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.
“But if this is a bad time…” She took a step back, and he finally seemed to come out of whatever trance he’d been under.
“No, no, not at all. I was just expecting someone older.”
His voice was as attractive as the rest of him, low and deep with a resonance that seemed to settle low in her stomach. Unfortunately, his words were considerably more disappointing.
“I assure you I am more than qualified.” This time she didn’t have to put any effort into keeping her voice cool.
“I don’t doubt that for a minute.” He flashed her an all-too-charming grin. “My apologies. I seem to have gotten off to a very poor start. Please, call me Garrick.”
She wanted to refuse. She really did, suddenly suspecting that keeping some formality between them would be extremely helpful to her peace of mind.
But refusing would be impolite, and politeness was another trait that had been trained into her.
She compromised on a half nod, and returned to the reason she was there.
“What can you tell me about the grounds?”
“Why don’t I show you?” He gestured at the surrounding landscape as he stepped out of the house.
She turned to follow the gesture, and for the briefest half second, he put a guiding hand on her back. A huge, warm hand that she was definitely not going to think about and didn’t immediately miss when it was gone.
“As you can see,” he said with barely a pause, although something in his voice had changed, “it was originally divided into a series of garden rooms. Somewhat more formal near the house and growing wilder towards the edges of the property.”
“If you want formal—”
He disagreed immediately. “No, it was never formal. Just more organized. My mother designed the gardens to be lived in.”
“Your mother?”
“She loved them,” he said quietly. “That’s mainly how I remember her. Out here on her knees planting things, or cutting roses for the house, or full of excitement for a new plant she wanted to try.”
“Is she still around?” she asked, then winced at the awkward question.
He shook his head. “No. She’s been gone for twenty years now, and after she died, my father just…” He waved a hand at the overgrown sprawl surrounding them. “He stopped caring.”
His face was expressionless, but something in his voice made her wonder if the gardens weren’t the only thing his father had stopped caring about. She cleared her throat and directed her attention back to the purpose of her visit.
“I can see it looks like a lot of the underlying structure is still here.”
“It has good bones.”
“Then let’s see what else we’ve got.”
They spent the next half hour touring the grounds, her excitement growing with every discovery.
A few places had been taken over by invading weeds—actual weeds and not the decorative kind—and a few plants absolutely had to come out.
There were considerably more that needed a severe pruning, but beneath all that were the remains of a truly magnificent garden.
The first thing she found was a wall that wasn’t one. What had looked from the terrace like a long green bank turned out to be a boxwood hedge that hadn’t been clipped in twenty years. She pushed her arm in to the elbow, and her hand emerged into open air on the other side.
“It’s hollow.”
She worked her shoulder in, and then shoved. The box gave way with a dry crackle and its distinctive cat pee odor. Inside it was a long green corridor bigger than her kitchen, floored with twenty years of dead leaves over old brick, the branches arching up and meeting overhead.
“They go hollow when they’re old,” she called. “Nobody believes me. Come and see.”
A shadow filled the gap she’d made. Garrick had crouched down and got his head through, and nothing else was going to fit without taking out half the hedge.
“I remember when this was a walkway,” he said, and something in his voice made her look down at the brick instead of his face. The brick paving ran straight through the boxwoods and out the far side. The box must have been an arch over the path back then.
“I can restore it,” she said. “Not this year. I’d take a foot off the top and a foot off each side and it would look like a crime for two summers. But you’d get the arch back.”
He gave a quick decisive nod. “Then put it back.”
She didn’t tell him that she hadn’t taken the job yet.
In the area below the box, something enormous was flowering in the shade, and she stopped again. An oakleaf hydrangea, ten feet across, the panicles already going rust-colored at the edges the way they did in August.
“Where did this come from?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s not a nursery one.” She got under the leaves and put her hand on the trunk, which was the size of her wrist and shaggy with peeling bark. “This is a wild one. Somebody dug this out of the woods and carried it home.”
“My mother used to do that. Is that unusual?”
“It is now.” She stood up and brushed the leaves out of her hair. “People buy the little tidy ones with names. This is just what was growing on the mountain.”
She’d done the same thing herself, back in the spring, wandering through the woods with a trowel and a bread bag. Toby had accompanied her several times and she found herself wondering if a young Garrick had done the same with his mother. She didn’t ask.
The wisteria was two beds further down, and she stopped with a sigh.
It had been planted against a wooden arbor, probably eighty years ago, probably by somebody who thought it would be pretty.
It had been pretty. Now the arbor was nothing more than fallen timber inside a tangle of grey stems as thick as her thigh.
The wisteria had covered it and moved up into the beech behind it, and the lower third of the beech was dead. She sighed again.
Garrick followed her gaze up to the tree. “Will the beech come back?”
“Not the part that’s gone. The rest will, if we get this off it now.” She put her hand on one of the thick grey vines where it twisted into the bark. “This has to come out of the tree.”
“No.”
She turned around. He hadn’t moved, but his wings had lifted off his back, and he was looking at the wisteria instead of at her.
“It flowers the first week of May,” he said. “This whole section turns purple and you can smell it from the gate.”
“I’m not arguing with you about that.” She followed the stem back down to where it came out of the ground. It took some doing. “I said out of the tree. I didn’t say out of the ground.”
He came a step closer. “You can do that?”
She got a hand around the old wood at the base.
It was thick and twisted and grey as an elephant’s foot.
“I take every stem off the beech, and every root that’s gone wandering, and I leave you this.
Then you build me a new arbor. A real one, preferably steel, and not where that one is, because that one’s underneath the tree. Then I train it onto the new one.”
“How long until it flowers?”
“Three years. Possibly four.” He didn’t flinch, and she kept going. “It’s slow and it’s expensive and you’ll be looking at a bare frame for two of them. Ripping it out is cheaper and it’s done in a week.”
“I’ll build the arbor.”
She stayed crouched a second longer than she needed to, with her hand on the old wood.
She hadn’t expected that. She’d expected him to want it ripped out, or at the very least to demand that it be flowering by the following spring.
She hadn’t expected him to choose to keep it. She hadn’t expected to like him.
They continued on past the beech and found a huge section of roses, thorny and overgrown but full of the kind of traditional varieties that were almost impossible to find. The more she examined them, the more she discovered.
“Look,” she said excitedly. “This is a Madame Alfred Carrière. I’ve never seen one so big. And this is a Champneys’ Pink Cluster. They’re incredibly rare.”
She turned to smile up at him and found him looking off into the distance.
“This was my mother’s favorite place,” he said softly. “During the summer, the whole town seemed to smell like her roses.”
“It could again,” she said before she could prevent herself. “But it’ll take some serious work, and I might not be able to save all of them.”
“Does that mean you’ll take the job?” he asked.
Those stone-grey eyes fixed on her with a sudden intensity and for a second, they almost seemed to glow, as if the sunlight were reflecting off them.
“Um, well, it’s a lot of work, and I do have other commitments.”
“There’s no pressure,” he said quickly. “You can take your time and fit it in amongst your other jobs. Hopefully the fact that you live so close will make that easier.”
He gestured towards the wall separating their properties, and she wasn’t entirely sure if that proximity was a good thing or not.
“Money’s no object,” he added, and she immediately tensed.
“The amount of money doesn’t affect my commitments,” she said stiffly.
To his credit, he immediately apologized. “That’s not what I meant. I just wanted you to know that I want it done properly. I’d rather it cost more and be done correctly than have it shortcut due to budgetary constraints.”
“All right.” To be fair, sometimes even the wealthiest clients, the ones who claimed to be willing to pay anything, were the first ones to hesitate when it came to spending money on things that weren’t visible.
“So will you take the job?” he asked, looking more anxious than an enormous male with a hard face should look.
“I…”
The rational corner of her brain, the corner that had kept her free from Cornelia’s well-intentioned but suffocating generosity, told her that it was a mistake.
But the other portion, the portion that saw the beautiful garden beneath the neglect and heard his voice when he talked of his mother’s roses, disagreed.
And that was the part that won.
“I’ll draw up a contract,” she heard herself say before she could change her mind.