by Zoe Chant
Graham was speaking between gritted teeth, his sides heaving like he’d just run the length of the resort.
“I was good at hurting people. Really good at it.”
Alice didn’t doubt it.
Then Graham stepped forward, a sharp, aggressive move designed to frighten her.
“And I liked it,” Graham hissed, close to her face. “I liked to hurt them.”
Chapter 22
It was out there. It couldn’t be taken back. She knew who he really was now, and that was it.
Graham couldn’t hold his angry facade for long, not in the face of Alice’s foolish bravery as she gazed back at him wordlessly. She was too beautiful to bear, too courageous to endure.
“You should go,” he said, stepping back and turning away. “I won’t bother you again.”
But she didn’t go. “Why did you go to prison?” Her voice was quiet and firm.
Graham was done with lies and secrets. He would answer any question she asked.
“I killed a man.”
He could have stopped there. He could have let her assume it was just an accident, could have stuck to half-truths like he always did. He could have forced her to ask the questions. Instead, he went on, continuing to stand looking away.
“He was a good fighter, strong and fast, light on his feet and well-trained. Not the best I’d ever been up against, but... good. I... thought he might have been a big cat shifter.”
Had he really? Had he really had no doubts at the beginning of the fight?
“He fought hard, snapped my wrist before I got his collar bone broken and turned the tide of the fight. But he never gave up, never... never begged for mercy... never asked...”
Grant had begged.
Shift, he’d hissed, hearing the man’s rib break at his hit. Shift and concede the fight.
Give up, he’d pleaded, when he dislocated his opponent’s shoulder. How much abuse could he take?
Shift, he’d shouted, over the crowd’s cheers and jeers.
Shift! he’d beseeched, holding the man’s broken body in his arms, not sure how he hadn’t surrendered to his animal instinct long before.
Then Graham finally realized why he hadn’t, as the light in the man’s blazing eyes slowly flickered out.
“He wasn’t a shifter,” Graham said. He was not sure when he had dropped to his knees, hands making fists in the gravel. “He was just a human that they’d put in a cage with me.”
Behind him, Alice gave a hiss of dismay.
“I tortured him,” Graham admitted to the strawberries before him. “I begged him to shift... but he couldn’t. The stuff they classified in my file? It was what I did to him. How badly I hurt him. It was slaughter, it wasn’t manslaughter.”
“What did you do then?” Alice asked quietly. She must be horrified. It was a wonder she was still there.
“The fight coordinator was a lovely bloke by the name of Cyrus Angres. He’d been setting these fights up for a couple of years, and he was afraid that the usual show was getting... stale. I realized he’d done it knowingly, set me up to kill that man for money, and it took six guys to pull me off him. I got away, went straight to a bobby I knew in London who was a shifter and told him everything. It went to the top of International Shifter Affairs. The whole ring went under, I got a reduced sentence for manslaughter, all the details of the guy’s death marked out with black pen... and afterwards I got a new identity from Johnny Ace to start over in America with.”
“As Graham Long, gardener.”
“Gardening ran in my family,” Graham said numbly. “When Scarlet found me, she was just like Jenny, hoping I had money to restart the resort; she only had about half of what she needed raised. All she found was a broke, broken, bottom-of-the-barrel groundskeeper at a half-rate golf course in Florida. She... could have left me where she found me, it would have been a lot easier. But she made me come here, gave me purpose, showed me how to start over.”
Alice’s feet crunched over the gravel and she sat down on the rock edge of the strawberry bed facing Graham. “I can’t picture Scarlet in Florida,” she said thoughtfully, as if that was the surprising part of the whole sordid story.
“She wasn’t,” Graham said quietly. “She can’t leave the island. She got my phone number, wired me a plane ticket, convinced me to use it.”
“Graham...”
“Grant,” he corrected. “Grant Lyons. Murderer.”
“Graham,” Alice insisted. “You are Graham Long now, and it was Graham Long that I fell in love with.”
He put his forehead down on the rock edge of the strawberry bed next to her. “Grant is still who I am,” he said plaintively. “And you don’t understand. I liked to hurt people. I liked it.”
“Bullshit,” Alice said flatly, to his surprise.
She didn’t get it, Graham thought in despair. “You don’t know...”
Chapter 23
Alice had not believed that there could be anything more devastating and distracting than Graham’s—Grant’s—bare chest.
She was wrong.
When Graham spoke—really spoke, in a confessional rush of words—he had the sexiest British accent that Alice had ever heard. The extra ‘r’s, the clear ‘t’s, the drawn out ‘oo’s... move over Tom Hiddleston.
She had to force herself to listen to his words, and not just drown in his voice.
He believed he was a monster, she realized as he spoke. A terrible person who did terrible things and liked them.
But Alice knew better. She knew Graham from the bottom of his soul to each gentle fingertip. She knew his heart.
“You don’t know...” he said softly.
“I do. I watch this happen to kids in sports all the time. They don’t love the sport, they only love being good at it,” Alice said firmly. “They get so wrapped up in what people expect them to do with a talent that they start thinking of themselves only in terms of that skill. They define themselves by what they’re good at, and they think that they enjoy it because it’s the only time they feel worth anything. That’s not enjoyment, that’s entrapment.”
She knelt beside him, putting a hand hesitantly on his shoulder. “Enjoying a fight where you get to be good at something, and there are people cheering you on, and you know that all your injuries and theirs will heal up in a couple of days... that’s not the same as liking to hurt people. You knew the difference, and you went out there and flipped tables because you were tricked into an unfair fight that only had one ending.”
Her arm slid around him, and Graham turned in her embrace to lay his head on her shoulder. She tangled her fingers in his hair and rested her head on his.
It was so comfortable, so natural, to hold him like that; Alice didn’t even mind the sharp gravel pressing into her knees.
“Graham,” she started.
“Grant,” he corrected firmly into her collarbone. His arms had crept around her, and he was pressed up close against her for comfort.
“I’ll call you what you want,” Alice said just as firmly. “But you are not the Grant you’ve convinced yourself you are.”
“Who am I, then?” he asked, drawing back to look her in the eyes.
Mine, Alice wanted to say.
Ours, her bear was growling.
Alice couldn’t say either of those things out loud, so she simply leaned forward and kissed him.
After a split second of surprise, Graham opened his mouth and kissed her back desperately, taking her face in his hands.
She’d been right not to kiss him before, Alice decided. It was like baring her soul to him; it undid her. She was helpless in his hands, utterly lost to his taste and his tongue and his hungry mouth.
Every inch of him was irresistible. Both of them rose to their feet, still kissing, as Graham lifted her shirt from her. She tried to get his shirt off while he was trying to unclip her bra, and they quickly realized they were working to cross-purposes and stripped off their own clothing.
For a moment, the
y simply stood close, not touching, just gazing at each other. But not for long; Alice couldn’t keep her eyes, or her fingers, from his beautiful shoulders, or his broad chest, or his amazing jaw, and she gave a little gasp as Graham stepped forward, his cock pressing just where it should as he kissed her again.
Alice didn’t think that he could unravel her more, but the second kiss was deeper, and there was no clothing to keep his intoxicating skin from her starving fingers.
She gave a gasp of surprise as he suddenly wrapped his arms around her and lifted her to lay her back, directly into one of the beds of strawberries.
Then his weight was over her like a shield, and he was pressing into her as Alice spread her legs in invitation. She was impossibly wet, he was impossibly hard, and when he slid into her there was a moment of pleasure so intense and intimate that Alice had to cry out in surrender.
For a heartbeat, he held there, buried inside her, then he bent to kiss her, and began to thrust, slowly, gently, deeper every stroke, and Alice felt like he was drawing her up on an unbreakable thread.
She kissed him back, arching up, wrapping her legs around him because there was no such thing as close enough, no place inside of her that didn’t want him.
When she found shuddering release, crying out in pleasure she didn’t want to deny, she opened her eyes and found him gazing at her in wonder and need.
Impulsively, she wrapped one leg around his and turned him onto his back, barely staying coupled as they rolled. She lifted his arms above his head and leaned on his forearms, pinning him, riding him, taking him deeper than she’d ever thought was possible. He let her hold him down, hips rising to meet her strokes, until she was falling into a second whirlpool of pleasure.
He broke free of her hands then, and wrapped his arms tight around her, holding her closer and closer, until he was spilling his ecstasy into her, groaning and growling near her ear.
Neither one of them let go this time, continuing to embrace as their heartbeats finally slowed and they could catch their breath again.
She was never going to be able to eat the berries again without evoking the memories of Graham. The scent of bruised leaves and squashed berries and disturbed earth was heady and strong; Alice felt like she’d just made love in a dessert.
“Poor, crushed strawberries,” Alice finally said.
She giggled. “The gardener is going to be so pissed...”
Below her, Graham made a rumbling noise. For a moment, Alice wondered if she was too heavy to keep lying on him, then realized he was laughing. It was the most beautiful sound she’d ever heard, vibrating through her entire body and she chortled with him helplessly.
“Alice,” he said, sitting up with his arms still around her. His laughter stilled. “Alice...”
If his voice in confession was disturbing, his voice saying her name struck some raw nerve inside of her and Alice suddenly felt like her world was dropping away. “I don’t know,” she said to the question he wasn’t asking. “I don’t know what this means. I don’t know what it changes.” She plucked a flattened strawberry from her shoulder blade and shook it off her fingers.
“Scarlet...” he started to say.
“Don’t tell me what she is,” Alice stopped him. “I can’t ask you to do that. You were right that it’s not your secret to give, and I shouldn’t have asked you.”
Graham gave a little shudder. “You were right that I know what she is, though. She’s been a friend of my family for decades. She was my grandfather’s... partner.”
“Don’t tell me what she is,” Alice repeated. “Not like this.” Then, as if she was compelled to ask, “Partner, like... lovers?”
“No, though I think that she may have loved him. She was technically his secretary, but she was much more to our family than that. The resort was supposed to be hers, when he built it.”
“Where did she get the rest of the money?” Alice asked, when he was quiet for a moment.
“She didn’t,” Graham explained. “This is only half of what the resort was meant to be. She scrapped the plans for a little community that was meant to be located over on this corner of the island, hoping that if the resort took off, she’d be able to add it on later.”
“And now?”
Graham sighed. “Now she’s going to lose it all.”
Alice shivered in the cooling evening breeze and stood up to find her clothes. She tossed Graham’s pants at him. “She doesn’t have to...” she said thoughtfully, pulling her shirt on without a bra.
Graham, as appealing shimmying into his pants as he’d been getting out of them, scowled at her. “What do you mean?”
“You’ve got some flush clients who love this place,” Alice suggested. “Isn’t Gizelle’s mate a billionaire? Hasn’t royalty stayed here? What if Scarlet ran a crowdfunding thing? Like, a timeshare program, but without the vulture salespeople, to raise enough money to buy it outright. They’d have to sell it to you if you came up with the cash, right?”
Graham stared at her. “They’d have to sell it to me, but they’re listing the island as a whole; we’d have to buy the entire thing. They want three hundred and fifty million dollars.”
Alice tried not to choke on the very idea of that kind of money.
“That would be... a lot of crowdfunding,” Alice conceded. “And I think I have a squashed strawberry in my underwear.”
Chapter 24
When Graham and Alice returned to The Den, there was no real way to get back in to his room privately, or sneak to the shower, or pretend that nothing had happened, so they didn’t try. The rest of the staff was already gathered in the living area, and the hum of conversation that they’d heard through the open windows came to a stop when Graham cracked the door.
Everyone politely pretended they weren’t craning to see if it was Graham alone, or if Alice with him, except Breck, who turned completely around on the couch, propped his chin on both hands, and greeted them cheerfully.
“Welcome back, your lordship!”
Darla gave a chiding murmur that couldn’t hide her amusement and Laura threw a pillow at him.
“There’s a bottle of wine on the counter,” Mary pointed out.
“Oh, good,” Alice said, opening cabinets at random until she found the glasses. “You want one?”
Graham shook his head.
While Alice filled her tumbler, the others discretely rearranged themselves on the chairs and couches so that the only free spots were together.
Graham stalked to take one of them, Alice following. He settled gingerly into place, wishing he had taken a glass of wine simply to have something to do with his hands. Alice flopped down beside him, pushing her sandals off with each opposite foot and tucking her legs up under her. They weren’t quite touching.
Everyone grinned.
“We’ve been talking about how we might save the resort,” Jenny said quickly. “We’re thinking about trying to raise the money ourselves. If we can, they have to sell it to you.”
“If you’re in,” Laura added.
Graham grunted.
“Great minds think alike,” Alice said. “We were just talking about that.”
Jenny had her computer in her lap. “We’re definitely going to ask Conall, and Magnolia. Laura and I are still fighting legal battles over the life insurance policy that Fred stole when our parents died, but Fred’s estate is running out of appeals to make, so we should get it soon. It will be a pretty good drop in the bucket.”
“I... have a few things of value,” Bastian said uncomfortably.
“You can’t sell your hoard,” Saina said to him, dismayed.
Bastian took her hands in his. “It’s not worth a lot,” he said, looking embarrassed. “But this is greater treasure.” He looked around at the others in The Den. “If the resort isn’t here, I don’t have a hoard worth having.”
Saina kissed him. “I know people who can fence anything we need.”
“I have some jewelry,” Lydia said thoughtfully. �
��Nothing spectacular, but some of it is gold.”
“I’ve got a watch,” Tex said. “It might have some value as an antique.”
Jenny was busily tapping onto her keyboard as everyone volunteered what they could and guessed prices that seemed pathetic compared to the monstrous number they were aiming for.
“What about Scarlet?” Alice asked. “She must know some well-to-do people to ask.” Graham wondered if she was thinking about the mysterious offer for the information on Scarlet, and her own dire straits. Fifty million would go a long ways.
Lydia, sitting nearly in Wrench’s lap on the crowded couch, shook her head. “Scarlet told us not to look for Grant Lyons.”
“To protect Graham,” Alice reminded them. “But you all know now.”
“Your...” Darla smothered Breck with the throw pillow before he could finish the lordship part.
“We were thinking we would try to do it quietly and surprise her,” Laura said. “She’s so private and proud, I think she might try to stop us.”
Graham knew she would, and his nod caught Laura’s attention.
“Are you in?” Laura asked him.
“I’ve got nothing of value,” Graham apologized.
“The sale has to be in your name,” Laura pointed out. “You’d be the owner.”
“Do I have to be?” Graham asked with a scowl. “Can’t I sign it away to Scarlet?”
“Yeah, you can do that,” Jenny said confidently, to his relief. “That’s quite straight-forward.”
“Good,” Travis said with a grin. “I don’t want Graham the Grouch calculating my bonuses.”
“Are you bleeding?” Lydia asked suddenly, leaning over to Alice.
Alice looked down at her leg. “Nope,” she said, peeling the red spot off. “Strawberry.”
“I thought I smelled strawberries!” Amber laughed. “I couldn’t figure out why.”
“I think there’s one in your hair, Graham,” Mary observed shyly.
