Page 41 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

“Don’t apologize. You invited me in. You didn’t sign a contract.”

That startled a laugh out of her, but there was something in his voice that made her wonder if he wasn’t quite ready either. She was too wrecked and too flushed and too full of the taste of him to work it out.

“I should go,” he said.

“Yeah.” She pushed her hair back off her hot face. “Probably.”

She walked him to the door. It was three steps in her little cottage, and she made it last as long as she could without admitting she was making it last. At the threshold he paused, filling the frame again, the dark garden and the darker manor beyond him. He looked down at her, and she looked up, and neither of them said the sensible goodnight that would have ended it cleanly.

“Thank you for the coffee,” he said dryly, so dryly she almost missed it. The tiny half-smile curving his mouth was as imperceptible as always.

“You didn’t have any coffee.”

“No,” he agreed. “I didn’t.”

And then he bent, and kissed her again. She was almost sure it was meant to be a goodnight kiss, a brief press of their lips at the door, the kind of thing that closes an evening. It didn’t stay that. It lasted exactly two seconds before it turned devastating. His hand came back to her jaw and hers went to his collar and she rose up on her not-tall-enough heels to get closer. The whole careful too fast, wait, I’m not ready argument she’d just made went down without a fight. Then he broke the kiss and hugged her, both of them breathing hard, before he finally let her go and stepped back into the night.

“Goodnight, Maris.”

“Goodnight.”

She watched him go—a big quiet shadow crossing her garden to walk down the street and around the corner and back up the street to the mansion that was fifty feet away behind the wall. She stood in her doorway with her hand pressed to her mouth as though she could hold the kiss there, and she didn’t close the door until he’d melted into the darkness.

Then she shut it and slid down against it until she was sitting on her floor in a green dress with her hands shaking and her heart going like she’d run for miles. She stared at her small kitchen and the counter where she’d almost thrown caution to the winds for the first time in six years.

Too fast, she’d said, and she’d been right.

But sitting there on her kitchen floor, still tasting him on her mouth, she wasn’t wondering whether she’d made a mistake by inviting him inside. She was wondering how long she was going to make herself wait before she did it again.

CHAPTER 13

Her taste was still in Garrick’s mouth when he reached his gates, and it was killing him. He crossed the dark garden with the measured stride of a male who didn’t trust himself to move faster. Because if he moved faster he would turn around, and if he turned around he’d go right back to that cottage. And Maris would let him in, and to hell with too fast. The evening would end the way they both wanted it to, and he knew it would be a mistake.

He could still feel her thigh under his hand. He could still hear the low, startled sound she’d made against his mouth, entirely unlike the dirt-under-the-nails woman who argued with him about ferns. He’d put her on the counter and she’d wrapped her legs around him without hesitating for a second. She’d looked at him with her mouth swollen and her eyes dark and he hadn’t seen fear on her face. He’d seen a desire that matched his own.

His gardens surrounded him, the rose garden she was resurrecting from his father’s neglect, the collapsed wall she’d refused to let him fix, the ferns she’d defended like they were her own children. Her touch was everywhere he looked. She’d already gotten into the land.

He stopped at the foot of the terrace and looked up at the mansion, and he couldn’t go any further. He’d made it a good house again. He’d spent most of the last two years stripping and rebuilding, undoing the long slow rot his father had allowed after his mother died. His father’s ghost had been in every room, but he was proud of the work he’d done. He’d stood right here a hundred times and felt the satisfaction of knowing he’d identified the faults and repaired the problems.

Tonight the house looked like a mausoleum.

Every window was dark. All that restored plaster and rehung paneling and oiled wood, and not one light. Forty rooms and one resident, with nothing waiting for him inside but the enormous echoing quiet he’d spent the past two years telling himself he preferred. He thought of walking through the great front door into that silence, up the wide stairs and down the long dark hall to his bedroom. Alone. He’d done it for two years and never even thought about it.

Tonight the thought of it made his chest ache.

This is what she’s done, he thought, and it wasn’t an accusation. It was closer to awe. One small human female with a wheelbarrow and a stubborn jaw had walked through his open gate and made his own house unbearable to him. She’d made the silence feel different, not restful but empty.

He didn’t go in.

Instead he kicked off his boots and unfurled his wings, glad of the dark and the cold air pouring over them as he extended them to their full span. He pushed off the terrace and flew. Two strokes, three, the great muscles of his back and chest doing the work they were built for, the ground dropping away, the manor’s roofline swinging up to meet him. He landed on the gable above his mother’s rose garden, the way he’d landed a thousand times as a boy. He folded his wings and settled into a crouch on the cold slate with his talons curled over the ridge, and looked over at her cottage.

The kitchen light still burned, a small bright square in the darkness. He could see her moving through the window, back and forth across the kitchen. Was she pacing, as unsettled as he was, or simply going about her business? He stayed where he was and watched it the way a lighthouse keeper watches a single ship in a black sea, and he tried to think.

Thinking was something he was good at. He’d built a company on it. He took a problem apart, looked at the loads and the stresses and where something would fail, and then he built a solution. He could solve this problem too.

Start at the beginning. Exactly what is the problem?