Page 22 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

Then Eric was gone.

The front door closed, and a moment later two engines started in the drive—Aidan’s battered old truck and Eric’s patrol car—and pulled away. The kitchen settled into silence around him, and he stood alone beside the table with Maris’s estimate spread open in front of him and the gold still cooling slowly out of his eyes.

I remember your father’s eyes.

He didn’t want to remember. He didn’t want to wonder what the pull meant, or why it had dragged him out of stone in January. He particularly didn’t want to think about why it went quiet whenever Maris was close, as though there was no longer any distance left for it to cross. And he had no intention at all of examining why watching Aidan touch her had produced a response so immediate and primitive that his wings had nearly opened in the middle of his own entrance hall.

None of it was useful. None of it changed anything.

Then a small, delighted sound came from beyond the east door and he turned his head towards the sound. Toby’s voice rose excitedly at the end of a question, and beneath it came Maris’s laugh, low and warm.

He could stay in the house. There was an estimate to review and email waiting in his study, a dozen perfectly reasonable things requiring his attention. Not one of them had anything whatsoever to do with a blonde woman digging holes in his garden, or with a quiet little boy who had decided a crooked wooden rose was worth noticing.

Maris laughed again.

He straightened his shoulders, folded his wings flat against his back, and went to find them.

CHAPTER 8

The bramble had roots like a grudge.

Maris braced one boot against the base of the collapsed gazebo, wrapped both gloved hands around the thickest cane, and yanked. The whole tangle groaned. Somewhere underneath it, she was fairly sure, was a rose that had survived twenty years of neglect purely out of spite, and she had every intention of setting it free.

“There you are,” she muttered. “Come on. I’m only trying to help.”

The bramble disagreed.

She had been at it since eight, working her way along the ruined stone edge of what had once been a formal rose garden. She was filthy and she was happy, the way she always was on a job with a lot of problems and satisfying solutions to those problems. This corner of the grounds had the best bones of anything she’d found so far. She could see the old geometry in it—four beds, a central axis, the ghost of a path—buried under two decades of everything else deciding it lived here now.

She set her feet again and pulled. The cane came free with a wet ripping sound and a shower of dead leaves, and she staggered back a step triumphantly.

“That one’s been winning for a long time.”

She turned so fast she nearly sat down in the dirt.

Garrick stood at the bottom of the three shallow stone steps that led up into the garden, and she had no idea how long he’d been there. He was in dark jeans and a grey T-shirt with the sleeves straining over his biceps. He was so large and so still against the overgrown green that her eyes had almost slid right past him, the way they slid past a wall.

“You could announce yourself,” she said. “People do that. It’s considered polite.”

“I did.” A pause. “You were arguing with a plant.”

“I was winning.”

“You were.”

She couldn’t tell if he was teasing. Garrick’s face gave up almost nothing, and his voice was so level that a joke and a threat sounded nearly identical. She had decided, somewhere over the last few days, that the safest assumption was that he was probably being funny and she simply couldn’t always hear it.

“Did you need something?” She peeled off a glove, shoved her hair off her forehead with the back of her wrist, and immediately felt something crunch. She’d have leaves in it for a week. “Or are you supervising?”

“Neither.” He came up the steps. Even that was quiet, for a male his size. “I wanted to see what you were planning here. Specifically.”

Here it comes.

She braced for it out of long habit. In her experience a wealthy client who wanted the plans specifically wanted to explain what he had actually pictured, which was invariably something out of a magazine, and then to be disappointed that reality involved dirt and time. She had been ready to have that fight since she signed the contract.

“All right.” She gestured with the loose glove. “This whole area. You’ve got four original beds under the mess. The stone edging’s mostly intact—I found the northeast corner this morning. My plan is to clear it back to the bones, keep whatever old roses are actually alive under here, and replant the gaps with the same kinds. Old varieties. Not the modern ones that need spraying every three days.”

She waited for the objection.