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Alice lay in her bed, listening to the night sounds around her little cottage, wishing she could sleep.
A sheet wasn’t warm enough. A blanket was too warm. The pillow was too flat, but two were too much. No position was comfortable.
And she couldn’t stop thinking of Graham.
It wasn’t just the sex, as mind-blowing as that had been. It was the hurt and longing in his eyes that he couldn’t quite hide, it was the way he’d smiled at her when they first met, slow and full of depth. It was all the questions she wanted to ask him, all the stories she wanted to tell him.
By the time dawn’s light started to creep around the curtains, she was gritty-eyed and grouchy, and tired of trying.
Alice got up and yanked her clothing on, then wandered quietly out of her cottage, up the white gravel paths towards the restaurant. Singing voices, light, and laughter spilled out of the closed doors of the kitchen, but the restaurant was as empty as she had expected for the hour of the day.
She wandered along the buffet for a moment because she felt restlessly hungry, but the food offered was no more satisfying than her bed had been. She took a piece of rolled lunch meat out of a sense of obligation and munched it as she left the restaurant.
At the door, she turned right, up the steep resort, towards the spa and the office. If she was canny, could she surprise Scarlet shifting? Maybe she was some kind of alien and Alice could catch her coming out of a cocoon...
She tripped over the corner of a potted plant at the corner of the courtyard; it didn’t fall, but it rattled in the plant stand, and Alice turned and fled, cursing her uselessness as an investigator.
“You’re up early,” a gentle voice greeted her, and she turned to find a beautiful Latina woman holding a yoga mat coming from the spa.
“Jet lag!” Alice said with false brightness. “My internal clock is all out of whack! Traveling would be so much easier without the traveling part, you know.”
“I’m about to go start a sunrise yoga class,” the woman said kindly. “Would you care to join me?”
“I... er...” Alice couldn’t think of a good reason not to. “I don’t have a mat?”
The other woman laughed. “Most guests don’t. We can stop by the activity center and get one there. I’m Lydia.” She offered a slight, gentle hand and Alice tried not to crush it.
“I’m Alice.”
That earned her a second, thoughtful look, and Alice could only imagine what she’d heard.
But Lydia didn’t bring Graham up, only asked how Alice was liking her stay so far, and chatted sweetly about the resort and the weather as they picked out a mat for her to use and walked past the pool to a wide lawn overlooking cliffs past the beach.
Apparently, Alice was the only one to show up for the class, and she was keenly aware of her clumsy, oversized body as Lydia, lithe and impossibly bendy, took her through a challenging series of poses.
They talked casually as they stretched and Lydia mildly corrected her posture.
“About Graham...” she finally said, exactly as Alice had been dreading.
Alice groaned, letting her head fall limp. Lydia had picked a moment when it would be challenging and graceless to storm off; she was leaning on her hands, with her butt in the air.
“Graham is a bighearted man. He doesn’t have a lot to say, but he’s clever and he’s kind. You should give him a chance.”
It was eerily similar to what Scarlet had said. Alice gave up her pose and sat down with a thump. “I’m sure he’s a great guy,” she said, and she was alarmed at the longing she heard in her own voice. She cleared her throat. “But I have a job back home, and he has a job here, and I just don’t see a life where either one of us is willing to throw what we already have away.”
Lydia looked at her thoughtfully. “Do you know a lot of mated couples?”
Alice snorted. “Not one, until Mary brought hers home.”
“When I met Wrench, I knew he was for me, but... I had this idea of what he ought to be that he wasn’t. I wasn’t disappointed, but it took some adjustment. I had to get past his rough exterior and street speech and swearing, and once I did I found this amazing man who I needed to spend the rest of my life with. It could be the same, for you. Don’t be put off by the fact that Graham was in jail, or that he can seem distant.”
Was Wrench really a name? Alice wondered. Then the rest of Lydia’s soft-spoken statement caught up with her.
“Graham was in jail?” Alice exclaimed. “For what?”
For the first time, Lydia looked flustered. “Oh, I’m sorry. I assumed you knew. It’s not really a secret. But it’s not such a bad thing. My own mate was in jail for a while. And I was alarmed when I found out, too.”
“What was he in jail for?” Alice repeated. “Graham, I mean.”
Lydia hesitated, then said, “Manslaughter. None of us know the details, but manslaughter is usually just an accident.”
“Huh,” Alice replied.
“But Graham is more than his rapsheet,” Lydia was quick to say. “Just like Wrench is. And don’t be put off by fact that he is so cool and reserved. He’ll take patience to get through to, but he has a warm heart under that gruff exterior. It might take a long time to get him to open up, but he deserves that chance.”
“Cool and reserved?” Alice scoffed. “Good god, the man declared his love for me before I found out his name.”
Lydia blinked at her, but seemed to have reclaimed her calm. “Then why aren’t you with him?”
“This isn’t the basis for a relationship,” Alice insisted. “I’m glad it worked out for you and... Wrench? Really? Okay... but I’m not looking for a man and I don’t have room in my life for one. And Graham wouldn’t be happy there anyway.”
Lydia continued to gaze at her, not judgmentally, but patiently.
“I’m six foot four and turn into a bear that could eat his face off,” Alice said desperately. “I live in a tiny apartment and have a high-stress job teaching ungrateful middle school students. I’m constantly traveling for sports events. I’m just... not girlfriend material.”
“Graham doesn’t care about that,” Lydia assured her confidently. “Let’s end our session in five minutes of child’s pose, to lengthen our backs, open our hips, and ease our stress.”
Alice obediently knelt and leaned her head forward onto the mat. She sighed into the stretch.
Graham didn’t care about any of that, she thought achingly. She actually believed him when he said he loved her. He would go back to Minnesota with her in a hot minute, if she asked him to. He would give up his perfect life here, with his friends, doing something he enjoyed in paradise, and he would follow her to... what?
To her hardscrabble life in a snowy state with strangers? He wouldn’t fit in her tiny apartment in Lakefield and she could barely afford it already. She couldn’t possibly put food on their table, and as far as she knew, jobs for landscaper felons were not available in any abundance. She couldn’t take care of Graham... she couldn’t even take care of the family she had.
Before she could stop herself, tears leaked out of her eyes and she was glad that her forehead was down on the mat.
She was trying so hard not to think about her family, because it only made her feel helpless and despairing.
Why couldn’t her mate have been a billionaire, like Gizelle’s deaf musician? she wanted to wail... but the brief, ungrateful thought made her chest squeeze with guilt and regret. The sad fact was, Graham was everything she wanted in one sexy package, and the more she reluctantly learned about him, the more she wanted to comfort him, to pull him into her arms and kiss him and show him that she knew who he really was beneath that quiet facade and checkered past.
Yoga, she decided, let her think too much. Once Lydia finally released her from this torture, she was going to go find the workout room that Neal and Tony had talked about and do something that would distract her more thoroughly. Maybe they had a punching bag, because she really felt like hitting something.