Chapter 19
Maris woke in a bed the size of a small country, and for a moment she couldn’t place the ceiling.
High and coffered, edged with pristine plaster details.
Then the wing wrapped around her shifted a little, the membrane catching the morning light, and all of it came back in a warm rush.
The rug. The fire. The dinner they had murdered.
She lay still and let herself be happy for exactly as long as she dared.
She’d learned that trick a long time ago.
Happiness was real. It just didn’t always stay, so she held it the way she’d hold something she might have to set down.
She’d held Toby like that when he was a baby, so frightened of loving him as much as she did that the fear started eating the joy.
She was better now. It was still there, though, deep down and humming a warning.
Don’t get used to this.
She ignored the thought and slid one leg towards the edge of the bed. An arm came around her waist and brought her back before her foot found the floor.
“No.”
“I have to—”
“No.” Garrick tucked her against his chest, the wing folding closer, and put his mouth against the back of her shoulder. “It’s early.”
“It’s Sunday. Robin’s bringing Toby back after breakfast. What time do you think that is?”
“Later this morning.”
“You don’t know when Robin—”
“I know what time Eric gets moving with a teething pup.” He said it into her skin, unhurried, one huge hand spread possessively over her stomach, claws retracted. “You have time.”
She should have argued. Arguing was practically her cardio. But he was cool everywhere except where he’d been touching her, and his mouth was working along her shoulder in a way that made arguing a waste of a Sunday.
“You’re very affectionate for a male who communicates in four-word sentences.”
“I’m a male of many talents.”
“That was six words.”
“I’m improving.”
She laughed, and he made a low satisfied sound against her back that she felt more than heard. She turned over in his arms. He let her, watching her with grey eyes that hadn’t gone gold yet, still soft with sleep, and she reached up and ran her thumb along the point of one ear because she could.
Every muscle in him locked.
“Does that—”
“It’s fine.”
“You always say it’s fine.”
“It’s always fine when you do it.”
That was a dangerous sentence to say to a woman before coffee. She kissed him instead of answering, and he rolled her under him with his wings sweeping open across the enormous bed. For a while she forgot about Robin and the time and the warning altogether.
Then his phone went off on the nightstand.
He ignored it. It stopped. It started again.
He lifted his head, and the softness burned off his face like fog. “The board.”
“On a Sunday?”
“They don’t care when it comes to business.” He was already reaching for the nightstand. The change in him was something to watch. The male who’d refused to let her out of bed was gone in a breath, and his face had gone stern and cold again. “Fifteen minutes.”
“Take your call.” She was sliding out from under his wing already, and this time he let her go. “I need to be home before Robin sees me coming back and dies of happiness.”
He caught her wrist as she stood, and held it a second, his thumb moving on the inside of her arm.
“Tonight.”
“Toby will be home tonight.”
“I know.” He said it like that was the point, not the problem, and then he let go and answered the phone in a low flat register that had nothing to do with her at all.
She dressed in the hall so she wouldn’t distract him.
One boot was in the study. The other was halfway down the main stairs, which she could not account for.
There was a mark along her jaw where his chin had been against it, her hair was a catastrophe, and the gilt mirror in the front hall told her that she looked exactly like someone who’d had the kind of night she’d had.
“Well,” she said to her reflection. “What did you expect?”
She let herself out through the garden.
The gate stood open. Their gate now, she supposed. She went through it and around the greenhouses at the brisk, dignified walk of a woman who wanted to be somewhere before somebody else got there.
She lost by about ninety seconds.
Robin’s car was in the drive with the engine off, and Robin was sitting on the front step with Birdie on her lap, pointing something out to Toby in the flowerbed.
“Mama!”
He hit her at knee height. She caught him and breathed in the top of his head, which smelled of somebody else’s laundry soap and a whole small adventure she hadn’t been there for.
“Did you have fun?”
“Birdie can sit up.” He pulled back to look at her, wide-eyed with the size of it. “She can sit up and hold your finger and if you put a crumb in her hand she puts it in her mouth every single time.”
“Can she really?”
“She did it eleven times.” He held up both hands with the fingers spread and then folded one down, which was as close as he could get. “And she didn’t fall over once. Then she cried in the night and Eric walked her up and down and I heard it and I didn’t even mind.”
“That’s good of you.”
She straightened, and finally made herself look at Robin. Her friend was standing now, her gaze traveling Maris’s hair and jaw and the boot she’d shoved on wrong, and it took her less than two seconds to put it together. Her mouth curved.
“Well,” Robin said.
“Don’t.”
“Did I say anything?”
“You said well.”
“It’s a versatile word.” Robin shifted Birdie to the other hip. “Nice night?”
“I did some work at the mansion. It ran late.”
“Did it?”
“Robin.”
“You have a mark on your neck shaped like Delaware.”
She slapped her hand over her throat, even though it was too late to make a difference. Toby looked up with interest. “What’s Delaware? Is it a dog?”
“A very small state,” she said, “which we are not discussing. Go put your bag inside and wash your hands.”
He went as obediently as ever, and the second the door shut Robin gave up all pretense.
“You slept with Garrick!”
“I did not—”
“You absolutely did.” Robin’s face lit up. “You have a tuft of wool in your hair from the rug in the front room.”
She opened her mouth to deny it, then closed it again because there was no version of this she was going to win. Robin had dusted Garrick’s rooms every Tuesday for eleven months. She knew that rug.
“It’s all very new,” she said. “And I have no idea what it is yet, and if you tell Sylvie I will salt your garden.”
“You wouldn’t. You love my garden.”
“I’d do it grieving.”
Robin laughed, and then she softened, which was worse. She reached out and picked the offending tuft of wool out of Maris’s hair with gentle fingers.
“He’s a good one,” she said quietly. “Eric’s known him thirty years, and there aren’t many people he’d trust more.”
Her eyes went involuntarily to the open gate.
“I know,” she said quietly, and Robin smiled at her. “Yeah. I think you do.”
The door banged. Toby had washed his hands, which she could tell because his sleeves were soaked to the elbow. He had also used the interval to go on thinking, because he arrived with the momentum of a decision reached.
“Mama, I want a baby sister.”
Robin choked.
“Do you?” Maris asked, frantically trying to come up with an acceptable response.
“Birdie is a baby and she’s so good, and she laughs when you make the face.” He demonstrated the face. It was alarming. “Dot has a baby sister and now I don’t have one and I would like one, please.”
“That isn’t really something you order, bug.”
“Where do you get them?”
Robin had turned away entirely and was looking at the flowerbed with her shoulders shaking.
“We’ll talk about it later,” she said, which was what her own mother had always said to her when she meant no, and Toby accepted it with the trust of a child who didn’t yet know the history of that phrase.
He nodded, satisfied to have lodged the request with the proper authority, and made the face at Birdie. Birdie laughed.
Robin wiped her eyes. “You are so doomed.”
“I know.”
“I won’t tell Sylvie, but I’m definitely going to tell Eric.” She hoisted the baby and headed for her car, still grinning. “For what it’s worth, it’s about time. This town has been holding its breath since that first newsletter.”
“The town really needs a hobby.”
“You’re the hobby, hon. Have you met Flora?”
Garrick came through the gate forty minutes later, showered and shaved, with the usual two coffees. Toby got to the door first and launched the baby-sister proposal at him before she could make it out of the kitchen.
“—and Dot has one and I don’t and I would like one, please,” Toby finished hopefully, looking up at Garrick with a totally serious face.
Garrick nodded equally seriously.
“That’s a decision for your mother.”
“She said we’ll talk about it.”
“Then you should talk about it.”
“Okay.” Toby eyed the coffees. “Are we going somewhere?”
Garrick looked at her over the top of her son’s head, a question in his eyes.
“Breakfast,” he said. “In town. If your mother wants.”
In town. Where there were people, and a tiny orc with a newsletter that had printed her name twice already. A woman with a tuft of wool in her hair walking in beside a gargoyle and her son was a public confession to anybody in Fairhaven with eyes.
Robin was already telling Eric. Sylvie would have it by noon whether Maris salted the garden or not. And the male in front of her didn’t want to keep it quiet.
“Get your good shoes,” she told Toby. “Not the muddy ones. I’ll go change. And brush my hair.”
Garrick’s eyes went briefly, warmly gold before settling back to grey. She took one of the coffees out of his hand before she headed into the bedroom. Their fingers touched, and neither of them pretended it was an accident.
The River Café had its windows steamed over and paper garlands of orange and black looped along the top of the glass, and the chalkboard out front promised pumpkin fritters, get them before the gnomes do.
Somebody had taped a cardboard skeleton to the door and dressed it, for some unknown reason, in a small flannel shirt.