The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games #1)(7)

I heard a creak, then a bam. There was a shuffling sound back behind the coats, and then a figure in shadow pushed through them and stepped out into the light. A boy, maybe my age, maybe a little younger. He was wearing a suit, but that was where the similarities with Grayson ended. This boy’s suit was rumpled, like he’d taken a nap in it—or twenty. The jacket wasn’t buttoned. The tie lying around his neck wasn’t tied. He was tall but had a baby face—and a mop of dark, curly hair. His eyes were light brown and so was his skin.

“Am I late?” he asked Grayson.

“One might suggest that you direct that query toward your watch.”

“Is Jameson here yet?” the dark-haired boy amended his question.

Grayson stiffened. “No.”

The other boy grinned. “Then I’m not late!” He looked past Grayson, to Libby and me. “And these must be our guests! How rude of Grayson not to introduce us.”

A muscle in Grayson’s jaw twitched. “Avery Grambs,” he said formally, “and her sister, Libby. Ladies, this is my brother, Alexander.” For a moment, it seemed like Grayson might leave it there, but then came the eyebrow arch. “Xander is the baby of the family.”

“I’m the handsome one,” Xander corrected. “I know what you’re thinking. This serious bugger beside me can really fill out an Armani suit. But, I ask you, can he jolt the universe on and up to ten with his smile, like a young Mary Tyler Moore incarnate in the body of a multiracial James Dean?” Xander seemed to have only one mode of speaking: fast. “No,” he answered his own question. “No, he cannot.”

He finally stopped talking long enough for someone else to speak. “It’s nice to meet you,” Libby managed.

“Spend a lot of time in coat closets?” I asked.

Xander dusted his hands off on his pants. “Secret passage,” he said, then attempted to dust off his pant legs with his hands. “This place is full of them.”





CHAPTER 7


My fingers itched to pull out my phone and start taking pictures, but I resisted. Libby had no such compunctions.

“Mademoiselle…” Xander side-stepped to block one of Libby’s shots. “May I ask: What are your feelings on roller coasters?”

I thought Libby’s eyes might actually pop out of her head. “This place has a roller coaster?”

Xander grinned. “Not exactly.” The next thing I knew, the “baby” of the Hawthorne family—who was six foot three if he was an inch—was pulling my sister toward the back of the foyer.

I was dumbfounded. How can a house “not exactly” have a roller coaster? Beside me, Grayson snorted. I caught him looking at me and narrowed my eyes. “What?”

“Nothing,” Grayson said, the tilt of his lips suggesting otherwise. “It’s just… you have a very expressive face.”

No. I didn’t. Libby was always saying that I was hard to read. My poker face had single-handedly been funding Harry’s breakfasts for months. I wasn’t expressive.

There was nothing remarkable about my face.

“I apologize for Xander,” Grayson commented. “He tends not to buy into such antiquated notions as thinking before one speaks and sitting still for more than three consecutive seconds.” He looked down. “He’s the best of us, even on his worst days.”

“Ms. Ortega said there were four of you.” I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to know more about this family. About him. “Four grandsons, I mean.”

“I have three brothers,” Grayson told me. “Same mother, different fathers. Our aunt Zara doesn’t have any children.” He looked past me. “And on the topic of my relations, I feel as though I should issue a second apology, in advance.”

“Gray, darling!” A woman swept up to us in a swirl of fabric and motion. Once her flowy shirt had settled around her, I tried to peg her age. Older than thirty, younger than fifty. Beyond that, I couldn’t tell. “They’re ready for us in the Great Room,” she told Grayson. “Or they will be shortly. Where’s your brother?”

“Specificity, Mother.”

The woman rolled her eyes. “Don’t you ‘Mother’ me, Grayson Hawthorne.” She turned to me. “You’d think he was born wearing that suit,” she said with the air of someone confiding a great secret, “but Gray was my little streaker. A real free spirit. We couldn’t keep clothes on him at all, really, until he was four. Frankly, I didn’t even try.” She paused and assessed me without bothering to hide what she was doing. “You must be Ava.”

“Avery,” Grayson corrected. If he felt any embarrassment about his purported past as a toddler nudist, he didn’t show it. “Her name is Avery, Mother.”

The woman sighed but also smiled, like it was impossible for her to look at her son and not find herself utterly delighted in his presence. “I always swore my children would call me by my first name,” she told me. “I’d raise them as my equals, you know? But then, I always imagined having girls. Four boys later…” She gave the world’s most elegant shrug.

Objectively, Grayson’s mother was over the top. But subjectively? She was infectious.

“Do you mind if I ask, dear, when is your birthday?”