Page 29 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

“Then—”

“I want to learn about the native plants you were talking about,” he said calmly. “I’d like to understand more about what you’re doing.”

I’d like to understand. Four words, and she had no business enjoying them as much as she did.

“I’m swamped,” she said, grabbing the excuse with both hands. “It’s the busiest day of the week, I’ve got customers, I’ve got Tillery at ten, I can’t just—there’s nobody to cover the⁠—”

“I got it covered!” Junie sang out from two aisles over, bright as a bell, popping up from behind the perennials with a trowel in her fist and a grin that promised absolutely no mercy. “Tillery’s rhododendrons are already loaded, the asters are restocked, and I can run the register with my eyes closed. You go teach the nice gentleman about native plants.” She put an appalling amount of weight on the words. “Take your time. Take all the time.”

Maris shot her a look that should have wilted a lesser dryad. Junie only wiggled her eyebrows and disappeared. She was left standing in the greenhouse, out of excuses, being watched by a mountain whose grey eyes had gone, she noticed, very slightly warmer than usual.

“Fine,” she said. “But if you knock over one of my seedling trays with those wings, I’m charging you for it.”

“Understood.”

She showed him around partly because it seemed ungracious to refuse, and partly because she loved this part. This was hers. Every square inch of it. The propagation benches with their trays of native seedlings under grow-lights, each label written in her own hand. The cold frames. The long back run where she kept the ridge plants, the ones you couldn’t buy anywhere else because she’d hiked them out one careful division at a time.

“These,” she said, crouching by a tray of unassuming green rosettes, and heard her voice change. “These are Shortia. Oconee bells. You can’t just order these—they barely grow anywhere on earth except for a few counties in these mountains, and they’re fussy about it. Right acid soil, right shade, right everything. I’ve been working on them since I arrived and I’ve lost more than I’ve kept. It will probably take two years before I have any viable stock.” She touched a leaf gently with one finger. “But when they bloom—little white nodding flowers, in the spring, before anything else has bothered to wake up—there’s nothing like it. People pave over hillsides full of them and don’t even know what they had.”

She looked up. He had crouched too, which put him roughly at her eye level and did nothing at all to make him seem smaller, and he wasn’t looking at the plants.

He was looking at her.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing.” He turned to the tray, unhurried. “Two years for a flower.”

“Two years for the right flower.” She stood, brushing off her knees, willing the heat out of her face. “That’s the thing, isn’t it? Anybody can throw money at a landscape and have it perfect by June. That’s not—” She stopped, because she was about to get preachy, and because he’d stood up too, and the aisle between the benches was narrow, and he took up rather a lot of it. “Come on. I want to show you the ferns. The ones from the wall situation—I’ve been dividing them, so if we ever kill the originals restoring your very structural second wall, we’ve got backups.”

“You called it a wall situation.”

“It was a situation. You wanted to demolish a fern habitat for the crime of being slightly collapsed.”

“I wanted it not to fall on you.”

“It’s been fine for twenty years.”

“It hadn’t met you yet, little thorn.”

She was halfway to a retort when the words caught up to her. She looked at him, and his face hadn’t changed at all. Flat, calm, unreadable to anyone who didn’t know that his mouth was doing that barely-there curve that meant he had made a joke on purpose. Her stomach fluttered.

“I’m not sure if that was intended as a compliment or not,” she said.

“Definitely a compliment.” His voice had gone low and warm, and a corresponding warmth pooled low in her belly.

The fern benches were around the back of the second greenhouse, in the shady corner where the buildings met. The light came down soft and green through the poly, and nobody ever came there unless they were looking for it. She led him along talking, about spore propagation and about the specific ferns colonizing his wall, maidenhair and Christmas fern and the little polypody she was proudest of. He followed, and he asked exactly the right questions, the ones that meant he was actually listening. By the time they got to that quiet green corner she’d half-forgotten to be careful.

Then she turned to point out the polypody, and he was right there, and she stopped talking.

The shop noise was a long way off. A hose somewhere. Junie’s faint laugh. Water dripping off the benches. Between the greenhouse wall and the potting shed there was maybe four feet of shaded space, a bench of ferns, and the two of them. She was suddenly, ruinously aware of every inch of him, the warmth coming off his skin, the way his shirt stretched over his chest. And the fact that his eyes had shifted, right in front of her, from solid grey to something with gold bleeding into the edges of it.

“Maris.”

“I’m not—” she started, with no idea where the sentence was going.

He kissed her.

This time it was his idea. No thank-you launched it, and no tired end-of-day fumble. He simply reached out, cupped her jaw in one enormous careful hand, and kissed her like he’d been thinking about it since last night. And there was nothing tentative in it. His mouth was warm. He tasted faintly of coffee and something clean and stony and dark. He kissed her slowly and thoroughly and deliberately, and the slowness affected her faster than fast would have.