Page 28 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

“Oh,” she said again, softer, and something dawned across her dirt-streaked face that he had no idea how to react to.

And Garrick, who never used ten words when four would do, found he had no words at all.

CHAPTER 10

In Maris’s dream, Garrick’s wings didn’t stop at flaring. They wrapped around her like a cloak, grey and gold and warm despite the stone. She was pressed against his chest with nowhere to go and no desire whatsoever to find anywhere else. His mouth was on her throat. His clawed hand cradled the back of her head with a care that made no sense given the size of him, given the strength she could feel humming under his skin. And she was pulling at his shirt, and it was giving, and⁠—

She woke flushed to the roots of her hair, with the sheet twisted around one leg and her mouth dry.

“Oh, for the love of—” She dragged the pillow over her face before tossing it aside.

Her bedroom looked exactly the same as it had every other morning. The small crack in the corner she kept meaning to patch. Toby’s crayon sun taped on the closet door. Nothing about the room acknowledged that she was twenty-nine years old and had just had an erotic dream about a client. A gargoyle client. A gargoyle client whose wings had gone off like a car alarm the second she’d kissed him and who she had absolutely, positively, one hundred percent decided not to think about ever again.

She’d been thinking about him for eleven hours.

“It was an aberration,” she told the ceiling. “A momentary lapse. I was tired. It doesn’t count when you’re tired.”

The ceiling declined to argue, which she took as a bad sign, because it meant even her own house thought she was lying.

She threw off the covers before the dream could get any more vivid in the recollection and stood there in the early light, hands on her hips, addressing herself sternly. One kiss. Two, if she was going to be technical. She wasn’t going to be technical, because the second one had been his body’s fault and she’d been an innocent bystander to the whole wingspan situation. It didn’t mean anything. He was a nice male. An enormous, quiet, unfairly attractive male who listened when she talked, and who had said he’s welcome anytime about her son as though it were a fact and not a favor. She’d gotten swept up, and that was all there was to it.

She was still telling herself that was all there was to it twenty minutes later, dressed and coffee in hand as she headed out into the nursery, where Saturday was already stirring.

Saturday was the day the nursery earned its keep.

By nine the lot had three cars in it and a truck backing a trailer up to the shrub row. She had answered four questions about hydrangeas and sold a flat of native asters to a man who’d wanted marigolds until she talked him out of them. The greenhouses breathed out their green damp warmth into the cooler morning air. Somewhere a hose ran. The air smelled of wet peat and tomato leaves and the clean mineral scent of a hundred pots freshly watered. Hauling a bag of soil onto her shoulder, she thought it was the one part of her life that made unambiguous sense.

“Okay but is it true?”

Junie appeared at her elbow the way she always did, out of nowhere and at full volume, with a wheelbarrow she hadn’t been asked to bring and an expression of naked delight. Nineteen, sturdy as a fence post, with brown hair shot through with those green streaks that weren’t dye. A year of agricultural college and an entire lifetime of enthusiasm.

“Is what true?”

“Sylvie says you kissed the gargoyle.”

She dropped the soil bag, and it hit the ground with a thud that startled a customer three aisles over.

“Sylvie,” she said, with great control, “was not there.”

“So it is true.” Junie clasped both hands to her chest, actually clasped them. “Oh my gosh. I told her there was no way, I said Maris is way too sensible, and she said sensible people kiss gargoyles all the time, they just don’t tell anybody, but she said Flora said it was true and—wait, why aren’t you saying it’s not true?”

“I’m not saying anything. I’m working. Look at this—it’s Saturday, we’ve got the whole native section to restock, the ferns need dividing, and Mr. Tillery’s coming for his rhododendrons at ten.” She hoisted the bag again. “There’s no time for gossip.”

“You always make time for gossip when it’s about other people.”

“That’s completely different and you know it.”

Junie beamed, unbothered, and grabbed the other end of the bag before Maris could stop her. “Fine. But if a seven-foot male with wings shows up at the shop today, I’m going to have thoughts about it, and you can’t stop me.”

He showed up at nine-forty.

She was on her knees in the native section with a flat of black-eyed Susans and a customer’s list, and she felt him before she saw him. It was an odd prickle at the back of her neck that she was starting to associate exclusively with Garrick Stonehaven, like standing near something huge and warm and patient. She turned, and there he was, filling the entrance to the greenhouse and having to duck slightly to keep his wings clear of the frame. He was in dark jeans and a shirt she was now doing her level best not to remember pulling at in a dream.

“Morning,” he said.

“You’re—” She stood too fast and knocked the flat with her boot. “You’re not on the schedule. It’s Saturday. I don’t come to the mansion on Saturdays, Saturdays are for the shop, I told you that.”

“You did.” He looked at the greenhouse around him, at the hanging baskets and the long benches of seedlings and the misters hissing on overhead, with the slow thorough attention he gave everything. “I’m not here about the grounds.”