Chapter 13
Her taste was still in Garrick’s mouth when he reached his gates, and it was killing him.
He crossed the dark garden with the measured stride of a male who didn’t trust himself to move faster.
Because if he moved faster he would turn around, and if he turned around he’d go right back to that cottage.
And Maris would let him in, and to hell with too fast. The evening would end the way they both wanted it to, and he knew it would be a mistake.
He could still feel her thigh under his hand.
He could still hear the low, startled sound she’d made against his mouth, entirely unlike the dirt-under-the-nails woman who argued with him about ferns.
He’d put her on the counter and she’d wrapped her legs around him without hesitating for a second.
She’d looked at him with her mouth swollen and her eyes dark and he hadn’t seen fear on her face.
He’d seen a desire that matched his own.
His gardens surrounded him, the rose garden she was resurrecting from his father’s neglect, the collapsed wall she’d refused to let him fix, the ferns she’d defended like they were her own children. Her touch was everywhere he looked. She’d already gotten into the land.
He stopped at the foot of the terrace and looked up at the mansion, and he couldn’t go any further.
He’d made it a good house again. He’d spent most of the last two years stripping and rebuilding, undoing the long slow rot his father had allowed after his mother died.
His father’s ghost had been in every room, but he was proud of the work he’d done.
He’d stood right here a hundred times and felt the satisfaction of knowing he’d identified the faults and repaired the problems.
Tonight the house looked like a mausoleum.
Every window was dark. All that restored plaster and rehung paneling and oiled wood, and not one light.
Forty rooms and one resident, with nothing waiting for him inside but the enormous echoing quiet he’d spent the past two years telling himself he preferred.
He thought of walking through the great front door into that silence, up the wide stairs and down the long dark hall to his bedroom.
Alone. He’d done it for two years and never even thought about it.
Tonight the thought of it made his chest ache.
This is what she’s done, he thought, and it wasn’t an accusation. It was closer to awe. One small human female with a wheelbarrow and a stubborn jaw had walked through his open gate and made his own house unbearable to him. She’d made the silence feel different, not restful but empty.
He didn’t go in.
Instead he kicked off his boots and unfurled his wings, glad of the dark and the cold air pouring over them as he extended them to their full span.
He pushed off the terrace and flew. Two strokes, three, the great muscles of his back and chest doing the work they were built for, the ground dropping away, the manor’s roofline swinging up to meet him.
He landed on the gable above his mother’s rose garden, the way he’d landed a thousand times as a boy.
He folded his wings and settled into a crouch on the cold slate with his talons curled over the ridge, and looked over at her cottage.
The kitchen light still burned, a small bright square in the darkness.
He could see her moving through the window, back and forth across the kitchen.
Was she pacing, as unsettled as he was, or simply going about her business?
He stayed where he was and watched it the way a lighthouse keeper watches a single ship in a black sea, and he tried to think.
Thinking was something he was good at. He’d built a company on it. He took a problem apart, looked at the loads and the stresses and where something would fail, and then he built a solution. He could solve this problem too.
Start at the beginning. Exactly what is the problem?
Attraction? No. He’d been attracted to females before, although never like this. But attraction didn’t wake a gargoyle out of stone two weeks early.
Desire? Desire was worse. It explained the kitchen.
It didn’t explain why he’d spent twenty minutes listening to her talk about Oconee bells, or why a crooked rose carved into a ceiling had become important because Toby liked it.
It didn’t explain why the sight of her laughing with three females in a tavern had made something in his chest settle before the tourist stood up.
The pull? It was merely another fact that explained nothing.
He needed a better word, but he didn’t have one.
Perhaps that was why his father came to mind.
Not the father he remembered from childhood, laughing while his mother complained that the gazebo in the rose garden leaned.
Not the one who had carried her through the front door one anniversary because she’d refused to come inside until he admitted she’d been right about something Garrick could no longer remember. The other one.
He’d been nineteen the first time he’d found his father sitting in the dark dining room long after midnight.
There had been a plate in front of him, untouched and gone cold.
Through the windows the rain was coming down hard enough that Garrick could hear water dripping somewhere in the upstairs corridor.
“The roof’s leaking,” he’d told his father.
His father had looked towards the empty chair at the other end of the table.
“Let it.”
The roof had leaked. The roses had died.
Rooms had been closed one by one as plaster cracked and pipes failed and his father stopped seeing any reason to repair them.
It hadn’t happened all at once. That would almost have been easier.
Instead he’d watched his father disappear inch by inch until the male who remained seemed as empty as the house around him.
And Garrick couldn’t stand it anymore. He’d left.
He’d built Stonehaven Construction. He’d built offices and hotels and houses and bridges, and when something failed he found the reason and fixed it. He had made an entire life out of solving problems by finding the answers.
He looked down at the dark garden between the manor and the small glowing window beyond the wall. Whatever this was, it didn’t feel like a problem with an answer.
The kitchen light went out. For a long time he watched the dark square where it had been.
I need to think about this, he told himself.
He always told himself that. It never once meant think.
It meant wait. He’d wait out the night up here where the air was clean and she was safely on the other side of the wall.
And when the sun came he’d go to stone, because stone didn’t want, stone didn’t ache, and stone didn’t sit on a cold gable with memory of a female’s thigh beneath his hand.
By the time he woke he’d have his answer.
He’d have taken the problem apart and known where it would fail and known what to do.
The sky in the east went from black to grey to the first thin line of dawn, and Garrick turned his face towards it, and let it take him.
The change came the way it always came. Not sleep, deeper than sleep, a slow spreading cold that started in his talons where they gripped the ridge and climbed inward, the world going still, going away.
His thoughts thinned out to a deep, calm quiet.
His wings settled and his eyes fixed on the horizon.
And the huge gargoyle on the gable of Stonehaven Manor became exactly what he appeared to be—stone, weathered, watchful, and entirely at peace.
It didn’t help.
He knew that the instant he came back. The warmth returning to his talons, the world flooding back in with the westering light and the green scent of the grounds below and the sound of the river at the bottom of the hill.
The whole day had gone in the single long breath that stone-sleep always was.
He’d expected to wake with an answer, the way he woke from most problems with the solution laid out cleanly in his mind.
Instead he woke no closer to knowing what to do about the problem of Maris.
The stone had given him rest. It had given him nothing else.
Whatever had happened to him hadn’t happened to a part he could argue with.
He stayed on the gable through the dusk, and the next night, and did not go inside until the work day began.
He felt her arrive later that morning the way he always felt her arrive, before he saw her or heard her.
A change in the pressure of the day, a pull low in his chest turning him towards the garden like a needle towards north.
He was standing at the tall windows of his study when it hit him, and he made himself not look.
He made himself turn back to the desk instead, to the computer screen and the drawings and the spreadsheets that were his actual life, the life that had been enough until Maris Calder appeared on his doorstep.
The Brampton development in Wilmington. Forty units, a schedule slipping, and a subcontractor over budget on the framing.
All real problems with real answers. He sat down and opened the framing figures and read them.
Then he made himself read them again, because they hadn’t penetrated the first time.
He picked up the phone. He put it down. He looked at the subcontractor’s numbers and could not for the life of him make them mean anything.
Because through the tall window, below in the rose garden, a small figure was on her knees in the beds she’d cleared, and the sun was in her hair.
And the pull in his chest took hold of him and tugged.
He got up and walked to the far side of the room, where he couldn’t see the window. He stood facing a wall of his own restored paneling like a child sent to stand in the corner.
Enough. This is a business day. I have a company to run.