Page 30 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

She made a sound against his mouth and grabbed his shirt. Actually grabbed it, with both fists, the exact gesture from the dream, and she didn’t even care. She yanked, and he came, crowding her back against the greenhouse wall, one hand sliding behind her head to protect it from the wall. His other hand left her jaw and slid down her throat and her collarbone. It skimmed over a breast and a suddenly taut nipple and her breath hitched as she arched into him.

Her hands were traveling too, up over the hard planes of his chest, his shoulders, the astonishing breadth of him. His wings shifted. She heard them stir and felt the air move, and the giddy triumph that went through her had no business being that satisfying. Then his thumb found the strip of skin where her shirt had ridden up, and she stopped thinking anything coherent at all⁠—

“Mr. Garrick!”

They came apart so fast she nearly took out the fern bench.

Toby stood at the mouth of the little green corridor with a dinosaur in his hand. His face was lit up with the pure uncomplicated joy of a five-year-old who has discovered his favorite person in an unexpected place. He hadn’t seen anything except that Garrick was there.

“You’re at the shop,” Toby said, delighted, like this was the finest coincidence ever engineered. “I didn’t know you’d be at the shop. Did you come to see the ferns? Mama has the wall ferns here. She has backups.”

“I heard,” Garrick said, and his voice had gone gentle the way it always did for her son. She watched him drop into a crouch that put him nearly at Toby’s height, entirely composed, entirely unflustered, as if his wings hadn’t just been halfway to a full spread. “She showed me. The polypody’s the best of them.”

“That’s the little one.”

“It’s tough for its size.”

Toby considered this with total seriousness, and nodded, evidently satisfied that Mr. Garrick understood ferns correctly. She pressed the back of one dirt-smudged hand to her burning mouth and prayed to every plant god she’d ever half-believed in that the flush would die down before⁠—

“There you are!” Sylvie swept around the corner in a cloud of perfume and mischief, her mahogany hair loose. She took in the two flushed adults, the beaming child and the suspiciously secluded fern corner with one all-encompassing glance, and produced a slow, spreading, absolutely delighted grin. “Well. Ferns. How educational.”

“Sylvie.”

“Found this one wandering the front looking for you.” She ruffled Toby’s hair, and he leaned comfortably into her hand. “And,” she went on, before Maris could get a word in, “I have news, and the news is that you are coming out tonight. Ben’s singing at the Moonlight, and Sara will grab us a table. Robin is coming too, and you need to actually leave the nursery after dark for once.”

“I can’t, I’ve got Toby⁠—”

“Dot’s nana is gonna take him. Already arranged. Half the class is having a sleepover with the goat, it’s practically a national holiday.” Sylvie’s grin sharpened. “So the only question left is whether you’re wearing something other than jeans and a work shirt for a change.”

“Sylvie, I really don’t think⁠—”

“You should go, Mama.”

Everyone looked down. Toby had said it—Toby, who never volunteered opinions to a room, who weighed every word before he spent it. He was looking up at her with those serious hazel eyes and that earnest little face, entirely certain of himself. “You never get to go do the fun stuff, Miss Sylvie said. And I get to sleep over with the goat.” He thought for a moment. “And Mr. Garrick could come too. He should come too. So he’s not by himself.”

The silence that followed was going to kill her.

Sylvie’s eyebrows had climbed to somewhere near her hairline. Garrick, still crouched at Toby’s level, hadn’t moved at all. And Toby stood there in the green shade looking up at her with complete faith that he’d solved everyone’s problems.

“Out of the mouths of babes,” Sylvie breathed, savoring it, then shook her head. “Sorry, sport, not this time. This is a girls’ night. No boys allowed.”

CHAPTER 11

Garrick had come to hear Ben sing. That was the only reason he was at the Moonlight Tavern. He told himself that one more time as he ducked under the tavern’s low doorframe. Ben only sings occasionally so it’s worth going to listen. The reason held up about as well as it had on the walk over, which was to say not at all.

The Moonlight Tavern was warm and loud, smelling of woodsmoke and fried fish and spilled beer, the rough plank walls papered over with decades of music posters. Several of them were for a band called The Bite that Ben had once fronted. The river ran along the back of the tavern and he caught the cool wet scent beneath the smell of the crowd, coming in through the wide porch doors half open to the dark.

The place was packed, and he found a corner to stand in. He didn’t like crowds and he didn’t like the attention he drew, even in a bar filled with Others. At least when he was standing in a corner, he was out of the way, easy to walk past and easy to leave alone. He got a beer he didn’t especially want and set his back to the wall and told himself again he was here for the music.

Then he saw her, and the music stopped mattering entirely.

Maris was at a table near the small stage with Sylvie and Sara and Robin, and she was laughing at something, head tipped back, and she was wearing a dress.

He’d never seen her in a dress. He’d seen her in work pants with dirt on the knees and mud to the elbow, leaves in her hair, a smudge on her cheek she never noticed, and he’d found all of it, God help him, unbearably tempting. The dress was something else. A soft green, the color of the ferns she’d been so fierce about, that left her arms bare and her collarbone bare and it moved when she moved. Her hair was loose around her face, and she’d done something to her eyes that made them dark and smoky and mysterious. He stood in his corner and forgot, briefly, the mechanics of drinking from a bottle.

This is a mistake.

He should have stayed home. He’d known it was a girls’ night, because Sylvie had made that theatrically clear—no boys allowed delivered with a look at him that said she knew exactly why Toby had suggested he come. He’d come anyway, because Ben was singing and he wanted to listen to Ben sing.