“Hey, handsome!” Alice called as she approached.
Graham stopped raking and leaned on the handle like a Greek statue, his mane of hair golden in the sunlight.
“I keep making you late for work, so I brought you lunch from the buffet,” she said cheerfully.
Graham smiled slowly. “Thanks,” he said gratefully. “Scarlet read us the riot act at the staff meeting today. She had a lot to say about how romance and weddings shouldn’t be keeping us from doing our jobs, and how she can’t run a business if we insist on treating it like a summer camp.”
Alice gave a laughing groan as she handed Graham the plates with the sandwich she’d put together. “She’s probably in a terrible mood.”
“Everyone who can is avoiding her,” Graham agreed.
It wasn’t only the upcoming wedding that was distracting everyone, of course... everyone was doing what they could to get money towards the purchase of the resort, and if the outstanding balance was still intimidating, it was encouraging to watch the total slowly rising as they got in touch with more of Scarlet’s previous guests. Alice had been flabbergasted when Jenny gleefully announced that the Empress of Atlantis had dropped a cool five million into the pot. She wasn’t sure which part of the statement astonished her the most: Empress, Atlantis, or five million.
“Next you’re going to tell me a royal unicorn family is making a donation,” Alice had scoffed in disbelief, trying to think of anything more unbelievable.
“Already did,” Jenny had laughed, pointing to a respectable pledge in the ledger. “Not royalty, quite, but English nobility.”
In ten days, they had raised more than half of the impossible goal.
She and Graham sat together on the bench overlooking the cliffs, the ocean crawling beneath them and beating on the rocks.
There were moments when Alice thought her life was in a perfect, fragile balance.
She was... when she was honest with herself... absolutely head-over-heels in love with a sexy, tenderhearted man with madly talented fingers and fabulous hair.
Graham didn’t ask what they were now, and he never called her his girlfriend—not that he would waste any syllables for extraneous things like titles anyway—but she was visiting his room every night. And each afternoon that he could be coaxed away from the gardens. And every morning when she caught him on break, and when they passed on the paths...
Her bear, apparently, was insatiable, and fortunately, his lion was, too; however he protested that he wasn’t going to be able to keep up this pace, every time she kissed him, he was more than capable of laying her down and making her bones turn to jelly.
They never talked about love, or the future. But Alice thought about a lot.
Love...
...and secrets.
There were also moments when Alice knew keenly that it was all temporary, that soon enough, she would be returning to her grubby real life, helpless to help her parents or her brother, unable to do anything to save either of them.
And Scarlet’s shift form hung between them like a giant white elephant.
Alice was sure that Graham would tell her what it was if she asked, but she knew just as certainly that she couldn’t ask. Forcing him to betray someone else’s trust in him seemed like the cruelest thing she could do to him.
So Alice never mentioned how much help even a portion of fifty million dollars would be in their slow fundraising efforts, and she never brought up Scarlet if he didn’t first, and she tried hard not to think about her life back home and the solution-less problems that she would return to.
Graham made it easy.
He told her stories about growing up in England, and she told him about growing up in the rural Midwest with her brother. He talked about his father, and learning how to garden on their estate when he was young. Alice told him about learning sports with her father, and fishing and boating in the rivers and lakes. He even told her, hesitantly, a little about his fighting days, and showed her a many-times-folded flier.
“King of the Jungle!” Alice chortled. “Look how short your hair is!”
“I could cut it again,” he offered at once.
“Don’t you dare,” Alice said. “I think a guy with longer hair than mine is the sexiest thing ever.”
He even let her work with him in the gardens at the top of the resort, showing her how to twist ripe strawberries off the plants without bruising them, and how to harvest herbs and which weeds to pull. He told her what all the jungle plants were, and how they grew.
Evenings were often spent in The Den, sitting cozily with the rest of the staff in the living room, and over the course of the week no fewer than seven people later commented to her that they’d never seen Graham talk so much. Two of them had marveled over the fact that they’d never realized he was British before.
The glorious tropical days spilled one into another, and Alice trembled, thinking how short their time left was.