Chapter 3

Forty minutes later, we were on a rooftop. Sorry, Alisa. I still had the coin.

“You could make a wish,” I told Jameson, twirling the coin between my fingers again, my lips swollen and aching in all the right ways. I cast a glance back over our shoulders at the gardens below. “There’s no shortage of fountains down there.”

Jameson did not turn to look at the fountains. He leaned into me, the two of us perfectly balanced—on the roof and with each other. “What fun is wishing?” Jameson countered. “No game to play, no challenge to best, just… poof, here’s your heart’s desire.”

That was a very Hawthorne perspective on wishes, on life. Jameson had grown up in a glittering, elite world where nothing was out of reach. He hadn’t spent his childhood birthdays blowing out candles. Every year, he’d been given ten thousand dollars to invest, a challenge to fulfill, and the opportunity to pick any talent or skill in the world to cultivate, no expenses spared—and no excuses accepted.

I considered leaving the topic alone, but ultimately decided to push back a bit. In my experience, Jameson Hawthorne liked being pushed.

“You don’t know what you would wish for,” I said, my tone making it clear that the words were a challenge, not a question.

“Maybe not.” Jameson shot me a look that was nothing but trouble. “But I can certainly think of some fascinating games I’d like to win.”

That statement was every bit as much of an invitation as heads or tails. Holding back—just a bit, just for a moment longer—I pulled the postcard Jameson had sent me out of my back pocket. It was starting to look a little wrinkled, a little worn.

Real, the way most people’s dreams never were.

“I got your postcard,” I said. “No message on the back.”

“How long did you spend trying to determine if I’d written something in invisible ink?” Jameson asked. Nothing but trouble.

I countered his question with my own: “What kind of invisible ink did you use?”

Just because I hadn’t been able to reveal it didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

Beside me, Jameson leaned back on his elbows and looked up at Prague Castle again. “Maybe I just considered writing something, then decided not to.” He gave a careless little shrug, a very Jameson Hawthorne shrug. “After all, it’s been done.”

For decades, another Hawthorne had sent postcards just like this one to my mother. Theirs had been a star-crossed kind of love—but real.

Like the creases in my postcard.

Like Jameson and me.

“Everything’s been done by someone,” I pointed out quietly.

Jameson’s gap year was three-quarters done. Day by day, I could feel him growing more restless in his own skin. I’d been Hawthorne-adjacent long enough to know that billionaire Tobias Hawthorne’s real legacy hadn’t been the fortune he’d left me. It was the marks he’d left on each of his grandsons. Invisible. Enduring.

This was Jameson’s: Jameson Winchester Hawthorne was hungry. He wanted everything and needed something, and because he was a Hawthorne, that elusive something could never be ordinary.

He couldn’t be ordinary.

“You should know by now, Heiress, that the words everything’s been done by someone sound a lot like a challenge to me.” Jameson smiled, one of those uneven, edged, wicked Jameson smiles. “Or a dare.”

“No dares,” I told Jameson, grinning right back.

“You’ve been talking to Alisa,” he said, then he cocked an eyebrow. “Saint Avery.”

Jameson could read at least nine languages that I was aware of. He almost certainly knew exactly what the world was saying about him.

“Don’t call me that,” I ordered. “I’m no saint.”

Jameson straightened and pushed my hair back from my face, the tips of his fingers banishing tension in every muscle they crossed. My temple. My scalp.

“You act like what you did with your inheritance is nothing,” he said. “Like anyone would have done it. But I wouldn’t have. Grayson wouldn’t have. None of us would. You act like what you’re doing with your foundation isn’t extraordinary—or like, if it is, it’s because the work is so much bigger than you. But, Avery? What you’re doing… it’s something.”

A Hawthorne kind of something. Everything.

“It’s not just me,” I told Jameson fiercely. “It’s all of us.” He and his brothers were working with me on the foundation. There were causes Jameson had been championing, people he’d brought in to sit on the board.

“And yet…” Jameson dragged the words out. “You’re the one with meetings today.”

Giving away billions—strategically, equitably, and with an eye to outcomes—was a lot of work. I wasn’t naive enough to try to do it all myself, but I also wasn’t about to coast on the blood, sweat, and tears of others.

This was my story. I was writing it. This was my chance to change the world.

But for another few minutes… I brought my hand to Jameson’s jaw. It’s just you and me. On this rooftop, at the top of the world and the base of a castle, it felt like the two of us were the only people in the universe.

Like Oren wasn’t standing guard down below. Like Alisa wasn’t waiting outside the gates. Like I was just Avery, and he was just Jameson, and that was enough.

“I don’t have meetings for another hour,” I pointed out.

Jameson’s adrenaline-kissed smile was, in a word, dangerous. “In that case,” he murmured, “could I interest you in some shapely hedges, a statue of Hercules, and a white peacock?”

I didn’t have to look back at the palace gardens below to know that they were still closed. Jameson and I still had this magical, lifted-from-time place to ourselves.

I smiled an adrenaline-kissed smile of my own. “Alisa said to tell you no puppies.”

“A peacock is not a puppy,” Jameson said innocently, and then he brought his lips to just almost graze mine—an invitation, a gauntlet thrown, an ask.

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

Kissing him set my entire body on fire. Losing myself to it, to him, I felt like standing at the base of something much more monumental than a castle.

The world was big, and we were small, and this was everything.

“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.”