Early the next morning, Oren informed me that Skye Hawthorne was leaving Hawthorne House. She was moving out, and Grayson had instructed security that she wasn’t to be allowed back on the premises.
“Any idea why?” Oren gave me a look that strongly suggested that he knew that I knew something.
I looked at him, and I lied. “Not a clue.”
I found Grayson in the hidden staircase, with the Davenport. “You kicked your mother out of the House?”
That wasn’t what I’d expected him to do, when he’d won our little wager. For better or worse, Skye was his mother. Family first.
“Mother left of her own volition,” Grayson said evenly. “She was made to understand it was the better option.”
Better than being reported to the police.
“You won the bet,” I told Grayson. “You didn’t have to—”
He turned and took a step up so that he was standing on the same stair as me. “Yes, I did.”
If I were choosing between you and any one of them, he’d told me, I would choose them, always and every time.
“Grayson.” I was standing close to him, and the last time we’d stood together on these stairs, I’d bared my wounds—literally. This time, I found my hands rising to his chest. He was arrogant and awful and had spent the first week of our acquaintance dead set on making my life hell. He was still half in love with Emily Laughlin. But from the first moment I’d seen him, looking away had been nearly impossible.
And at the end of the day, he’d chosen me. Over family. Over his mother.
Hesitantly, I let my hand find its way from his chest to his jaw. For a single second, he let me touch him, and then he turned his head away.
“I will always protect you,” he told me, his jaw tight, his eyes shadowed. “You deserve to feel safe in your own home. And I’ll help you with the foundation. I’ll teach you what you need to know to take to this life like you were born to it. But this… us…” He swallowed. “It can’t happen, Avery. I’ve seen the way Jameson looks at you.”
He didn’t say that he wouldn’t let another girl come between them. He didn’t have to.
