Page 48 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

“I’m telling you plenty of things.” Maris rang up the coreopsis without looking. “I’m telling you those are eight dollars a flat and you’re trying to argue me down to six.”

“Six is fair. They’re leggy.” Sylvie set two more flats down and leaned both elbows on the counter, mahogany hair swinging forward, the green in it catching the light through the greenhouse glass. “Don’t change the subject. How’s the manor?”

“Coming along. The roses are responding well to the pruning. We saved most of the original⁠—”

“I wasn’t asking about the roses, Maris Calder, and you know it.”

She kept her eyes on the register, even though she could feel the flush climbing up her throat. That was the trouble with fair skin and a friend who watched everything like a hawk watched a mouse. “The job’s going fine.”

“The job.” Sylvie tasted the word like it was something faintly indecent. “The seven-foot job. The grey, brooding, absolutely-carved-out-of-granite job with the shoulders.” She sighed. “Is it true his eyes go gold? Robin swears they go gold.”

“How would Robin know?”

“So they do go gold.”

Damn. Maris punched the total in harder than she needed to. “I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t say a lot of things.” Sylvie’s grin turned wicked and slow. “You didn’t say why you were humming when I walked in. You didn’t say why you’ve got that particular—” she waved a hand up and down at Maris “—glow. That is not a hard-day’s-work glow, honey. I’ve had a hard day’s work. It does not look like that.”

Maris shoved the plants towards her. “Twenty-four dollars.”

“He stays and helps you, doesn’t he.” It wasn’t a question. Sylvie counted bills out one at a time onto the counter, watching Maris’s face for each one. “Big scary gargoyle out there on his knees in the dirt pulling weeds for you. Bringing you coffee. I heard about the coffee.”

“Who told you about the coffee?”

“So there is coffee.” Sylvie clapped once, delighted. “Oh, this is better than I hoped. You’re blushing. You’re actually blushing. Look at you, you’re the color of those geraniums.”

“I am not—” She pressed her cool hands to her cheeks and found them hot, which settled the matter. She dropped them. “We had supper. Once. The three of us. Toby fell asleep in front of the fire, and it was—” She stopped, because the memory of it rose up warm and glowing and a little too tender to repeat across a register, even to Sylvie. The bright kitchen. The boy breathing on the rug. Garrick’s mouth in the firelight and the way he’d said we should stop like it was painful. “It was nice,” she finished weakly.

“Nice.” Sylvie put a hand over her heart. “You spent the evening with a male built like a cathedral and your baby asleep by the fire and it was nice. Maris. You’re killing me. Give me one real detail or I’m making up a better one.”

“There’s nothing to⁠—”

“Fine. Then I’ll tell you my detail.” Sylvie put the flats to one side and produced a folded sheet of pale green paper from her back pocket with the flourish of a magician. “You’re in the newsletter again.”

Maris’s stomach dropped. “No.”

“Page two. Under Around the Falls.” Sylvie shook it open and cleared her throat with relish. “Word from the Stonehaven grounds is that the restoration is progressing beautifully under the expert hand of our own Maris Calder—and that the notoriously private owner has taken a keen personal interest in the work. Very keen. We do love a project that brings people together.” She lowered the page. “Flora wrote that.”

“She can’t just—” Maris snatched the newsletter and read it herself, which was a mistake. Reading it made it worse, and it also made a small traitorous part of her ridiculously pleased, and she hated that part of herself with a clean bright passion. Taken a keen personal interest. She thought of his hand under her shirt on the terrace, his phone going off, and both of them laughing. She folded the paper up small. “This is mortifying.”

“You’re smiling.”

“I’m not.”

“You’ve got a smile going. Right there.” Sylvie tapped the corner of her mouth. “That’s the smile of a woman who read very keen and thought, yes, actually, quite keen, thank you for asking.”

Maris opened her mouth to deny it⁠—

—and the front of the nursery went dark with the shadow of something enormous rolling up the drive.

For one absurd heartbeat she thought it was Garrick, because she had gotten stupidly primed to think Garrick at any large shape. But this shape had wheels. A Stonehaven crew truck, and behind it a trailer, and chained down on the trailer, yellow and squat and brand-new, sat a Bobcat. The same machine she had stood at a rental counter pricing out the day before.

A young troll in a Stonehaven Construction cap swung down from the cab with a clipboard.

“Calder?” he called. “Delivery. Where do you want her?”

Maris walked out onto the drive slowly, the newsletter still folded in her hand. “There’s a mistake. I didn’t… I rented one. From Buncombe Rental. It’s coming Friday.”