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Alice turned blindly on the path and ran, grinding her teeth and wishing herself anywhere else.
She’d told him everything, and he’d told her half-truths.
I want to be honest, he’d said. It’s nice to have someone to trust, she’d told him.
And he wasn’t even Graham Long.
Alice came to another fork in the path and jogged uphill, because it was harder, because she wanted the clean sweat of hard work to wash away the ugly anger and resentment and betrayal that she was feeling.
What could she trust of what he’d told her? What part of it was real and what part was the mask that he’d shown everyone?
It didn’t make her feel any better that he’d been lying to everyone.
Everyone except Scarlet. Scarlet knew. And if Scarlet knew about Graham...
The path ended in a high wall and a closed gate marked “KEEP OUT” in red letters. Alice snarled, and turned to find somewhere else to run, then caught a whiff of Graham and knew he’d followed her.
She waited.
He wasn’t running, he was walking slowly, and by the time he got to the gate, Alice had worked herself into a fury.
“You know what Scarlet is,” she accused him, when he finally rounded the last corner and wearily approached.
“You knew what she was the whole time, and you knew what it would mean for me, that I could save my family. You lied to me. I trusted you.”
Did he understand how rare her trust was?
Graham didn’t answer, only went to the gate, opening it and going in without saying a word.
Alice hesitated a moment, then followed him.
For a moment, her anger was washed away in surprise. They walked into a garden, a beautiful, riotous, protected little area of green glory. An open greenhouse lay in one direction, uncovered beds, groaning in flowers and fruit, in the other. Jungle towered above it on the island side, open fields to the ocean side. Even in the darkness, it was gorgeous.
And it smelled... like home.
This was Graham’s haven, she realized. The forbidden garden, his secret place.
But she wasn’t ready to forgive him, or accept this gift as any kind of compensation for his lies and deception.
“Why didn’t you tell me about Scarlet?” she demanded, only a few steps into the garden. She turned and glared at Graham, not letting herself drink in the peacefulness of the plants around them. She didn’t want peacefulness, she wanted Graham to suffer some fraction of the agony she was feeling.
“Her secrets aren’t mine to tell,” Graham growled, in that low voice that masked accents.
“I might have accepted that,” Alice snarled. “But you let me believe you didn’t know.”
Graham was silent. Insufferably silent.
“You lied about who you are,” she went on, hating the silence worse than the lies. “You lied to me and talked about trust and honesty, and I don’t know how I’m supposed to ever believe you about anything again.”
“I’m sorry...” Graham started to say.
But Alice didn’t want an apology any more than she wanted peace.
She was angry, and hurting, and she wanted to fight him, because she didn’t know what else to do.
“You’re only sorry you got caught,” Alice hurled back at him. “You would have cheerfully continued to deceive me... for how long? Until I left after Mary and Neal’s wedding? What if I’d decided to quit my job and stay here with you? Would you have let me sacrifice my whole world for a complete fiction?”
“I wouldn’t have...”
“How can I believe anything you say!” Alice snapped, hating his gentleness, resenting his calm. “I don’t know what you would have, what you might have, I only know what you did. What you said. How you lied. I told you everything. You let me believe you were being honest with me.”
She was being impossible, she knew, and that was the very worst part. She was the one who had pushed him away, held him at arm’s length. She was the one who had tried to deny that their bond was anything more than sexual need. No kissing, she’d told him, as if that had protected her heart in the slightest.
“I actually fell in love with you!” she railed at him, the pain in her chest like a band being tightened. “Until ten minutes ago, I thought maybe we could make something work, that there really was something here! Something real!”
“Don’t,” Graham said, sounding angry at last. “Don’t love me!”
Alice was out of words, out of breath, out of the fury that had carried her this far; it was leaking out of her with the tears on her face.
Graham seemed to have absorbed all of it. “You want my secrets? You want to know the whole truth, who I really am?” he threatened.
Alice stared at him, not sure what to do with the emptiness in her chest or the silence in her throat.
“I’m a fighter, I’m a killer. I told you the truth about school, and I got recruited soon after to fight in an underground cage fighting ring. It was all shifters, and it was a fight in human form until one of the fighters shifted in sheer survival instinct. You know how you get shifters to take animal form? You hurt them. You hurt them so bad, they have to shift, they can’t help themselves. Ask Tony, or Neal. Beehag had it down to an art.”
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.”