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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, they 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.”