Games Untold: An Inheritance Games Collection

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Worrying about Jameson Winchester Hawthorne was about as useful as trying to argue with the wind.

Jameson had a habit of landing on his feet.

My Jameson still took risks—but he always came back.

“Are they calling him Don’t Stop?” I asked Alisa seriously. Her perfectly sculpted brows pulled together. “Sorry,” I said in a completely deadpan. “I forgot. That’s what I call him.”

That was all it took for Jameson Hawthorne to make my heart start beating a little harder, a little faster. Welcome to the City of a Hundred Spires, Heiress. Feel like a game of Hide and Seek?

Heads I kiss you, he’d told me once, tails you kiss me, and either way, it means something.

Yes. With Jameson, my answer was almost always yes.

“And, Heiress?” Jameson’s lips moved down to my jaw, then my neck. “For the record…” I felt him everywhere. My fingernails dug lightly into the skin of his neck. “I would never,” he whispered roughly, “confuse you for a saint.”

“I know, Heiress.” His voice was low and hoarse, but he managed a rakish smile. “Bleeding is a good look for me.”

He went to brush past me, and I stopped him with a single word. “Jameson.” He turned his head toward me, like he couldn’t help it, like I was his north. “Avery.” Something about the sound of my given name on Jameson’s lips, combined with everything else, almost undid me. He said Avery like a plea and a curse and prayer.

Jameson Hawthorne was temptation personified—but right now, I was more tempted by the puzzle.

Or maybe it was the knowledge, heavy in the air between us, that in our lifetimes, this probably wouldn’t be the only ring that Jameson gave me.

Like the sun and the moon I loved her. Saint Avery. Until death and beyond.

I reached for the bandages on the counter at the exact same moment that Jameson reached for me.

I knew that it was an illusion, that nothing in this place was infinite except for Jameson and me.

Sometimes it meant knowing that what he needed mattered more than what you wanted. I wanted answers. He needed me not to ask.

For better or worse, this was us.

“There’s a difference,” he says in that Texas drawl of his, unhurried and smooth, “between showin’ off and deciding you’re done giving a damn about people who expect you to dim your light so they can feel more like the sun.”

He brings his lips to just almost touch mine, a silent reminder that I don’t have to say a word, that he has never and will never demand from me anything that I don’t want to give. I’ve spent my life tiptoeing around glass and walking through minefields, but Nash is steady. Nash is pale blue skies. Nash is grass and mud, wide-open spaces, worn leather.

But the difference between Jameson and Grayson, between Jameson and Rebecca, was that when Jameson was hurting, he wanted to hurt more.

“Avery.” Her name escaped Grayson’s lips the second she stepped into the room. Seeing her still did something to him. Perhaps it always would.

Avery asked, unable to bite back a smile that nearly broke her face. A face he knew better than he should have. Better than he had any right to.

Grayson corrected, because at least when he was correcting Thea, he wasn’t too caught up in things that might—or might not—have been different, if he had been different.

Jameson’s lips twisted into a familiar smile. That smile was trouble. The good kind.

“I told you two,” Jameson said, looking directly at me, “Christmas at Hawthorne House is a contact sport.”

“You’re perfect,” I said, my voice a little rough. “You know that?” “I think you might be confusing me with someone else,” Jameson quipped. I gave him a look. “Never.”

The day after Christmas, he and I were headed to Tahiti.

“Avery?” Grayson took a step toward me, and his lips curved into one of those very Grayson Hawthorne smiles, subtle but true. “You win.”

“Would you rather have your ex officiate your wedding… or have her marry one of your brothers?” Xander, as always, appreciated Jameson’s unique combination of creativity and deviousness.

Someday, Lib and me, we’ll have a family, and our kids?” Nash’s whiskey-smooth voice grew thick. “They will always be enough for me.” Nash looked down at the drop and didn’t so much as blink. “Let the great Tobias Hawthorne chew on that.”

Fear was loving someone so fiercely that there was no point in your heart beating if hers did not.