Chapter 10
In Maris’s dream, Garrick’s wings didn’t stop at flaring.
They wrapped around her like a cloak, grey and gold and warm despite the stone.
She was pressed against his chest with nowhere to go and no desire whatsoever to find anywhere else.
His mouth was on her throat. His clawed hand cradled the back of her head with a care that made no sense given the size of him, given the strength she could feel humming under his skin.
And she was pulling at his shirt, and it was giving, and—
She woke flushed to the roots of her hair, with the sheet twisted around one leg and her mouth dry.
“Oh, for the love of—” She dragged the pillow over her face before tossing it aside.
Her bedroom looked exactly the same as it had every other morning.
The small crack in the corner she kept meaning to patch.
Toby’s crayon sun taped on the closet door.
Nothing about the room acknowledged that she was twenty-nine years old and had just had an erotic dream about a client.
A gargoyle client. A gargoyle client whose wings had gone off like a car alarm the second she’d kissed him and who she had absolutely, positively, one hundred percent decided not to think about ever again.
She’d been thinking about him for eleven hours.
“It was an aberration,” she told the ceiling. “A momentary lapse. I was tired. It doesn’t count when you’re tired.”
The ceiling declined to argue, which she took as a bad sign, because it meant even her own house thought she was lying.
She threw off the covers before the dream could get any more vivid in the recollection and stood there in the early light, hands on her hips, addressing herself sternly.
One kiss. Two, if she was going to be technical.
She wasn’t going to be technical, because the second one had been his body’s fault and she’d been an innocent bystander to the whole wingspan situation.
It didn’t mean anything. He was a nice male.
An enormous, quiet, unfairly attractive male who listened when she talked, and who had said he’s welcome anytime about her son as though it were a fact and not a favor.
She’d gotten swept up, and that was all there was to it.
She was still telling herself that was all there was to it twenty minutes later, dressed and coffee in hand as she headed out into the nursery, where Saturday was already stirring.
Saturday was the day the nursery earned its keep.
By nine the lot had three cars in it and a truck backing a trailer up to the shrub row.
She had answered four questions about hydrangeas and sold a flat of native asters to a man who’d wanted marigolds until she talked him out of them.
The greenhouses breathed out their green damp warmth into the cooler morning air.
Somewhere a hose ran. The air smelled of wet peat and tomato leaves and the clean mineral scent of a hundred pots freshly watered.
Hauling a bag of soil onto her shoulder, she thought it was the one part of her life that made unambiguous sense.
“Okay but is it true?”
Junie appeared at her elbow the way she always did, out of nowhere and at full volume, with a wheelbarrow she hadn’t been asked to bring and an expression of naked delight.
Nineteen, sturdy as a fence post, with brown hair shot through with those green streaks that weren’t dye.
A year of agricultural college and an entire lifetime of enthusiasm.
“Is what true?”
“Sylvie says you kissed the gargoyle.”
She dropped the soil bag, and it hit the ground with a thud that startled a customer three aisles over.
“Sylvie,” she said, with great control, “was not there.”
“So it is true.” Junie clasped both hands to her chest, actually clasped them.
“Oh my gosh. I told her there was no way, I said Maris is way too sensible, and she said sensible people kiss gargoyles all the time, they just don’t tell anybody, but she said Flora said it was true and—wait, why aren’t you saying it’s not true? ”
“I’m not saying anything. I’m working. Look at this—it’s Saturday, we’ve got the whole native section to restock, the ferns need dividing, and Mr. Tillery’s coming for his rhododendrons at ten.” She hoisted the bag again. “There’s no time for gossip.”
“You always make time for gossip when it’s about other people.”
“That’s completely different and you know it.”
Junie beamed, unbothered, and grabbed the other end of the bag before Maris could stop her. “Fine. But if a seven-foot male with wings shows up at the shop today, I’m going to have thoughts about it, and you can’t stop me.”
He showed up at nine-forty.
She was on her knees in the native section with a flat of black-eyed Susans and a customer’s list, and she felt him before she saw him.
It was an odd prickle at the back of her neck that she was starting to associate exclusively with Garrick Stonehaven, like standing near something huge and warm and patient.
She turned, and there he was, filling the entrance to the greenhouse and having to duck slightly to keep his wings clear of the frame.
He was in dark jeans and a shirt she was now doing her level best not to remember pulling at in a dream.
“Morning,” he said.
“You’re—” She stood too fast and knocked the flat with her boot. “You’re not on the schedule. It’s Saturday. I don’t come to the mansion on Saturdays, Saturdays are for the shop, I told you that.”
“You did.” He looked at the greenhouse around him, at the hanging baskets and the long benches of seedlings and the misters hissing on overhead, with the slow thorough attention he gave everything. “I’m not here about the grounds.”
“Then—”
“I want to learn about the native plants you were talking about,” he said calmly. “I’d like to understand more about what you’re doing.”
I’d like to understand. Four words, and she had no business enjoying them as much as she did.
“I’m swamped,” she said, grabbing the excuse with both hands. “It’s the busiest day of the week, I’ve got customers, I’ve got Tillery at ten, I can’t just—there’s nobody to cover the—”
“I got it covered!” Junie sang out from two aisles over, bright as a bell, popping up from behind the perennials with a trowel in her fist and a grin that promised absolutely no mercy.
“Tillery’s rhododendrons are already loaded, the asters are restocked, and I can run the register with my eyes closed.
You go teach the nice gentleman about native plants.
” She put an appalling amount of weight on the words. “Take your time. Take all the time.”
Maris shot her a look that should have wilted a lesser dryad. Junie only wiggled her eyebrows and disappeared. She was left standing in the greenhouse, out of excuses, being watched by a mountain whose grey eyes had gone, she noticed, very slightly warmer than usual.
“Fine,” she said. “But if you knock over one of my seedling trays with those wings, I’m charging you for it.”
“Understood.”
She showed him around partly because it seemed ungracious to refuse, and partly because she loved this part.
This was hers. Every square inch of it. The propagation benches with their trays of native seedlings under grow-lights, each label written in her own hand.
The cold frames. The long back run where she kept the ridge plants, the ones you couldn’t buy anywhere else because she’d hiked them out one careful division at a time.
“These,” she said, crouching by a tray of unassuming green rosettes, and heard her voice change.
“These are Shortia. Oconee bells. You can’t just order these—they barely grow anywhere on earth except for a few counties in these mountains, and they’re fussy about it.
Right acid soil, right shade, right everything.
I’ve been working on them since I arrived and I’ve lost more than I’ve kept.
It will probably take two years before I have any viable stock.
” She touched a leaf gently with one finger.
“But when they bloom—little white nodding flowers, in the spring, before anything else has bothered to wake up—there’s nothing like it.
People pave over hillsides full of them and don’t even know what they had. ”
She looked up. He had crouched too, which put him roughly at her eye level and did nothing at all to make him seem smaller, and he wasn’t looking at the plants.
He was looking at her.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing.” He turned to the tray, unhurried. “Two years for a flower.”
“Two years for the right flower.” She stood, brushing off her knees, willing the heat out of her face.
“That’s the thing, isn’t it? Anybody can throw money at a landscape and have it perfect by June.
That’s not—” She stopped, because she was about to get preachy, and because he’d stood up too, and the aisle between the benches was narrow, and he took up rather a lot of it.
“Come on. I want to show you the ferns. The ones from the wall situation—I’ve been dividing them, so if we ever kill the originals restoring your very structural second wall, we’ve got backups. ”
“You called it a wall situation.”
“It was a situation. You wanted to demolish a fern habitat for the crime of being slightly collapsed.”
“I wanted it not to fall on you.”
“It’s been fine for twenty years.”
“It hadn’t met you yet, little thorn.”
She was halfway to a retort when the words caught up to her. She looked at him, and his face hadn’t changed at all. Flat, calm, unreadable to anyone who didn’t know that his mouth was doing that barely-there curve that meant he had made a joke on purpose. Her stomach fluttered.
“I’m not sure if that was intended as a compliment or not,” she said.
“Definitely a compliment.” His voice had gone low and warm, and a corresponding warmth pooled low in her belly.