Tropical Lion's Legacy (Shifting Sands Resort 9)

“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.