Status Updates From Games Untold: An Inheritanc...

Jameson heard the threat inherent in that sentence. As much as he wanted to know what the hell this was how the hell any of this was possible—Avery was the one thing that he would not, could not risk.

Fear wasn't justice in your veins or a beast at your throat. Fear was loving someone so fiercely that there was no point in your heart beating if hers did not.

"What happens in the tree house..." Grayson said, his voice thick with emotion.

"Stays in the tree house," Xander, Jameson, and Nash finished as one. All four of them took a drink of the black champagne. All four of them felt the moment—Xander knew they did.

"Always," Nash said, his voice coming out rough and low. "Lib and me getting married won't change that. It won't change us. This."

Silently, Grayson raised his glass all the way up. One by one, the others did the same.

"I'm livin' my life on my terms. Getting married to a girl of my choosing. Helping people, when and where I want to. 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 deop and didn't so much as blink. "Let the great Tobias Hawthorne chew on that."

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

On the front, I'd gone for a familiar Latin phrase. EST UNUS EX NOBIS. NOS DEFENDAT EIUS. It was something Grayson had said about me once. On the back, I'd opted for English, something that I had said to him.

IT GOES BOTH WAYS.

Grayson's fingers closed around the rock and he looked up, his eyes locking on to mine once more.

Last Christmas, we'd been together, but I hadn't been his and he hadn't been mine the way we were now.

"Just for the record..." Jameson told me, standing and reaching for my hand, pulling me inward, like we'd just been transported to a ballroom and this was our dance. "When I take out enough targets to inherit your name, my present will be beyond perfect." He smiled that dangerous, heady smile of his.

"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."

Your mom was beautiful," he said softly. "She had your smile."

In other words: He was definitely the person who'd found the photograph. A lump rose in my throat. "I think most people would probably say that I have hers," I told him.

"I have other pictures." Jameson brought his hand to my hair again, tucking another stray wisp behind my ear. "For you, Heiress—and not a part of the game."

"Game ends Christmas morning," Nash told Libby and me, but he had eyes only for her. "Perfect presents take time""

"The best gifts," Nash said, glancing at Libby, a low, deep hum in his voice, "are the ones you don't even know you want." The edges of his mouth crinkled with a subtle smile. "Maybe you don't even know it exists, but the moment you see it..."

"Perfection," Xander finished with a chef's kiss.

If looks could have killed. Xander would have been ashes. You'd better not have," Grayson growled.

Xander threw an arm around him. "I'm an Anna. You're an Elsa. You know in your heart that this is true."

Nash and Jamie were hardly holding it together.

"I hate you all," Grayson told his brothers.

"Has Thea taken any photos yet?" 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.

Focus.

"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.

Max had always pictured herself with someone dark and broody. A rogue assassin. A vampire of questionable morals. Someone with a checkered past and a heart in need of healing.

But there Xander was, with his blankets and his plushies and an entire ceiling covered in books.

I see the shift in his expression, and suddenly, there's nothing steady or understated about what I see in his eyes, and I know—

He's dreaming, too.

And it's beautiful.

"It might not be positive," I told him. "It probably isn't. But—"

"We look together," he told me, taking my hands in his. "On three."

"One." I start off the count.

"Two." He smiles, and then I do.

"Three."

He kisses me until I believe him with every fiber of my being: Whatever my answer, everything is going to be fine.

Whatever my answer, we are.

And that's why I'm ready. That's why I keep kissing him and shake the Magic 8 Ball. That's why I pull back and keep shaking it, until the answer I want pops up.

One word. Just one. YES.

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.

Nash is mine.

Even in sleep, Nash's arm curls protectively around me. Were in London. I've never been before, but would be content to stay here in bed with him all day. There's something about being held, something about letting myself be held, about the way my head fits under his chin and the warmth of his body against mine.

There's something about knowing that he is content to just hold me.

I used to wake up from bad dreams and bounce out of bed and smile and think about all the good things that could happen that day, a surefire recipe for chasing the darkness away. Now there is no darkness, no nightmares.

Now I wake up and roll into him.

When his nails are dry, he lifts first my right wrist and then my left to his mouth, his lips brushing over my pulse, over the words I've tattooed there, reminders that I'm a survivor, that I can trust myself.

And him.

I smile a cowboy kind of smile to go with the hat. "I've always been good at waiting." At dreaming. At hoping. And I am done punishing myself for that.

Nash's eyes are brown, darker around the outside and center of his iris and almost amber in between. Right now, the expression in those eyes isn't measured in the least.

I take a step forward. Nash casually kicks his bedroom don closed behind me. He's smiling like a Cheshire cat now, and I don't know why—not until I look at the back of his bedroom door. Hanging there is a cowboy hat, just my size.

"I can't," I tell him again. I don't know if I'm talking about the hair dye or him or us or the fact that I can't keep doing nothing when my sister is in a medically induced coma, when she might never wake up.

Nash takes the bag of dyes from my hand. "I can," he says. "If you let me."

I see Nash's chest rise and fall, and I realize that the only reason I am breathing is because my chest is rising and talling in unison with his.

"I need you to breathe for me." Nash closes what little space remains between us in a single breath. His arms wrap around me.

He's got me.

"I am breathing," I lie.

"Breathe, Lib." He pulls me against him. My head on his chest, I breathe in Nash Hawthorne.

I reach for him, my fingers curling around his. Nash is used to being the protector. He's not used to being protected, but right now, that's too damn bad. I give his hand a squeeze.

Nash squeezes back, then takes his own shot. "I shouldn't be surprised. Money talks."