Chapter 26
“Show me the water again.”
Ruggiero had a developer’s hands—soft, ringed, quick—and he tapped the survey where the seep line ran, the way a man taps a figure he suspects of lying to him.
Across the study, on the long oak table Garrick had cleared of everything else, the two site plans lay side by side.
Hollow Ridge on the left. The new parcel on the right.
“The seep’s here.” He moved one clawed finger along it.
“On the ridge, that’s a problem. Every foundation you pour sits above it, so you’re pumping and lining and monitoring for the life of the building, and one bad spring you’re on the front page for it.
” He drew the finger across to the right-hand plan.
“On the Riverstone parcel, the water’s downhill of everything you’d build.
It’s an amenity. You don’t fight it. You put a pond where it wants to be and sell the units around it for more. ”
Ruggiero grunted. He didn’t look convinced. He looked like a man who had been dragged out to a county he was tired of and wanted, above all, to leave without losing money.
“That’s geography,” he said. “I don’t pay for geography. Geography’s free. Talk to me about the numbers, Stonehaven. You told me eight weeks ago the ridge was the only site that worked. Now you’re telling me it doesn’t. One of you was lying and I’d like to know which so I know what I’m buying.”
“The first one,” Garrick said calmly.
Ruggiero blinked.
“I hadn’t looked at the alternate properly.
Also, most of the preliminary work we’ve done for Hollow Ridge is still valid.
” He turned the folder around and slid it across.
“Your building designs move. Your unit mix moves. The architecture, the branding, the vertical package—all of it transfers to Riverstone untouched. What dies is the geotech, the grading plan for that specific slope, and one survey. That’s it.
The loss is a third of what I’d anticipated. ”
“A third?”
“Yes. And the Riverstone parcel already has infrastructure in the ground.” He pulled out the second folder.
“A firm went bankrupt out there and left the bones behind. Graded pads. A stormwater system that’s oversized because they planned bigger than they could pay for.
A water main stubbed to the property line.
Somebody already spent the money you’d have spent, and then went under before they could enjoy it. You’d be buying it at pennies.”
Ruggiero was quiet, his soft fingers tapping the folder thoughtfully.
“So the alternate’s cheaper than the ridge?”
“Once you fold in what’s already in the ground? Yes.”
“You’re aware,” Ruggiero said slowly, “that you just talked me out of the deal you spent two months bidding.”
“I’m aware.”
“And you told your board that?”
“They didn’t take it well.”
By the window, Aidan made a sound that was almost a cough. He’d been leaning against the casement with his arms folded through the whole meeting, in his ranger’s green, doing an unconvincing impression of someone who was only there by accident.
Ruggiero caught it and turned. “And you. Remind me why the county’s got a park ranger in the room while I’m being told how to spend fourteen million dollars.”
“Because I’m the reason the ridge is a headline waiting to happen,” Aidan said cheerfully. “There’s a plant up there that only grows in a couple of places. You’d have found that out from a lawyer instead of from me, and lawyers cost more than I do.”
Ruggiero looked at him a long moment, then at Garrick, then down at the numbers. Garrick watched him run his own calculations.
“All right.” The developer sat back. “The Riverstone site. I’ll do it.
Not for the flower.” He said flower the way Fernando had said it on the board call, faintly amused, as if it were the punchline to a joke he didn’t need explained.
“I’ve got lawyers too. I’ll do it because the numbers work.
And because you showed me your hand, which either makes you a fool or the only builder in this county I can trust. I already know you’re not a fool. ”
“Thank you.”
“Now.” Ruggiero drummed his rings once. “The ridge. I hold a purchase option on it that runs another ninety days. If I let it lapse I forfeit the deposit and I look like a man who came into a small county, kicked up a fuss over some flower, and walked away sore.” He grimaced.
“I may want to build here again, and I don’t want that kind of reputation.
” He shrugged, and it was the shrug of a man solving a problem, not doing a kindness, which was exactly why Garrick believed it.
“So. I’ll assign the purchase option. At cost. It’s no use to me and I’d rather not read about myself in the paper. ”
Aidan straightened off the wall so fast his boots squeaked.
“Assign it to who?” the ranger said.
“I don’t care. Whoever wants a ridge with a weed on it.
That’s your problem, not mine.” Ruggiero was already gathering his coat.
“Have your people send mine the assignment. I’ll sign the Riverstone letter of intent tomorrow.
Stonehaven builds it.” He offered Garrick a hand, his grip firm despite the softness.
“You lost my confidence for about forty minutes and then you gave it back with interest. Don’t do that to me again. ”
“I’ll try not to.”
“You won’t succeed. You’re the type.” Ruggiero nodded to Aidan, ignored the flower one final time on principle, and let himself out.
The moment the front door boomed shut, Aidan spun around grinning from ear to ear.
“He’ll assign the option—” He was already pulling his phone out of his pocket.
“I’ve been talking to the Blue Ridge Land Trust all week, on the off chance.
They said if the option ever came loose they’d take the assignment, close on the purchase, and have a conservation easement recorded on the deed before the ink was dry.
Permanent.” He was grinning like a male who’d just been handed Christmas.
“It’s not fenced-off-for-now safe. It’s forever safe.
Nobody builds a thing up there ever again.
Not Ruggiero, not the next Ruggiero, not anybody.
” He reached whoever he was calling and turned towards the window, talking fast and low.
Forever safe.
He’d started this as a business proposal. Somewhere between a seep in the woods and a lily nobody had asked him to care about, it had become the work he was proudest of.
He found Maris in the conservatory an hour later, after Aidan had gone whooping off to sign papers with a land trust and the great house was quiet again.
She was on her knees at the long planting bed she’d been rebuilding, wrist-deep in the black soil, her hair coming loose, a smudge of dirt along her jaw.
She’d taken to working here while he was under.
He’d learned that. He’d learned it the only way a gargoyle could.
“It’s done,” he said from the doorway. “Ruggiero’s off the ridge. Building at Riverstone. And Aidan’s land trust is buying the ridge outright.” He watched her hands go still in the soil. “It’s protected. Permanently. Your lilies aren’t going anywhere. Ever.”
She sat back on her heels. Her face was full of relief and pride and something she hadn’t told him directly yet.
“You did that,” she said.
“You did. You dragged me up there and made me stand in the wet until I saw it.”
“Aidan said—” She hesitated, and he watched the pink rise over her cheekbones.
“Aidan said you put your own money behind moving it. Your name on the loss. That the board wouldn’t back you so you backed it yourself.
” She pushed a strand of hair off her face and left a fresh streak of dirt. “You didn’t tell me.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
He crossed the tile floor and lowered himself down beside her, folding seven feet of gargoyle into a sitting position at the edge of her planting bed. His wings settled against his back. He was quiet for a moment, choosing the three words he needed out of all the ones he didn’t.
“I heard you,” he said, and she went very still.
“This morning.” He didn’t look at the bed, or the glass, or anywhere but her. “When I was under. In the conservatory. I heard every word.”
She looked at him for a long moment with her eyes bright and swimming, and then she laughed—a soft, helpless sound—and dropped her forehead against his shoulder.
“Of course you did,” she said into his shirt. “But you couldn’t say anything, which was why I could say it—”
“I didn’t ask you to say it.” His hand came up, and he brushed the loose strand of hair back off her cheek with one carefully retracted claw. “You don’t have to say it again.”
She lifted her head and looked at him. Then she set her jaw the way she did before she dug in.
“The money frightened me,” she said. “I need you to know why, so you don’t think it was you.
” Her hand closed over his where it rested against her face.
“For six years, money meant Cornelia. It meant a garden I built for three years getting paved over the summer after I left. It meant being told, very politely and very kindly, that I wasn’t quite good enough for a family I never asked to join.
Money was how people decided things about my life without me in the room.
So when you sent that Bobcat—” She shook her head.
“I saw Cornelia. I looked at the best male I’ve ever known and I saw my mother-in-law. I was wrong.”
“Maris—”
“Let me finish, or I won’t get through it.
” She took a breath. “You’re not them. You put your name against a loss to save a flower nobody but Aidan and I care about, and then you didn’t tell me, because you didn’t save something I love to be thanked.
You just did it because it mattered to me.
” Her thumb moved over the back of his hand.
“That’s not Cornelia. That’s the opposite of Cornelia.
And I love you. I’ve loved you since the wall with the ferns, I think, when you were so concerned about safety and I misread it as you not liking the way it looked.
I love you, Garrick, and I said it to a rock this morning because I was too much of a coward to say it to your face, and now your face is right here.
” She lifted her chin. “I’m saying it to your face. On purpose.”
His eyes went gold. He felt them go and saw her smile when she saw them.
“Say it again,” he said quietly.
“I love you.”
His wings came open. He couldn’t have stopped them if the roof had been in the way.
He got a hand into her hair and one arm around her back and drew her up off her heels and into his lap, soil and all, and kissed her.
Not a careful kiss, but the one he hadn’t been able to give her while he sat listening to her promise a rock she was staying.
She responded with equal intensity, and the part of him that measured and rationed and kept everything standing went quiet for once and let him have the moment.
“Study,” he managed against her mouth, surrounded by glass walls. “Not here.”
“Then move faster.”
He carried her. It was easier than letting go of her long enough to make her walk, and she didn’t argue, which was how he knew she was just as far gone.
Maris Calder, who argued with him about everything, wound her legs around his waist and put her mouth on his throat instead.
He made it to the study in less than a minute.
The site plans still lay abandoned on the oak table and he swept them off it.
Fourteen million dollars of proposal hit the floor in a slither of paper and he didn’t spare it a thought.
He set her on the cleared table and got her out of the dirt-streaked shirt, and she got him out of his.
Then her small hands were on his chest, over the place where he knew she could feel the resonance.
The low deep hum that started whenever she touched him, and that he had never been able to hide from her.
“That’s the only part of you that never goes quiet,” she breathed, her palm over the sound. “Even when you’re in the stone. It’s quieter, but it’s still there.”
“Nobody else has ever put a hand on me to find out. But you’ll always know I’m there.”
“Good.”
His wings mantled around them both, closing them into a space that was just the two of them, and the hum in his chest, and her breath going ragged as he worked her out of the rest of her clothes.
He never got used to how small she was against him.
He was always half a thought away from being afraid of his strength with her, and she never let him be.
She tipped her head back and pulled him closer, asking wordlessly for more.
He gave it to her on the table in his study, with the afternoon coming gold through the tall windows and the wreck of the ridge proposal scattered across the floor.
One clawed hand splayed wide and gentle up the length of her spine.
The other braced against the oak beside her head, taking his weight.
She said his name, and then she stopped saying words at all.
The hum in his chest built into something that rattled the glass in the window frames.
For the length of it he was not a builder or a businessman or the last of a line of stone.
He was just a male, wholly and stupidly in love, holding on to the female he loved.
Afterwards she lay sprawled half across him where they’d slid down onto the rug, and he had his wing thrown over her like a blanket. Neither of them said anything. It was the best silence of his life.