Chapter 9
Maris was still working at six. Garrick had left her working to take a conference call, then spent the next hour convincing himself he shouldn’t go back.
But it was getting late and she was still there.
Unable to resist any longer, he returned to the rose garden and found her on her knees in the last of the afternoon light, elbow-deep in a hole.
“You’re late,” he said.
“I’m working.” She didn’t look up. “Different thing.”
“It’s past six.”
“Is it?” She sat back, wiped her forehead, and left a streak of dirt across it. “Huh.”
Toby was missing. He’d expected her to leave at some point and return with the small serious boy who usually trailed her, probably kneeling nearby with a trowel of his own and a running list of questions.
“Where’s Toby?”
“At Dot’s. Or rather, Dot’s grandma’s.” She dug again.
“Mrs. Crenshaw offered to take him a few afternoons a week. She’s got half the class over there most days apparently so there’s a house full of kids and a goat.
” She shook her head. “I didn’t think he’d go for it, but Dot told him to come so he decided to give it a chance.
And I get to see if I can get more done without a five-year-old asking me if worms have faces. ”
“Do they?”
“Have faces? No. He was very disappointed.” She glanced up at last, and gave him a cautious look.
“He wanted to go, but I think he likes it here better. He asked twice this morning when we were coming to your garden and got quiet when I said not today.” She shrugged a shoulder. “Sorry. He gets attached.”
“He’s welcome here any time.”
“You don’t have to—”
“He’s always welcome,” he said again, and this time he made sure she heard that he really meant it and it wasn’t just courtesy. “Any afternoon. He can stay. He doesn’t get in the way.”
She studied him a moment longer than the words needed. Then she nodded, once, and went back to her hole. He understood that he’d said the right thing, and she’d accepted it.
He crouched beside her. “What are we doing?”
“I am moving this rose. It’s been planted in the wrong place for twenty years, and it’s been miserable and stubborn about it the whole time.” She grunted, levering the trowel under a root. “I’m relocating it before I lose the light.”
“Give it here.”
“Garrick—”
“You’ve been on your knees since eight. Your hands are shaking.” They were. He’d watched the trowel wobble. “You want to move the rose. Tell me where.”
She looked at him for a beat, and he could see her running through the argument she always ran, the one where accepting help meant something she didn’t want it to mean. Then he watched her decide, for once, to accept it.
“There.” She pointed at a spot near the old bench-gap. “I dug the receiving hole an hour ago. Get under the whole root ball. Don’t tear it.”
He got under the whole root ball and he didn’t tear it.
She directed him with the competence of a female who knew exactly how something should go into the ground, and he did precisely what she said.
It worked as well as it had the day before.
The two of them fell into a rhythm with no wasted words in it, and she backfilled while he held the plant steady, and she talked him through it and he learned.
It was, he thought, the most peace he’d had on these grounds in twenty years. He was kneeling in wet dirt while a small dirty woman told him he was doing it wrong and then that he was doing it right.
Earlier that day she had told him about a courtyard in Charleston, and about people who’d had a garden redone because it was time for something new.
He had said nothing then. There was a folder on his desk with Palisade Resort Group printed across the front of it and a ridge above Miller’s Creek inside, and he hadn’t said anything about that either. Was he going to?
By the time she firmed the last of the soil around the crown, the light was slanting through the surrounding bushes. They were both filthy to the elbows and slower than they’d been an hour before.
“There.” She pressed both palms into the earth around the rose in a small final blessing. “Now it can be miserable somewhere it’ll actually thrive.”
“That’s a contradiction.”
“Roses are complicated.” She pushed to her feet with a groan and put a hand to the small of her back. He stood too, and they were suddenly very close in the narrow cleared space between the beds. Neither of them stepped back.
She looked up at him. There was dirt on her jaw and a leaf caught in her hair again, and her cheeks were flushed from a day of working outside. Her disheveled state hit him with an intensity that had nothing professional in it whatsoever.
“You watch me a lot,” she said.
“I’m your client.”
“Clients watch the budget. You watch me.” It wasn’t an accusation, and her mouth had started to curve. “You’ve been doing it since the first day. Standing there like one of your own gargoyles going hmm at me over the roses.”
“I don’t say hmm.”
“Your face says it.” She was smiling now, tired and warm and teasing, and he had no defense against teasing. “It’s very disconcerting. A person can’t dig properly with a mountain evaluating her.”
“Was I evaluating?”
“Weren’t you?”
He should have stepped back. He knew the distance this kind of thing required, and he had spent his whole adult life keeping that distance, keeping it safe. He had watched what happened to a male who let somebody matter too much. He knew it better than he knew anything.
He didn’t step back.
“Thank you,” she said quietly. “For helping. For meaning it about Toby. For—” She stopped, abandoning whatever she’d been going to say. “Just, thank you.”
And then she went up on her toes, put one filthy hand against his chest, and kissed him.
It was meant to be small. He understood that even as it happened. She’d meant it as a simple thank-you, the kind of thing a person does and quickly steps away from. She’d intended it to be brief.
It was not brief.
The moment her mouth touched his, something came apart in him with a suddenness that would have alarmed him if he’d had any capacity left for alarm.
She tasted like the day, salt and green and warm skin.
She made a small sound against his lips, surprise turning into something else, and her hand closed on the front of his shirt instead of pushing him away.
He got an arm around her and pulled her closer, and she came, soft and warm after a day of stone and dirt.
The kiss stopped being a full stop and became a question neither of them had planned to ask out loud.
Her lips parted beneath his, and he heard himself make a sound low in his chest, something with too much want in it to be careful. Her fingers slid around his neck, careless of the dirt on them, and his control—that famous, formidable, twenty-year control—disappeared completely.
His wings flared.
He felt them go before he could stop them.
They snapped wide behind him with a sound like a sail catching wind, the membranes spreading gold-lit against the low sun, and it was the most involuntary and honest thing his body had ever done.
He hadn’t let it happen in front of anyone in longer than he could remember.
He might as well have shouted at her across the garden.
She broke the kiss with a gasp, her eyes flying open, and she looked up past his shoulders at the enormous shadow his wings had thrown across the ruined rose bed, blocking the sun.
“Oh,” she breathed.
He stood there with her in his arms, both of them filthy, both of them breathing like they’d run for miles, his wings spread wide and utterly beyond his command. He had made a serious error in his estimate of the situation.
He had told himself for days that this was manageable. Just a pull. Just a distraction. Something he could keep at the correct distance and work around.
One kiss, and his own body had just informed him, in a language older than words and impossible to take back, that it was nothing of the kind.
She looked from the wings back down to his face, and he knew exactly what she was finding there, because he could feel the heat of it behind his eyes.
“Your wings just—” she said, still staring, her hand still fisted in his shirt, her mouth still red from his.
“Yes.”
“Do they do that when—”
“Yes.”
“Oh,” she said again, softer, and something dawned across her dirt-streaked face that he had no idea how to react to.
And Garrick, who never used ten words when four would do, found he had no words at all.