Page 25 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

“Hold still.”

His hand came up before she’d finished processing the words.

She held still.

He was so careful about it that it caught her off guard. Not that he did it, but how. His clawed fingers moved through her hair, feather-light, picking out a leaf, a twig, a curl of dead bramble, one at a time, his knuckle just barely grazing her temple. She could feel the warmth coming off him, like stone that had been sitting in the sun.

Her hands stayed exactly where they were, filthy and useless in her lap.

He was very close, and she hadn’t noticed him getting there. She could see the grain in his grey skin and the subtle shift of color across his cheekbone. His jaw had gone tight with concentration over the trivial task of getting leaves out of a woman’s hair. Then his eyes came up to hers, and neither of them was looking at the leaves anymore.

The garden was completely, ringingly silent.

His fingers had stopped against the side of her head. One leaf remained, apparently, tucked behind her ear. He was not removing it and she was not moving away, and there were about eight inches of air left between them.

She turned back to the rose bed so fast she nearly headbutted her own trowel.

“Got it,” she said to the dirt. “Thanks. I… Thank you.” Her face was on fire and she could feel it burning. She grabbed the trowel and applied herself to a rose that did not need any attention whatsoever. “These are… Look, the graft union on this one’s still sound, that’s great, that means⁠—”

“The fern.”

She glanced up, grateful and wary in equal measure. His voice was level, but his hand had curled slightly, as though it were still holding the leaf.

“What about it?”

“The rare one you found.”

She stared at him. “The one you announced to the entire entrance hall yesterday?”

“Yes. I know you found it.” He crouched beside her again, leaving a much safer amount of space between them. “I don’t know why it matters to you.”

“Oh.”

It took her a moment to understand. He was asking because she cared about it.

“It isn’t really about the fern.” She warmed to the subject despite herself. “I care about preserving plants. The design work pays the bills, but the natives are the part I really love. I propagate them myself. I go out and find them growing where they belong, take seed or cuttings when I can do it responsibly, and bring them on at the nursery. Then people can put the right things back in the right places instead of buying the same six plants from a big-box store.”

She heard herself and looked back down at the rose. Put the right things back in the right places. She had been hearing that sentence since she was seven years old and had never once thought to apply it to herself.

Garrick listened, and not the way customers listened, waiting for the useful part. He didn’t glance towards the house or check his phone or start to look faintly regretful that he’d asked. He stayed beside her in the dirt, enormous and silent and attentive.

“There’s a woodland aster I’ve been chasing ever since I arrived,” she continued. “It grows on maybe three sites in the whole county. Every one of them is vulnerable to mowing or construction or somebody deciding the woods would look nicer cleaned up. If I can get enough seed and establish a reliable nursery population, then at least it isn’t dependent on those three places forever.”

“How long would that take?”

“A few years.”

“And you’d do all that for one plant?”

She smiled. “You kept a crooked rose on your ceiling because the boy who carved it was learning.”

He gave her a half-smile.

“That was different.”

“Of course it was.”

“It was original to the house.”