Page 42 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

Attraction? No. He’d been attracted to females before, although never like this. But attraction didn’t wake a gargoyle out of stone two weeks early.

Desire? Desire was worse. It explained the kitchen. It didn’t explain why he’d spent twenty minutes listening to her talk about Oconee bells, or why a crooked rose carved into a ceiling had become important because Toby liked it. It didn’t explain why the sight of her laughing with three females in a tavern had made something in his chest settle before the tourist stood up.

The pull? It was merely another fact that explained nothing.

He needed a better word, but he didn’t have one.

Perhaps that was why his father came to mind. Not the father he remembered from childhood, laughing while his mother complained that the gazebo in the rose garden leaned. Not the one who had carried her through the front door one anniversary because she’d refused to come inside until he admitted she’d been right about something Garrick could no longer remember. The other one.

He’d been nineteen the first time he’d found his father sitting in the dark dining room long after midnight. There had been a plate in front of him, untouched and gone cold. Through the windows the rain was coming down hard enough that Garrick could hear water dripping somewhere in the upstairs corridor.

“The roof’s leaking,” he’d told his father.

His father had looked towards the empty chair at the other end of the table.

“Let it.”

The roof had leaked. The roses had died. Rooms had been closed one by one as plaster cracked and pipes failed and his father stopped seeing any reason to repair them. It hadn’t happened all at once. That would almost have been easier. Instead he’d watched his father disappear inch by inch until the male who remained seemed as empty as the house around him. And Garrick couldn’t stand it anymore. He’d left.

He’d built Stonehaven Construction. He’d built offices and hotels and houses and bridges, and when something failed he found the reason and fixed it. He had made an entire life out of solving problems by finding the answers.

He looked down at the dark garden between the manor and the small glowing window beyond the wall. Whatever this was, it didn’t feel like a problem with an answer.

The kitchen light went out. For a long time he watched the dark square where it had been.

I need to think about this, he told himself. He always told himself that. It never once meant think. It meant wait. He’d wait out the night up here where the air was clean and she was safely on the other side of the wall. And when the sun came he’d go to stone, because stone didn’t want, stone didn’t ache, and stone didn’t sit on a cold gable with memory of a female’s thigh beneath his hand. By the time he woke he’d have his answer. He’d have taken the problem apart and known where it would fail and known what to do.

The sky in the east went from black to grey to the first thin line of dawn, and Garrick turned his face towards it, and let it take him.

The change came the way it always came. Not sleep, deeper than sleep, a slow spreading cold that started in his talons where they gripped the ridge and climbed inward, the world going still, going away. His thoughts thinned out to a deep, calm quiet. His wings settled and his eyes fixed on the horizon. And the huge gargoyle on the gable of Stonehaven Manor became exactly what he appeared to be—stone, weathered, watchful, and entirely at peace.

It didn’t help.

He knew that the instant he came back. The warmth returning to his talons, the world flooding back in with the westering light and the green scent of the grounds below and the sound of the river at the bottom of the hill. The whole day had gone in the single long breath that stone-sleep always was. He’d expected to wake with an answer, the way he woke from most problems with the solution laid out cleanly in his mind. Instead he woke no closer to knowing what to do about the problem of Maris. The stone had given him rest. It had given him nothing else. Whatever had happened to him hadn’t happened to a part he could argue with.

He stayed on the gable through the dusk, and the next night, and did not go inside until the work day began.

He felt her arrive later that morning the way he always felt her arrive, before he saw her or heard her. A change in the pressure of the day, a pull low in his chest turning him towards the garden like a needle towards north. He was standing at the tall windows of his study when it hit him, and he made himself not look. He made himself turn back to the desk instead, to the computer screen and the drawings and the spreadsheets that were his actual life, the life that had been enough until Maris Calder appeared on his doorstep.

The Brampton development in Wilmington. Forty units, a schedule slipping, and a subcontractor over budget on the framing. All real problems with real answers. He sat down and opened the framing figures and read them. Then he made himself read them again, because they hadn’t penetrated the first time. He picked up the phone. He put it down. He looked at the subcontractor’s numbers and could not for the life of him make them mean anything. Because through the tall window, below in the rose garden, a small figure was on her knees in the beds she’d cleared, and the sun was in her hair. And the pull in his chest took hold of him and tugged.

He got up and walked to the far side of the room, where he couldn’t see the window. He stood facing a wall of his own restored paneling like a child sent to stand in the corner.

Enough. This is a business day. I have a company to run.

He went back to the desk and read the numbers, and that held him until the middle of the afternoon. The framing was over budget because the crew lead had ordered the wrong grade of lumber and hadn’t caught it until it was up, which meant either eating the cost or tearing out a week’s work. The correct decision was obvious and required a two-line email. Garrick sat with his hands over the keys and did not type it, because a small clear voice had just floated up from the garden⁠—

“—but why do they close up at night?”

—and every orderly thought in Garrick’s head fell down like a wall with a bad foundation. Toby.

He’d suspected the boy would be there. She had told him, that afternoon in the roses—I’m trying letting him stay with Dot’s grandmother some afternoons—and he had said, and meant, that Toby was always welcome. He hadn’t planned to go down. He’d planned, in fact, the opposite. A full day of business, a wall between himself and the garden, time to think. He’d been very clear with himself about that.

He was out the terrace doors before he’d finished being clear about it.

He came around the box hedge and there they were. Maris knelt at the edge of the bed with her hands in the soil. Toby crouched beside her in his neat little shirt with the knees of his jeans already black with dirt, peering with enormous seriousness at a clump of some low flowering plant she’d been dividing. Neither of them had heard him. He was good at that—too big to be quiet by rights, and quiet anyway.

He stopped a few feet off and simply watched them for a moment, the two heads bent over the same small green mystery. And the terror he’d been feeling suddenly disappeared, revealing the desire underneath. Not just the heat of Saturday night, but something quieter and more dangerous. He wanted this. The two of them in his garden with the small serious voice asking why.