These Games We Play

chapter seventy five: happy birthday bitch

The morning of my eighteenth birthday-and the first day of fall break at the vaunted Heights Country Day School-I woke up to see an unspeakably gorgeous ball gown hanging in my doorway. It was a deep midnight green, floor-length, with a bodice marked by tens of thousands of tiny black jewels in a dark, delicate, mesmerizing pattern.

It was a stop-and-stare dress. A gasp-and-stare-again dress.

The kind one would wear to a headline-grabbing, hashtag-exploding black-tie event. Damn it, Alisa. I stalked toward the gown, feeling mutinous-then saw the note dangling from the hanger: WEAR ME IF YOU DARE.

That wasn't Alisa's handwriting.

☆☆☆☆

I found Jameson at the edge of the Black Wood. He was wearing a white tuxedo that fit his body far too well and standing next to an honest-to-God hot-air balloon. Jameson Winchester Hawthorne.

I ran like the ball gown wasn't weighing me down, like I didn't have a knife strapped to my thigh. Jameson caught me, our bodies colliding.

"Happy birthday, Heiress." Some kisses were soft and gentle-and some were like fire. Eventually, the realization that we had an audience managed to penetrate my brain. Oren was discreet. He wasn't looking at us, but my head of security clearly wasn't about to let Jameson Hawthorne fly off with me alone. Besides Oren was still mad at Jameson because of our trip to New Castle over the summer and about the office incident but we didn't talk about that. Reluctantly, I pulled back.

"A hot-air balloon?" I asked Jameson dryly. "Really? I haven't grown out of my fear of heights in time you have been away."

"I know, if you want to hold my hand the entire time I am not opposed to the idea." He told me as he walked me over to the ballon. I rolled my eyes.

"You Jameson Hawthrone are the opposite of discrete, if you wanted to hold my hand you could have just told me."

"You wound me." Jameson swung himself up onto the edge of the basket, landing in a crouch. "I should warn you, Heiress. I am dangerously good at birthdays."

Jameson Hawthorne was dangerously good at a lot of things.

He held his hand down to me. I took it, and I didn't even try to pretend that I had grown used to this-all of it, any of it, him. In a million years, the life Tobias Hawthorne had left me would still take my breath away. Oren climbed into the balloon after me and fixed his gaze on the horizon. Jameson cast off the ropes and hit the flame. We surged upward. Airborne, with my heart in my throat, I stared down at Hawthorne House.

"How do you steer?" I asked Jameson as everything but the two of us and my very discreet bodyguard got smaller and farther away.

"You don't." Jameson's arms curved around my torso. "Sometimes, Heiress, all you can do is recognize which way the wind is blowing and plot a course."

☆☆☆☆

The balloon was just the beginning. Jameson Hawthorne didn't do anything halfway.

A hidden picnic.

A helicopter ride to the Gulf.

Speeding away from the paparazzi.

Slow dancing, barefoot, on the beach.

The ocean. A cliff. A wager. A race. A dare.

I'm going to remember this. That was my overwhelming feeling on the helicopter ride home. I'm going to remember it all. Years from now, I'd still be able to feel it. The weight of the ball gown, the wind in my face. Sun-warmed sand on my skin and chocolate-covered strawberries melting on my tongue. By sundown, we were almost home. It had been the perfect day. No crowds. No celebrities. No...