Chapter 2 #2
The foyer rose three stories above him, filled with morning light that gleamed on the newly refinished floors.
The library was finished, along with the study and the ballroom.
The conservatory off the kitchen had taken nearly a year and most of a glazier’s patience.
Now, four lemon trees stood in enormous pots beneath the restored glass, and he sometimes sat there in the mornings and read contracts.
Most of the house looked like a home again.
At the end of the west corridor there was an oak door whose brass handle had gone dull while every other handle in the house gleamed. He walked past the corridor every day on his way to the kitchen. He didn’t slow down and he didn’t look at it. None of that took any effort anymore.
The kitchen looked much as it always had.
It still had the old marble counters and the big old-fashioned range.
He’d repainted the wooden cabinets and Robin had scrubbed everything within an inch of its life and he’d called it good.
He put on a new pot of coffee and moved to the big window overlooking the garden.
From there he could just make out the boundary wall beneath a tangled mass of honeysuckle and Virginia creeper, the solid grey stone that separated his property from the old Dolan place.
The place had been empty when he’d gone into stone in December.
It wasn’t sleep, exactly, not the way humans understood it, but his kind occasionally needed to let body and consciousness sink deep into the stone.
He had chosen the six weeks over the end of the year when business was slow and he had no other responsibilities.
He’d planned to remain that way until the end of January. Instead he’d surfaced two weeks early.
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.