Page 39 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

Nobody at the table believed her, and to their credit, nobody said so. Robin just gave her a small, sympathetic smile and refilled her cider. Sara started a story about a five-year-old who’d tried to smuggle a live frog into circle time, and she laughed along and told herself she wasn’t disappointed. She got about halfway to believing it.

Then a big, wall-sized shadow fell across the table and she looked up, and her heart skipped a beat.

Garrick stood there. He’d ducked back in from the porch and she could feel the coolness of the river coming off him. He looked, for a male built out of granite, distinctly uncertain. She had never seen him look like that before, not in the garden, not in the greenhouse, not anywhere. He was holding two drinks, and he set one down in front of her. Cider. Her cider. He’d noticed what she was drinking from a corner, across a crowded room, and gone and gotten it right.

“You looked lovely,” he said.

Which wasn’t a full sentence, and wasn’t smooth, and came out about three degrees too formal, and her stomach flipped anyway.

“Looked?” Sylvie said. “Past tense? Buddy, she still does. Your eyes work fine.”

“Sylvie,” Robin murmured.

“This is girls’ night,” Sylvie went on, with the air of a woman lodging a formal complaint she has no intention of winning. “There are rules. It’s a whole thing. No boys. It’s practically written on the door.”

“Is it?” he asked, raising an eyebrow, and Sylvie sighed.

“It’s implied on the door. No boys.”

Which was the exact moment Eric appeared. He dropped into the empty chair beside Robin, kissed the top of his mate’s head, and stole a chip off her plate all in one easy motion.

“Evening, ladies,” he said.

Sylvie threw up her hands. “Oh, great. Sure. Everybody bring a male. Girls’ night’s over. Might as well hand out cigars.”

“You said I could come get you at eleven,” Eric said mildly to Robin. “It’s eleven. My mother has Birdie, and she’s in no hurry to give her back.” He glanced up at Garrick, still standing there with his beer. Something passed between the two males, and then Eric grinned at him. “Sit down, Garrick. You’re blocking the stage.”

Garrick sat. Beside her. The chair creaked under him and the whole table shifted a little with his weight. His shoulder was suddenly very close to hers, warm and solid, and she was aware of it the way she’d been aware of the corner all night. Except now the fire was six inches away instead of across the room, and it still wasn’t close enough.

Ben came back to the stage before she had to figure it out. He settled onto the stool, worked his ears back, and said something dry into the microphone that made the whole room laugh. Then he started to play, his voice low and rough and good, the kind of voice that made a crowded loud room go quiet in pieces. Sara went soft-eyed watching her husband. Robin leaned into Eric. Sylvie stopped heckling and just listened.

She sat in the crowded, cheerful bar with a cider she hadn’t asked for and a wall of quiet gargoyle at her side, his knee not-quite touching hers under the table. And for the length of one song and then another, she simply let herself be happy. It was such a small thing, but it felt enormous. She hadn’t sat in a room full of music and friends and a male whose shoulder she wanted to lean into since before Toby, and the urge to lean against him was so strong it frightened her.

She didn’t lean.

But somewhere in the last song, his hand came to rest on the back of her chair. He wasn’t touching her, but she could feel his hand against the bare skin of her shoulder, cool but slowly warming, and so light she could have told herself she imagined it.

She didn’t tell herself that.

When Ben finished playing, the group split up. Sylvie announced loudly that next time there would be a bouncer. Sara and Ben had already disappeared into Ben’s office and from the look on Sara’s face, Maris didn’t think they were going to check the books. Eric had Robin tucked under his arm, whispering something into her ear that made her blush and smile at the same time. Maris hugged Sylvie and walked outside, and Garrick fell into step next to her as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Because we live on opposite sides of the same wall, she told herself.

The town was quiet at this hour, the storefronts dark, the gas streetlamps flickering. The breeze off the river was cool from the approaching fall and she shivered, pulling her pashmina closer. Garrick extended a wing, not wrapping it around her exactly, but blocking the wind. Her traitorous mind went directly to the memory of how they’d flared when they kissed.

They turned down her street and the smell of the river faded behind them, replaced by the fragrance of the night-blooming flowers she’d planted to have something sweet waiting for her in the darkness. Her heels clicked quietly on the pavement. She still couldn’t believe she’d worn heels for the first time in forever. Even in the heels, she still didn’t quite reach his shoulder and that definitely wasn’t why she’d chosen them. His footsteps made almost no sound at all, which should have been unnerving but was oddly comforting instead.

“Thank you,” she said, “for the cider.”

“You seemed to enjoy it.”

“You noticed from across the room.”

“I notice you,” he said simply, the words lingering in the dark. Her heart did the complicated undignified thing again.

They came to the cottage with the small light she’d left on glowing in the kitchen window. Behind it, past the overgrown stone wall, the dark bulk of the manor loomed against the stars.

She got her key out. She should say goodnight. She knew she should say goodnight. There was a whole careful list of reasons—Toby asleep at Dot’s nana’s, the job, the difference in their lives, the way this could go wrong in a hundred ways and take her heart and her son’s with it. She stood on her kitchen step with the key in the lock, and every one of those reasons lined up neatly and sensibly in her head.