“You don’t have to kick all the boys out,” Breck suggested slyly. “It’s traditional to have a stripper at these affairs, and I will reluctantly let you demean me in this manner.”
“Reluctantly,” Bastian scoffed, as the others laughed.
“Only if it’s hands-off,” Darla said possessively. “And I get to watch!”
From the giggles, Breck must have tickled or poked her. There was the sound of a kiss, murmurs about a private show, and more laughter.
The conversation flowed to the party, and the wedding, and Graham trudged on to his room, feeling ashamed and angry and aching.
He wanted to be someone different, someone better. He wanted to deserve his friends’ trust. He wanted his past to stop haunting him.
Graham closed the door quietly behind him and leaned on it with a groan.
He wanted Alice.
Chapter 11
Dinner with Mary, Amber, and their mates was straight-up torture.
They all knew that Graham was Alice’s mate, and that she had slept with him, and if they didn’t know the details of their parting, they at least knew that it hadn’t exactly ended with pledges of devotion.
I love you, he’d said.
Well, she hadn’t ended it with pledges of devotion.
If her dinner partners didn’t say anything directly, their careful choice of topics and thoughtful sideways glances sent the message quite clearly: they thought she was being crazy.
She felt crazy.
She felt as loony as the gazelle shifter, and she desperately wished she could get away with shifting and running away to escape the awkward dinner and her own awkward self.
But being shy and eccentric as a small, delicate antelope was a lot different than it was as a giant, clumsy brown bear, and Alice knew it would only be ridiculous if she tried. To say nothing of destructive.
So she plowed through the meal and the conversation with bullish cheer, praising the food, making observations about the weather, and expressing gratitude that Mary had chosen not to put the bridesmaids in heels—in part because of Amber’s advancing pregnancy and in part because Alice already towered over most of the wedding party.
It occurred to her rather suddenly that Tony had been investigating Scarlet when he first came to the resort; she had been near the top of his list of suspects for the disappearing shifters that Beehag had bee
n kidnapping. Had he figured out what her animal shift form was in that time?
It was far preferable to think about the uncomfortable topic of her real mission on the island than it was to think about Graham.
Alice steered the conversation to ask about their original visits to the island.
Mary and Neal laughed about his attempts to avoid her.
“I couldn’t figure it out,” Mary chuckled. “I’d catch sight of him, and it was like I was wearing roadkill perfume—he was suddenly fleeing in the opposite direction.”
“Not my finest hour,” Neal agreed, smiling fondly at her. “But sometimes, it’s a rocky path to true love.”
Everyone very carefully did not quite look at Alice.
“What about you, Tony?” Alice asked brightly. “You were actually here investigating Scarlet, weren’t you? Did you find out any juicy secrets about her before you got distracted by meeting Amber and breaking up Beehag’s zoo? Everyone’s dying to know what her shift form is.”
She did her best to sound casual, but the looks she got suggested she had not moved past crazy in their minds.
“Most of what came up in the investigation is classified,” Tony said apologetically. “But no, we never did find out what she is.”
Then the dessert tray was brought by Chef himself, the cook with arms like barrels and a warm, friendly smile in his handsome, graying face.