Chapter 15
The coffee had gone lukewarm in Garrick’s hand by the time she came through the gate, and he found he didn’t much care.
He’d taken to standing by the sundial at the head of the rose garden every morning with two mugs and no reason he was willing to say aloud.
It had become a habit between them without either of them naming it.
She’d step through the gate with the morning light gilding her face, and he’d hand her the coffee.
She’d wrap both hands around it and make a low satisfied sound into the steam that did unreasonable things to a male before he’d even had his first cup.
“You made it strong today,” she said, and drank, and closed her eyes.
“You said it was weak yesterday.”
“I said it was civilized yesterday. You didn’t need to take it as a challenge.
” She opened her eyes and squinted up at him over the rim of the mug, and there it was again.
The sheer pleasure of her being here in his garden, first thing.
Dirt already ground into the knees of her work pants and her hair half out of its tie.
Looking at him like he was a fixed point in her morning.
Nobody had looked at him like a fixed point in a very long time.
He’d forgotten a male could get used to it in the space of a week and then not be able to imagine the mornings any other way.
This was the fifth morning. He was keeping count, which was the sort of thing he’d have found faintly embarrassing in another male.
The days had settled into a rhythm so easy it made him suspicious of it, the way he was suspicious of a wall that had held too long without a crack.
She arrived. He brought coffee. She worked in the gardens and he watched her for as long as he could justify before the business of Stonehaven Construction dragged him back inside to his study.
He’d sit at the desk with the contracts and the bids and the quarterly numbers spread out in front of him and get about half of it done.
Because he could hear her out there, the scrape of the spade, the snip of the shears, and once in a while a burst of tuneless humming she didn’t know she was doing.
The sound of another living person, of that particular person, moving around in the ruin of his family’s grounds untangled something in his chest that he hadn’t known was knotted.
He stayed to help when he could make the time. He made the time more often than the numbers strictly allowed.
The second morning he’d kissed her good morning.
He’d meant it to be a small thing. A casual brush of the mouth before the working day.
He should have known better. The heat that had ignited in her kitchen hadn’t cooled at all in the days between.
It had only been banked, waiting, and the moment his mouth found hers it flared straight back up as if no time had passed.
He’d had her backed against the stone balustrade at the edge of the terrace before he’d registered moving, her fingers knotted in his shirt and her leg hooked around the back of his.
His hand had found the warm bare skin of her waist under her shirt with startling speed and was headed north with a great deal of intent.
His thumb had just brushed the underside of her breast when his phone went off in his pocket.
Bellucci, the site foreman. Something about a crane permit.
He had answered it with his voice as steady as a table and his other hand still under her shirt and Maris laughing silently against his throat.
Afterwards they’d stood there breathing hard and looked at each other and mutually, wordlessly, agreed that they were going to have to be more careful than that.
They had tried. It hadn’t always worked. But they’d managed to keep the mornings mostly to good morning and coffee and the occasional stolen kiss that didn’t get all the way out of hand. Which was, he told himself, a triumph of discipline.
He didn’t examine too closely how badly he wanted it to get out of hand.
“Bellucci again?” she asked now, because his phone had buzzed against the sundial where he’d set it.
“The site.” He glanced at it. Not urgent. “The Asheville job. They found rot in a joist we thought was sound.”
“Bad?”
“Manageable.” He pocketed the phone. Manageable.
That was the word for most of his life, or it had been.
Everything a matter of identifying the fault and correcting it.
He looked at her drinking his coffee in his garden with her hair coming down and understood that she did not fall under manageable at all.
He was going to have to make his peace with that.
Toby didn’t come every afternoon. Sometimes he was at Dot’s grandmother’s.
Sometimes Maris had the boy at the nursery with her because Junie was off.
But on the afternoons he did come, Garrick found himself rearranging his entire day around it, and he’d stopped fighting the impulse somewhere around the third time it happened.
The boy had questions. Garrick had answers, or he had honest admissions that he didn’t know, which Toby seemed to find nearly as satisfying.
They’d rehung a shutter together on the east wing.
They’d sorted a whole box of old iron fittings by size and function, Toby’s small serious hands laying each piece in its place.
And Garrick had watched the boy’s careful reserve loosen a little more each afternoon.
Watched him laugh a beat quicker. Watched him forget to say sir and then not remember to be embarrassed about forgetting.
It shouldn’t have mattered so much. It mattered a great deal.
That was the part that unsettled him. Not the wanting Maris—he understood wanting, even wanting like this, wanting so much it was painful.
This was the other thing. He’d catch himself standing at the study window watching the boy run through the gate, and something would go hard and protective in his chest. A certainty that anything that came at either of them would have to come through him first. He hadn’t asked for it.
He didn’t know what to do with it. He was a male who solved problems, and this wasn’t a problem, it was a state.
He had no schematic for it and no idea how to make it stop, and increasingly no wish to.
Twice that week he’d found himself standing in front of the closed door at the end of the west corridor.
He hadn’t gone in. He’d stood there both times in the dusty dimness with his hand not quite on the dull brass handle, and both times he’d turned and walked back the way he’d come.
He’d opened that door once, the first time he’d come back, and never since then.
For years he’d simply left it closed, the way he’d close a wall over a crack he didn’t want to price.
He didn’t want to think about why he kept walking down that corridor now. He knew, and he didn’t want to.
At the end of the week they stayed for supper.
It hadn’t been planned. It had simply gotten late, and Maris had straightened up from the last of the border with her hand pressed to the small of her back.
Then Toby had asked, with the new confidence that still caught Garrick square in the chest every time, whether Mr. Garrick had anything to eat because he was starving.
Garrick had said yes before Maris could gather up a polite refusal, and that had been that.
He’d cooked. He was competent at it, the way he was competent at most things he’d decided to be competent at.
There’d been a decent piece of fish, roast potatoes, a heap of roasted vegetables, and bread Maris had commandeered his kitchen to warm.
They’d eaten at the long scarred table in the kitchen because the dining room was still full of drop cloths.
And the whole time the house had done something around them that it had not done in twenty years.
It had filled up. The cold high-ceilinged rooms of Stonehaven with their dark windows had been replaced by one bright warm one filled with the scent of food and a five-year-old explaining the entire hierarchy of the vehicles at a construction site.
He sat at the head of his table and felt the house settle around the three of them like something exhaling.
Lived in. That was the word. He’d spent two years and a fortune restoring the bones of the place and it had never once felt lived in. Not until a woman put a loaf of bread in his oven and a boy left a smear of butter on his hundred-year-old table.
Afterwards they’d gone through to the front room where he’d gotten a fire going, and Toby had made it about twenty minutes before the day caught up with him.
One moment he was cross-legged on the hearth rug with a book.
The next he’d tipped sideways against the leg of the sofa, mouth open, dead to the world, one hand still curled around the corner of the page.
Maris had moved to gather him up and Garrick had said quietly, “Leave him. He’s fine,” and she had.
She’d tucked a pillow under the sleeping boy and covered him with a blanket, then sat back on the sofa, and he had sat down beside her.
The fire crackled in the hearth, and Toby breathed slow and even on the rug, the house peaceful around them.
“Does Toby take after his father?” he asked, watching the boy sleep.
“A little,” she said, her voice pitched low enough not to carry to the sleeping boy. “In personality more than looks, which his grandparents aren’t thrilled about. They would have preferred a mirror image. I don’t think they remember any more that Jeff wasn’t the perfect son they’ve made him into.”
“No?”
“No. He studied horticulture instead of business, got someone with no pedigree pregnant, and then insisted on marrying her.” Her voice had gone dry, not quite bitter but headed there.
“They sound terrible.”