Page 51 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

He smiled at that one. “He can hand me things.”

“He loves handing you things.” She exhaled, and the last of her resistance went with it. She couldn’t have said exactly when the male in front of her had gone from a client to someone she’d trust with the most important person in her life, but somehow he had. “In that case, yes. Thank you.” She raised her voice. “Toby. You’re spending the day with Mr. Garrick. Is that all right?”

Toby’s head immediately came up, the shoelace forgotten, and a wide grin covered his serious little face. He was on his feet before she’d finished the sentence. “On the grounds?”

“On the grounds.”

“With the—” He stopped himself, clearly remembering his manners. “If it’s not any trouble,” he said to Garrick, with a small formal dip of his head that would have broken her heart if she’d let it.

“It’s no trouble,” Garrick said. “I could use the help, actually,” he added. “There’s a job I can’t do alone.”

Toby stood up straighter under the weight of the help.

“Go get your boots,” she told him, and he went. She turned back to find Garrick already looking at her, grey eyes gone soft the way she’d stopped pretending she didn’t notice.

“Drive safe,” he said. “I’ve got him.”

I’ve got him. Three words she’d been saying to herself alone since Toby was a baby, and she had to get in the truck fast before her face gave everything away in front of Sylvie.

The install ran long, because installs always ran long, and there were two tractor trailers crawling over the mountain in front of her. By the time she turned Doris back into the lot the sun was slanting through the trees and her lower back was complaining. Loudly. She’d called three times. Each time Garrick had answered on the first ring and said he’s fine in a voice so calm she’d almost been annoyed by it. Once she’d heard Toby chattering away merrily behind him. It was so unlike the way her boy acted with most adults that she’d sat in the client’s driveway for a full minute just listening to the sound of it.

She didn’t go to the cottage after she’d parked the truck. She went straight through the gate.

The rose garden had never looked so much like something on the mend—but that wasn’t what stopped her on the path. Off to the side, in the sunny pocket where she’d marked out a future kitchen bed with stakes and string, the string was gone. In its place sat a low border of pale flat stones, curved into a soft-cornered rectangle no bigger than a bathtub, mortared clean and level. Fresh soil filled the middle, dark and turned. And crouched over it, dust to the elbows, was a seven-foot gargoyle crouched down on his heels like a mountain trying to be small, and a five-year-old boy with his sleeves shoved up and a smear of dirt across one cheek and an oversized hard hat sliding down over his eyes.

“—and this one,” Toby was saying, tapping a stone, “is the wonkiest one but you said wonky was okay because it’s character, and Dot says her nana has a whole wall that’s all wonky on purpose and it’s hundreds of years old, so wonky is—is distinguished⁠—”

“It is.” Garrick’s low rumble was gentle and unhurried. He was listening, his head bent and one enormous clawed finger holding a stone in place while her son patted mortar around it with a child’s trowel. “Press there. Firmly. Good.”

“Is it distinguished now?”

“Very.”

Toby beamed at the stone like it had done something remarkable. “Mama’s going to plant the rest of it but you said I could plant this part because it’s mine. It’s my own bed, and I’m going to do carrots and the little tomatoes, the yellow ones, and—” He pushed the hard hat back up out of his eyes with a filthy wrist. “Can gargoyles eat tomatoes?”

“Yes.”

“Do you like tomatoes?”

Garrick considered the matter seriously, then nodded. “I do.”

“Then I’ll grow you some.”

Garrick’s whole body went still.

“I’d like that,” he said quietly, and Toby went right on chattering, already onto the wonkiness of the next stone.

And she knew. It wasn’t the coffee. It wasn’t little thorn or his mouth in the firelight or even the way he’d listened when she’d been furious with him. It was a seven-foot gargoyle on his heels in the dirt, promising to eat a five-year-old’s tomatoes.

Her eyes stung.

She let them.

“Mama!” Toby had spotted her. He rushed over, hard hat swaying, and grabbed her hand with both dirty ones. “Come see. I made a bed. A whole bed. It’s distinguished.”

“I can see that.” Her voice came out thick and she had to clear her throat. “That’s the finest bed I’ve ever seen, baby.”

“Garrick let me do the mortar. He said I have a… a steady hand.” He repeated the compliment like it was a medal.