Page 69 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

Fernando wasn’t satisfied. Fernando was paid not to be. “That’s only if Ruggiero goes for the new plan. What if you’re wrong again? What if Ruggiero walks away from the ridge, hates Riverstone, and walks from that too?”

He looked at the number at the bottom of the column. The one that had been true all along, waiting in his file for him to calculate it.

“I was wrong about the number,” he said. “I have never once been wrong about the ground.”

He was right and they knew it. Stonehaven Construction existed because of the times he had stood in a room and said the ground won’t hold while other males said it would. Laura let his statement sit for a moment, then moved the discussion forward.

“You’re right, but it’s still risky. If we agree, there’s a condition.”

“Name it.”

“If you move Ruggiero off the ridge and onto Riverstone, and he walks because the numbers don’t hold—that loss doesn’t touch the firm’s books,” she said firmly. She had watched him carry a wrong number he hadn’t checked, and she didn’t intend to let the firm carry a real one on his account. “You’re doing this for personal reasons, so make it personal. If it fails, it’s your debt. Not Stonehaven’s. Yours.”

He didn’t hesitate. He’d already suspected she’d ask it, somewhere out on that cracked asphalt with his hand on the rock and he’d already decided it there.

“Yes.”

“Say it back to me.”

“If it doesn’t hold, it’s my loss. Personally.”

Another pause, and then Laura sighed.

“I’ve worked for you eleven years,” she said. “I’ve never seen you take a personal position on a parcel of dirt.”

He looked out of the study window, down the long slope of the restored grounds and past the stone wall. Maris was kneeling in his mother’s rose garden in her work pants, with a smaller figure in an oversized hard hat crouched beside her. The two of them were arguing cheerfully with the earth.

“Draw up the papers,” he said. “I’ll sign them today.”

CHAPTER 23

Toby had laid the wings out on the nursery’s potting bench as if he were laying out a surgeon’s tools. Two crescents of corrugated cardboard, painted a careful uneven grey, edged in the darker grey he’d insisted on because Mr. Garrick’s have darker bits on the inside, Mama, you have to look. He’d been building them since the morning at the River Café when Flora asked him what he wanted to be, and his serious little face had lit up as though somebody had handed him a plan for his life.

“Careful with the straps,” Maris said. “Let me fix the—there.”

“Do they look right?”

“They look exactly right.”

Which was when the car pulled up out front, long and dark and expensive. Cornelia Pinckney stepped out onto the gravel in a camel coat that had never once in its life touched dirt.

Oh, Maris thought. Right. Today.

“Grandmother!” Toby forgot the wings. He ran, and Cornelia crouched right there on the gravel in that coat and caught him and hugged him tight. Jeff’s father came around the car more slowly, beaming, his arms full of shopping bags with rope handles and tissue paper foaming out of the tops.

“There you are,” Lawton said. “Good Lord, Cornelia, look at the size of him.”

They loved him. That was the thing she always had to remember, before the rest of it started. They genuinely loved him.

“We brought a few things,” Cornelia said, standing, brushing at her knees even though the gravel hadn’t dared mark her. She looked at Maris over Toby’s head and her smile arrived, warm and polished. “Maris. You look well. You’ve caught the sun.”

“I work outside.”

“Of course you do.” The smile held for a beat longer. “It suits you, in its way.”

In its way. Two months of Garrick and she had almost forgotten how it went. The little hooks slipped in so smoothly you didn’t feel them break the skin until later.

The bags kept coming out of the car. A cashmere coat sized for a five-year-old. A leather satchel. A boxed set of leather-bound children’s classics Toby would not be able to read for years. And a garment bag, which Cornelia unzipped right there with the pride of a woman producing the ace she’d driven four hours to play.