Page 45 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

“I see it. Very official.”

“Mr. Garrick said I have to wear it because of the falling things.”

“There aren’t any falling things,” she said.

“There could be,” said Toby, with immense seriousness, and Garrick, behind him, met her eyes over the yellow brim, absolutely deadpan, and she had to look away.

She meant to keep working. There was real work to do. The whole east border wanted dividing before the frost came, and she had a planting plan for the terrace beds she still hadn’t settled. She was a professional, she reminded herself. She was being paid. And the fact that the male paying her had had his hand up her thigh two nights ago was something she was going to be disciplined about.

She managed about four minutes.

Then Toby’s voice floated over from the wall—“like this?”—and Garrick’s low rumble answered him, patient and unhurried. She found the trowel had stopped again and she was just kneeling there in the dirt listening. She couldn’t help it. She’d almost never heard her son talk this much. With most adults Toby went quiet and polite and careful, and here he was chattering like he did with her, asking Garrick what the tool was called, and why the hinge went there, and whether stone was heavy for him or whether it was heavy for people but not for him.

And Garrick answered every single one of them like it was a question worth answering, like Toby was a colleague and not a five-year-old in an enormous hat. He never once talked down to him, and he let a silence be a silence when her son needed one. This was going to be what killed her, and she knew it already. Not the shoulders. Not the wings. Not the mouth against hers in the dark kitchen.

This is worse.

She kept working. She split a clump of asters and shook the soil off the roots and worked them into fresh holes. The whole time she was tuned to that happy voice across the garden like a plant turned to light. She stopped pretending she was disappointed about anything at all.

“Mama! Mama, come and look!”

She got up, brushing her knees, and crossed the garden to the wall.

The gate stood open. Actually open, swung wide on its old hinges, the vines pulled back and tied off to one side, the fallen pin replaced with a bright new one. The whole thing cleaned of decades of rust and grime so the good iron showed through, black and simple and still exactly the gate it had always been. Beyond it she could see straight through into the back of her own nursery, the greenhouses, the rows of pots, and the shed. Everything that had been a hundred and forty yards and a whole block away now sat a single step through the wall. Two places she loved, joined by a door that swung.

Toby was beside himself.

He ran through the gate. He ran back. He stood in the exact middle of the opening, one foot in Garrick’s garden and one foot on the threshold of hers, hat wobbling, and announced, “I’m in both places.” Then he ran through again to prove it. Back and forth, back and forth, the yellow hat bobbing, and he was laughing. Actually laughing, out loud, unselfconscious, a sound she heard so rarely from him that it caught her under the ribs.

“It swings,” she said. She’d meant to say something clever. That was all that came out.

“It swings.” Garrick stood beside her, wiping his hands on a rag, watching the boy tear back and forth through the wall. He’d left the gate itself untouched, exactly as she’d asked—just made it work. Just opened it.

She looked at the gate, and the boy, and him, and the two gardens made into one, and she found her throat had gone tight.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

He didn’t answer right away. He folded the rag once and set it aside. Then he put his arm around her, slowly and carefully, giving her every chance to avoid it. It was the same way he handed decisions back to her. It settled heavy and warm across her shoulders, and he drew her in against the solid grey bulk of his side. She leaned into him before she’d decided whether she was going to.

Toby ran through the gate again, into the nursery, out of sight for a heartbeat, and then his hat came bobbing back into view.

“There’s a caterpillar on your pepper plants!” he shouted, and vanished again to go and inspect it. And she leaned into the warmth of the enormous, quiet, impossible male beside her, his arm heavy across her back, and watched her son run laughing through a wall that had stood between two worlds for a hundred years.

Too fast, she’d told him.

Standing there in the roses with his arm around her and the gate swinging open and the boy’s bright hat flashing through the gap, she couldn’t for the life of her remember what she’d been so afraid of. Too fast seemed like something that had happened to someone else, a long time ago, on the far side of a wall that no longer had anything in the way of it.

CHAPTER 15

The coffee had gone lukewarm in Garrick’s hand by the time she came through the gate, and he found he didn’t much care.

He’d taken to standing by the sundial at the head of the rose garden every morning with two mugs and no reason he was willing to say aloud. It had become a habit between them without either of them naming it. She’d step through the gate with the morning light gilding her face, and he’d hand her the coffee. She’d wrap both hands around it and make a low satisfied sound into the steam that did unreasonable things to a male before he’d even had his first cup.

“You made it strong today,” she said, and drank, and closed her eyes.

“You said it was weak yesterday.”

“I said it was civilized yesterday. You didn’t need to take it as a challenge.” She opened her eyes and squinted up at him over the rim of the mug, and there it was again. The sheer pleasure of her being here in his garden, first thing. Dirt already ground into the knees of her work pants and her hair half out of its tie. Looking at him like he was a fixed point in her morning. Nobody had looked at him like a fixed point in a very long time. He’d forgotten a male could get used to it in the space of a week and then not be able to imagine the mornings any other way.