Page 56 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

He gave her everything he knew how to give. And when the fire had burned lower and the forgotten dinner had long since passed the point of rescue, he lay on the rug with her tucked against him and both wings curved around them.

One wing lay beneath her, the heavy outer edge curled up beyond her back. The other had come over them sometime afterwards, enclosing the small warm space they occupied until there was almost nothing beyond it. Firelight came through the dark membrane in shades of muted amber. The rest of the room might as well not have existed.

She traced an idle line across his chest.

“You’re doing it again.”

“What?”

“Thinking.”

“I wasn’t aware that was prohibited afterwards.”

“I’m considering an amendment.”

His hand moved slowly along her back. “I’ll have my attorney review it.”

“Your attorney is going to hate me.”

“He already does.”

She lifted her head. “You’ve discussed me with your attorney?”

“No.”

“Then why does he hate me?”

“Because you’re going to make me amend a contract.”

For a second she stared at him. Then she laughed. The sound filled the small space beneath his wings, warm and sleepy and entirely without restraint, and he drew the wing a little closer around her.

He kissed the top of her head, and she settled against him again. Neither spoke for a while.

The quiet should have been familiar. He had built his life around quiet. He’d sought it out, protected it, returned to it after crowded construction sites and airports and boardrooms. Stonehaven had given him all the quiet a male could want.

This wasn’t the same.

She breathed against his chest. The fire cracked and popped. Somewhere in the kitchen, something in the ruined pan gave a faint, accusatory hiss.

“We murdered dinner,” she murmured.

“It knew the risks.”

Her shoulders shook, and he smiled into her hair. He didn’t want to move. There was a perfectly good bed upstairs. There was food that hadn’t been destroyed somewhere in the kitchen. There were clothes scattered across the room. None of it seemed sufficiently important to justify lifting his wing.

Her hand had stopped moving against his chest. He looked down and discovered her eyes were closed. She had fallen asleep in his arms, warm and trusting.

He should wake her eventually. Her son would be home in the morning. She would want clothes and a toothbrush and whatever else human females reasonably required after spending a night they had not technically planned to spend. But not yet.

Her cheek was warm against his skin. One strand of blonde hair had caught beneath his wing, and he freed it carefully with the tip of one claw. She didn’t wake.

Something deep inside him settled. It was the same feeling he’d had when she stepped through the gate in the morning. When Toby’s voice came through the garden. When he’d sat at the kitchen table listening to the boy explain construction vehicles while she stole roasted potatoes from the serving dish and denied doing it.

Except the feeling was stronger now. Dangerous in a way he couldn’t define. He looked towards the fire through the amber shadow of his wing and decided he didn’t need to define it tonight. For once in his life, he didn’t need to fix it either. He lowered his head to Maris’s hair, closed his eyes, and let himself stay exactly where he was.

CHAPTER 19

Maris woke in a bed the size of a small country, and for a moment she couldn’t place the ceiling. High and coffered, edged with pristine plaster details. Then the wing wrapped around her shifted a little, the membrane catching the morning light, and all of it came back in a warm rush. The rug. The fire. The dinner they had murdered.