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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...”