handwriting is definitely Toby’s.”
Alisa rolled her eyes heavenward. “You sent Libby after him?”
I was getting ready to tell her that there was nothing wrong with Libby,
when Grayson clarified the situation. “And Nash.”
It took Alisa a full four or five seconds to recover from the fact that Nash had known—and that he was with Libby now. “And you,” she told Grayson heatedly. “You had time to look up the legal precedent, but it didn’t occur to you to talk to a lawyer?”
Grayson looked down at the cuff link on his right sleeve, considering his response. He must have decided on honesty, because when he lifted his gaze back up to Alisa, all he said was, “We couldn’t be certain where your loyalties would lie.”
This time Alisa didn’t look angry. She looked like she might cry. “How could you say that to me, Gray?” She searched his expression for a response, and I was reminded that she’d grown up with the Hawthorne family. She’d known Grayson and Jameson and Xander their entire lives.
“When did I become the enemy here? I have only ever done what the old man wanted me to do.” She spoke like those words were being physically torn out of her. “Do you have any idea what that’s cost me?”
It was clear from the tone of her voice that she wasn’t just talking about the will, or me, or anything that had happened in the wake of Tobias Hawthorne’s death. She’d called him “the old man,” the same way they did, when I’d only ever heard her refer to him as Mr. Hawthorne or Tobias Hawthorne before. And when she spoke about what her loyalty to the old man had cost her…
She’s talking about Nash.
“I am holding this empire together by a thread.” Alisa swiped angrily at her face with the back of her hand, and I realized a single tear had escaped.
Her expression made it damn clear that it would be the last. “Avery, I will handle this situation. I will put out this fire. I will do what needs to be done, but the next time you keep a secret from me, the next time you lie to me? I will throw you to the wolves myself.”
I believed her. “There is one more thing.” I gulped—there was no way of sugarcoating this. “Well, two more things. One: Toby was adopted, and his biological mother was the Laughlins’ then-teenage daughter.”
Alisa stared at me for a good three seconds. Then she arched an eyebrow, waiting for the other thing.
“And two,” I continued, thinking back to the moment when Grayson had stopped me from saying this on camera—and how. “I have reason to believe
