Page 7 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

He’d awakened abruptly, his awareness rushing back along with the certainty that something had changed. He didn’t know what it was, but he hadn’t questioned it. He’d showered, called the office, and gone back to work. A gargoyle who intended to sleep until the end of the month and woke two weeks early could keep that information between himself and the stone.

But the knowledge that something had changed hadn’t gone away. A low, persistent pull, like the change in pressure before a storm, came from somewhere beyond that boundary wall. Not strongly enough to interfere with his life, but enough that he was constantly aware of it on some level. He’d felt it strongest the mornings after he returned home, standing in the garden at dawn, and the sensible part of him had put it down to fatigue and jet lag and a male who’d spent too long alone.

He couldn’t explain it so he ignored it. He was very good at ignoring things. It was practically the family trade.

He could call Flora. He should call Flora. He should explain that the grounds weren’t scheduled until spring, apologize to Ms. Calder for wasting her time, and arrange a consultation when the remaining exterior work was finished and he had a plan and a budget.

He did not call Flora.

Instead he went to his study and answered eleven emails. He reviewed a shipping manifest. He drafted a response to the Charlotte client that was more polite than the man deserved. At nine forty-five, he discovered he’d read the same paragraph of a subcontractor agreement four times.

At nine fifty-two, he abandoned it.

At nine fifty-five, he caught himself straightening the collar of a shirt that did not need straightening, and stared at his reflection in the hall mirror.

“What the hell are you doing?”

The gargoyle in the mirror offered no useful response.

At precisely ten o’clock, a knock came at the front door.

He knew, before he touched the handle, that he was not going to like what happened next. His pulse was doing something it hadn’t done since he was a boy, and the pull he’d been ignoring for months had gone from a distant awareness to a hard throb in his chest. For one brief cowardly second he considered pretending he wasn’t home. Then he opened the door.

Maris Calder stood on his front step in a faded green work shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pencil tucked behind one ear. Dirt was already ground into one knee of her jeans as though she couldn’t keep clean for the length of a morning and had long ago stopped caring. Blonde hair, wavy, coming loose from whatever she’d done to contain it. A generous mouth already half-open to say something brisk and businesslike. Hazel-green eyes that went up his chest, and up, and up, and widened as they climbed.

Her scent hit him a half-second later—warm skin and green growing things and something underneath all of it that had absolutely no business making his wings twitch against his back like they wanted to open.

The pull that had dragged him out of stone in January, that had waited beyond his wall for eight months while he’d crossed state lines and buried himself in work, had a source. Every cell in his body, every particle of male and stone and ancient instinct was utterly, catastrophically sure of exactly one thing.

Mine.

His mind immediately rejected the conclusion. He didn’t know this female. He didn’t even know her⁠—

“Mr. Stonehaven?” she said. “I’m Maris Calder. Flora sent me.”

He opened his mouth to answer and, for the first time in his adult life, Garrick Stonehaven found he had absolutely nothing to say.

CHAPTER 3

Maris was suddenly extremely grateful that, if nothing else, six years of exposure to Cornelia Pinckney had taught her how to keep her expression composed.

Because, damn.

She’d known Garrick Stonehaven was a gargoyle. And she’d had some vague impression of what that meant. Grey skin. Wings. Perhaps one of those comically ugly expressions, like the statues adorning his roofline.

Well, the grey skin was right. And the wings. But everything else about her assumptions was wrong.

For one thing, he was huge. He had to be almost seven feet tall, even without the wings, the tips of which were currently rising up from behind his shoulders. Her head didn’t even come up to his shoulder. And he was broad, his body almost filling the large doorway of the mansion.

And he was absolutely, definitely, not ugly.

His features were stern and a little hard. Like stone, she thought, hysterically. But they were extraordinarily attractive.

And he was currently giving her a look out of those stone-grey eyes that made her stomach do something it hadn’t done since before Toby was born.

“Mr. Stonehaven,” she repeated, relieved to hear that her voice sounded as composed as her expression. “Flora sent me to look at the grounds.”

He was still staring at her.