Page 27 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

“That’s a contradiction.”

“Roses are complicated.” She pushed to her feet with a groan and put a hand to the small of her back. He stood too, and they were suddenly very close in the narrow cleared space between the beds. Neither of them stepped back.

She looked up at him. There was dirt on her jaw and a leaf caught in her hair again, and her cheeks were flushed from a day of working outside. Her disheveled state hit him with an intensity that had nothing professional in it whatsoever.

“You watch me a lot,” she said.

“I’m your client.”

“Clients watch the budget. You watch me.” It wasn’t an accusation, and her mouth had started to curve. “You’ve been doing it since the first day. Standing there like one of your own gargoyles going hmm at me over the roses.”

“I don’t say hmm.”

“Your face says it.” She was smiling now, tired and warm and teasing, and he had no defense against teasing. “It’s very disconcerting. A person can’t dig properly with a mountain evaluating her.”

“Was I evaluating?”

“Weren’t you?”

He should have stepped back. He knew the distance this kind of thing required, and he had spent his whole adult life keeping that distance, keeping it safe. He had watched what happened to a male who let somebody matter too much. He knew it better than he knew anything.

He didn’t step back.

“Thank you,” she said quietly. “For helping. For meaning it about Toby. For—” She stopped, abandoning whatever she’d been going to say. “Just, thank you.”

And then she went up on her toes, put one filthy hand against his chest, and kissed him.

It was meant to be small. He understood that even as it happened. She’d meant it as a simple thank-you, the kind of thing a person does and quickly steps away from. She’d intended it to be brief.

It was not brief.

The moment her mouth touched his, something came apart in him with a suddenness that would have alarmed him if he’d had any capacity left for alarm. She tasted like the day, salt and green and warm skin. She made a small sound against his lips, surprise turning into something else, and her hand closed on the front of his shirt instead of pushing him away. He got an arm around her and pulled her closer, and she came, soft and warm after a day of stone and dirt. The kiss stopped being a full stop and became a question neither of them had planned to ask out loud.

Her lips parted beneath his, and he heard himself make a sound low in his chest, something with too much want in it to be careful. Her fingers slid around his neck, careless of the dirt on them, and his control—that famous, formidable, twenty-year control—disappeared completely.

His wings flared.

He felt them go before he could stop them. They snapped wide behind him with a sound like a sail catching wind, the membranes spreading gold-lit against the low sun, and it was the most involuntary and honest thing his body had ever done. He hadn’t let it happen in front of anyone in longer than he could remember. He might as well have shouted at her across the garden.

She broke the kiss with a gasp, her eyes flying open, and she looked up past his shoulders at the enormous shadow his wings had thrown across the ruined rose bed, blocking the sun.

“Oh,” she breathed.

He stood there with her in his arms, both of them filthy, both of them breathing like they’d run for miles, his wings spread wide and utterly beyond his command. He had made a serious error in his estimate of the situation.

He had told himself for days that this was manageable. Just a pull. Just a distraction. Something he could keep at the correct distance and work around.

One kiss, and his own body had just informed him, in a language older than words and impossible to take back, that it was nothing of the kind.

She looked from the wings back down to his face, and he knew exactly what she was finding there, because he could feel the heat of it behind his eyes.

“Your wings just—” she said, still staring, her hand still fisted in his shirt, her mouth still red from his.

“Yes.”

“Do they do that when⁠—”

“Yes.”