The Hawthorne Legacy (The Inheritance Games #2)(76)

Not Jackson, Mississippi.

Jackson Currie. The fisherman who’d pulled Toby from the water.

“What I don’t understand,” Zara said, “is why Toby was so intent on running once he got his memory back—assuming he got it back. He had to have known that our security could protect him from any threat. The Rooneys may run Rockaway Watch, but it’s a small town. They’re small people with a small reach, and the legal situation had already been taken care of. Toby could have come home, but he fought it.”

He didn’t come home, because he didn’t think he deserved to. Having read the postcards, I understood Toby. Wasn’t that how I would have felt if I’d done what he’d done?

A ringing sound jarred me from that thought. My phone. I looked down. Grayson was calling.

I flashed back to the moment he’d kissed me. I’d kissed him back. Since then we hadn’t even managed to look at each other. We hadn’t really talked. So why was he calling now?

Where is he? “Hello?” I answered.

“Avery.” Grayson lingered on my name, just for a moment.

“Where are you?” I asked. There was a pause at the other end of the line, and then he sent me an invite to switch over to a video chat. I accepted it, and the next thing I saw was his face. Gray eyes, sharp cheekbones, sharper jawline. In the sunlight, his light blond hair looked platinum.

“After some convincing, Max told me about what was written on your postcards,” Grayson said. “About your mother. Do you remember when I told you that I was in this? That I would help you?” He turned his phone, and I saw ruins. Charred ruins. Burned trees. “That’s what I’m doing.”

“You went to Hawthorne Island without us?” Xander was absolutely indignant.

He did this for me. I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to feel about that when, if he’d waited a few hours, we could have gone together. This didn’t feel like a larger-than-life gesture. It felt like Grayson running away.

Keeping his promise as far away from me as he could.

“Hawthorne Island,” Grayson confirmed in response to Xander’s accusation. “And Rockaway Watch. I wouldn’t call the locals friendly, but I’m optimistic that I’ll find our missing piece, whatever that might be.”

He was optimistic that he would find the answer. Had he even considered dealing me in?

“Rockaway Watch,” Xander said slowly.

The town’s name echoed in my mind. Rockaway Watch. My mother’s family. Suddenly, I had much bigger concerns than what Grayson’s behavior did or did not mean—and what it did or did not make me feel.

“Grayson.” My voice sounded urgent, even to my own ears. “You don’t understand. My mother changed her name and left that place because her family is dangerous. I don’t know what they know about Toby. I don’t know if that’s the reason they hated her so much—but they blame the Hawthornes for their daughter’s death. You have to get out of there.”

Beside me, Oren cursed. Grayson turned the phone back around and those gray eyes locked on mine. “Avery, have I ever given you reason to believe that I’m particularly averse to danger?”

Grayson Hawthorne was arrogant enough to consider himself bulletproof—and honorable enough to see a promise through to its end.

“You have to get out of there,” I said again, but the next thing I knew, Jameson was sticking his head over my shoulder, yelling to his brother.

“You’re looking for a man named Jackson Currie. He’s a recluse, living near an abandoned lighthouse. Talk to him. See what he knows.”

Grayson smiled, and that smile cut into me, every bit as much as his kiss. “Got it.”





CHAPTER 73


It was another hour before we heard from Grayson again, and Oren spent a good chunk of that time calling in favors on the West Coast. I wasn’t the only one concerned about the safety of a Hawthorne anywhere near the town of Rockaway Watch.

When my phone did ring again, Grayson was less than happy about the security detail that had descended on him.

“Did you find him?” Jameson squeezed in beside me to talk to his brother. “Jackson Currie?”

“He has a very colorful vocabulary,” Grayson reported. “And the land near his shack is booby-trapped.”

“Father and his investigator ran into similar issues,” Zara said behind us. “They never got a word out of the man. Grayson, you should come home. This is a fool’s errand. There are other leads that we could follow.”

In any other circumstances, I would have asked what those leads were, but all I could think was that Toby had told my mom to go to Jackson if she needed anything. That seemed to suggest that if my mom had shown up, he would have opened the door.

“Can you get close enough to put me on the phone with him?” I asked.

“Assuming no one tries to restrain me…” Grayson glanced pointedly back over his shoulder at what I could only assume was his security detail and then turned back to look straight into the camera—straight at me. “I can try.”





Jackson Currie’s shack really was a shack. I would have laid money that he’d built it himself. It wasn’t large. There were no windows.

Grayson knocked on what appeared to be a metal door. Then again, maybe shack is the wrong word, I thought. What Jackson Currie had built was closer to a bunker.