Page 17 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

The cold thing in her throat sat down, embarrassed.

“Oh,” she said, out loud this time, and he sighed.

“I should have led with that.” He rubbed the back of his neck, and for one strange second the biggest, wealthiest, most intimidating male she’d ever met looked almost sheepish. “I lead with the solution. Eric tells me it makes people want to hit me. I’m not good at the part before the solution.”

“No,” she said faintly. “I’m getting that.”

She turned back to the wall and looked at the whole wall rather than just the ferns. Damn. He was right. The part that was still standing was leaning, and she could see the dark crack along the base.

“You’re right,” she said grudgingly. “That’s going to come down.”

“It is.”

“It’ll take most of the wall with it. And half the polypody.” She chewed the inside of her cheek, looking for a solution. “So we don’t rebuild the fallen one.”

“Maris—”

“Hear me out. You’re not the only one who’s good at this.” She held up a dirty hand. “We leave the fallen wall exactly where it is. Every stone. It stays a fern bank, forever, and you don’t touch a single frond. We build a new wall behind it. There.” She pointed to the place on the slope. “Engineered however you want and set back so that when the old section gives way, it just comes down against the new wall and never gets anywhere near the sidewalk. Your ton of stone has nowhere to go, the children never know it happened, and my walking fern dies of old age at a hundred and fifty like it deserves.”

She stopped, blushing. She’d gotten a bit carried away towards the end.

He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he walked the line she’d indicated, looking at the slope, the standing wall, and the drop to the sidewalk, doing the calculations behind his eyes.

“The footing would need to go deeper on the downhill side,” he said at last. “Given the drop, I’d want to pin it into the bedrock. There’s an outcrop under that soil, I can feel it.” He crouched and pressed one broad palm into the earth as if he could read it through his hand, and she was not at all certain that he couldn’t. “Two courses of dry-stone facing on the garden side so it doesn’t look new, and weep holes at the base.” He looked up at her, and the gold flared in his eyes again, just for a moment. “It’s a better solution than mine.”

“Yes,” she said. “It is.”

“You could just say thank you.”

“You could just say I was right.”

The smile that broke across that granite face was so unexpected and so warm that she forgot what she had been about to say next.

“You were right,” he said. “You’re going to be right a great deal, I suspect. It’s going to be a long autumn.” He rose to his immense height and smiled down at her.

“All right, little thorn,” he said. “We’ll build your wall.”

“Little—” She narrowed her eyes up at him. “What did you call me?”

But he had already turned and started back towards the house, his wings settling across those enormous shoulders. And she was absolutely and infuriatingly sure that he was still smiling.

CHAPTER 7

“You’ve almost finished the house,” Aidan said, in the tone of a male discovering evidence. He turned a slow circle in the middle of the entrance hall, his head tipped back to take in the ceiling. “I mean, I knew you’d been working on it. But this is different. The hall is really starting to look finished.”

“It is finished.”

Aidan snorted. “You own a construction company. Nothing is ever finished.” He dropped onto the arm of the antique leather chair, one of the original pieces in the house, which Garrick had spent a fortune restoring. “Still, it looks good. Less haunted ancestral pile. More house where a rich, sad man lives alone.”

“Get off the chair.”

Aidan got off the chair, but only to prowl over to the window, where he leaned against the sill in a bar of afternoon light, looking entirely at home. Then again, Aidan looked at home everywhere. Although he was as strong and powerful as most werewolves, the big redhead had an ease to him that most wolves didn’t. Both humans and Others tended to like him on sight. Dogs and children liked him even better.

Eric lounged against the other window, working his way through a mug of Garrick’s coffee. His eyes flicked back and forth between the two of them like a male watching a tennis match.

Aidan crossed his arms and gave him a shit-eating grin. “Tell me about the landscaper.”

He refused to rise to the bait. “What about her?”