Page 79 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

“I love you.”

His wings came open. He couldn’t have stopped them if the roof had been in the way. He got a hand into her hair and one arm around her back and drew her up off her heels and into his lap, soil and all, and kissed her. Not a careful kiss, but the one he hadn’t been able to give her while he sat listening to her promise a rock she was staying.

She responded with equal intensity, and the part of him that measured and rationed and kept everything standing went quiet for once and let him have the moment.

“Study,” he managed against her mouth, surrounded by glass walls. “Not here.”

“Then move faster.”

He carried her. It was easier than letting go of her long enough to make her walk, and she didn’t argue, which was how he knew she was just as far gone. Maris Calder, who argued with him about everything, wound her legs around his waist and put her mouth on his throat instead. He made it to the study in less than a minute.

The site plans still lay abandoned on the oak table and he swept them off it. Fourteen million dollars of proposal hit the floor in a slither of paper and he didn’t spare it a thought. He set her on the cleared table and got her out of the dirt-streaked shirt, and she got him out of his. Then her small hands were on his chest, over the place where he knew she could feel the resonance. The low deep hum that started whenever she touched him, and that he had never been able to hide from her.

“That’s the only part of you that never goes quiet,” she breathed, her palm over the sound. “Even when you’re in the stone. It’s quieter, but it’s still there.”

“Nobody else has ever put a hand on me to find out. But you’ll always know I’m there.”

“Good.”

His wings mantled around them both, closing them into a space that was just the two of them, and the hum in his chest, and her breath going ragged as he worked her out of the rest of her clothes. He never got used to how small she was against him. He was always half a thought away from being afraid of his strength with her, and she never let him be. She tipped her head back and pulled him closer, asking wordlessly for more.

He gave it to her on the table in his study, with the afternoon coming gold through the tall windows and the wreck of the ridge proposal scattered across the floor. One clawed hand splayed wide and gentle up the length of her spine. The other braced against the oak beside her head, taking his weight. She said his name, and then she stopped saying words at all. The hum in his chest built into something that rattled the glass in the window frames. For the length of it he was not a builder or a businessman or the last of a line of stone. He was just a male, wholly and stupidly in love, holding on to the female he loved.

Afterwards she lay sprawled half across him where they’d slid down onto the rug, and he had his wing thrown over her like a blanket. Neither of them said anything. It was the best silence of his life.

CHAPTER 27

The knock, when it came, was small and polite and at knee height.

“Mr. Garrick?” A pause. “Mama?”

They came apart in an undignified scramble that would have been funny if his heart hadn’t tried to climb out of his throat. Maris made a sound and dove for her shirt. He got his own on inside out and corrected it. By the time Toby had his hand up to knock again, Garrick had the study door open exactly wide enough to put his head through.

“Hello,” he said.

“Miss Sara let out early because the heat went out, and Dot’s nana brought me home.” Toby had his wings on. Not the cardboard ones. The new ones Garrick had built him, grey canvas on a hinged frame, and he had worn them every day since, twice to bed. He peered up. “Why is your shirt wet?”

“Plants,” Garrick said.

“Okay.” Toby accepted this with the trust that still got to him every single time. “Can I come in? Aidan told me the flower is saved forever and I want to see the map.”

Behind him, he heard Maris smother a laugh and finish buttoning. “Come in, baby,” she called, her voice only slightly wrecked. “Careful of the papers, we… dropped them.”

Toby came in and surveyed the study—the two grown-ups, the scattered proposal, the general air of a room where something had happened—with the unhurried, thorough attention that was his default response. Then he stood in the middle of it and put his hands on his hips over the wings, and delivered his verdict.

“We should live here.”

Garrick had thought about it. Often. But he had never once let himself think about it seriously. He had to look at the floor for a moment.

“The cottage is too small,” Toby explained, with the patience of a boy stating something obvious to slow adults. “You can’t even open your wings in the kitchen. You have to fold them all the way up and you hit your head on the light. I’ve seen it. And here there’s the whole west wing and nobody’s even in it, and there’s a fireplace big enough to stand up in, and Mama’s greenhouses are right through the gate now.” He counted these on his fingers. “It just makes sense.”

“It does,” Maris said faintly, “actually make quite a lot of sense.”

She said it lightly, but he had spent that morning in the stone, listening to her tell him she had kept a bag packed in the back of her head since she was seven years old, and he knew that it wasn’t light at all.

“He’s not wrong,” he agreed.

Toby nodded, pleased to have carried the motion. Then he thought of something else and got nervous. Garrick watched him master it, and watched him wear, for a second, the exact expression Garrick had worn his whole life before saying something that mattered. Toby folded his hands in front of him the way his grandmother had taught him. Then he asked his question with all the careful formality of a boy who had been praised his short life long for being polite.