Page 24 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

Oh, he’s clever.

He’d handed her a reason that had nothing to do with charity and everything to do with a large male wanting to fight a plant. It was so exactly right that she laughed and stepped aside.

“Be my guest. Watch the thorns. They’re vicious.”

He wrapped one hand around the base of the bramble anchor, set his feet, and pulled. There was a sound like a small tree giving up its will to live. The entire tangle tore free of the earth in one piece, roots and all, in about the time it took her to blink, and he tossed it onto her debris pile without apparent effort.

“Show-off.”

“You asked me to watch the thorns.”

She stared at his hands, and there wasn’t a mark on them. Thorns were never going to win an argument with stone.

“That would’ve taken me an hour.”

“I know. You told me.”

She went back to work with him beside her, and it stopped being strange with unexpected speed. He turned out to be an excellent person to garden with. He didn’t chatter. He did exactly what she asked, with more strength than three men, and he asked good questions and then listened to the answers. She found herself talking, which she rarely did on a job, but he made it easy.

“I’ve done this since I was a little kid,” she said, working her trowel around the crown of a surviving rose. “Community garden plot behind our apartment building. My mom couldn’t afford much, but she could afford seeds.” She worked a little more soil away, exposing a thick old stem. A tiny green shoot pushed out low on the cane, almost hidden beneath the debris. “Would you look at that?”

He leaned closer. “What?”

“New growth.” She touched it lightly with one finger. “Not everything neglected is dead.”

His gaze lifted from the rose to her face, and for a moment she had the peculiar feeling that she’d said something other than what she meant.

She cleared her throat and went back to the soil. “I worked three years on a garden like this one, actually. In Charleston. The Pinckneys’—my in-laws. Their courtyard garden. It was the one thing I could do that they couldn’t find fault with, so I poured everything into it. Antique roses, a fig, a whole shade bed I built up from nothing. Three years.”

“What happened to it?”

“They decided to redo the courtyard after we moved up here.” She dug a little harder than the rose required. “They hired a designer. Very expensive, very fashionable. I don’t think anyone even thought about the fact that I’d done the old garden. It was just time for something new.”

“What did they do?”

“Bluestone pavers and a fountain with a cherub. Boxwood in pots. White impatiens in the summer and I’m sure they’ll be white pansies in the winter. Very Charleston.” She smiled, but it felt a little crooked. “We went back in June to visit, and it was just… gone. Toby asked where the fig tree was, and the gardener didn’t even know there’d been one.”

Beside her, his hands had stopped moving. When she glanced up the gold was in his eyes again, so she hadn’t imagined it after all. This time it didn’t look warm.

“They took out everything?”

“I’m sure they didn’t do it because of me.”

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

She hesitated. “Yes. Everything.”

“You built it.”

“But I wasn’t there anymore. It was still theirs to change.” She shrugged, harder than she felt. “That’s the lesson, isn’t it? You can love a place all you want. Doesn’t make it yours.”

He said nothing to that, but the gold stayed a long moment before it faded. She got the distinct sense he would remember the Pinckneys, and not pleasantly.

She turned back to the last of the bramble anchor, a stubborn secondary root he had missed, and got both hands into it. She yanked, and this time it came. The whole thing whipped up out of the ground and slapped back down, and her reward was a faceful of dead leaves and a shower of grit.

“Blech.” She spat out a leaf. “Charming. This is very glamorous work.”

She reached up to clear the mess out of her hair and stopped. Her gloves were black to the wrist, caked with wet dirt, and she’d only smear it worse. There was probably half the garden up there by now.