2. Chapter 2
Bram
"Try it and see how it goes.”
The sharp words, whispered in a tone sweet as pie filling, come from a woman barely five foot three standing on a frosted sidewalk, hugging her purse like a shield. Her brown eyes shine and her face is red, but there’s no mistaking her stance.
She thinks she won. I can tell, because her chin is up and her weight is already shifting toward home, like she'll fire the shot and storm away down the harbor. Like she’s going to leave me standing here to think about what I said.
That's the plan. Say the outrageous thing, walk off, win.
I don't move.
Being made from stone has its advantages. Nobody can see when a woman you've spent a year trying not to want smiles at you like that and shifts something you thought you had locked down. That’s exactly what happens every time I look at Rory Hale.
A year of standing very still teaches you things.
You learn how to watch a warm, beautiful woman with curves made for sin walk into the staff room every morning already smiling, already talking, far too cheerful for this early in the morning, and pretend the sight of her doesn't improve the room anyway.
You learn how to grunt at her good mornings and pretend not to notice the coffee she brings during playoff week, because taking it would put your talons an inch from her fingers.
People flinch from cold stone. I learned that young. After a while, you stop trying to touch people at all.
I have spent twelve months pretending I don't want to touch her.
Then she dares me, on an empty street, with chocolate she put there still smeared across my slacks. Right next to my still pulsing, aching cock. A cock she brushed with those small, dainty fingers.
A cock that, if I’m being entirely honest, has started taking decisions for me right now. What can I say? I may be made of stone, but I’m still a man.
I step in. Once. Deliberate. Frost creaks under my boot, the streetlamp drops behind my shoulders, and her whole face tips back to hold my gaze. Defiance blaze in those warm, big eyes, but something else as well. Something infinitely more dangerous.
This close, I can feel her the warmth of her body, the softness of her breath fogging in the air.
That's the loudest thing about her, her warmth. The cold comes off the harbor in sheets. The frost sits on the sidewalk, the parked cars are stone-temperature, my temperature. The whole street is November straight through. And she stands in the middle of it putting out heat like a flame.
I always know where she is in a room just by the heat signature she sends like a beacon. I never let myself wonder why, partly because I don’t want to know and partly because I’m afraid of what I’ll do if I think about her too hard.
"Is that a challenge?" My voice comes out low and husky, grating around the edges like gravel. It does that around her. I try not to think about that either.
Her breath fogs between us. She doesn't step back.
Shit. This feels way too good.
"Careful when “challenging a gargoyle,” I say, "We tend to take these things literally."
She pushes her lower lip out in a slow, exaggerated pout and looks up at me through her lashes, somehow managing to make defiance look indecent. My cock gives another hard pulse against my slacks. She has to know what she’s doing to me. Nobody looks at a man like that by accident.
"Oh no." Nothing in her tone is scared. If anything, she sounds even more bratty. "The big scary gargoyle takes me literally. What's the worst that happens, you loom at me? You've been looming at me for a year, Coach. I've had the deluxe looming package. I'm immune."
Immune. She's standing in my shadow on a frozen sidewalk with her heart going hard enough that I can hear it, an inch of fog between her mouth and my sternum, calling herself immune. She’s full of it.
My gaze drops to her mouth and stays there. Red lipstick. Soft lips. That provocative little pout still lingering at the corners. My cock jerks so hard I have to clench my jaw, and every thought in my head narrows down to one: I want that mouth under mine. Now.
"That smart mouth," I say, "is going to get you into trouble."
"Promises, promises." Her lipstick is red.
It has survived the pie, the walkout, the shriek when I landed in front of her, all of it, sitting on her mouth like a dare with a wax finish.
This close, she smells like chocolate and vanilla, plus a lightly floral perfume that plays with my sanity like guitar strings.
"You want to stop me from arguing with you?
Nothing short of kissing me silly is going to shut me up, so unless you've got the... "
I kiss her.
I take her jaw in my hand and I press my mouth to her lush, soft lips.
I don’t touch many people. So this first contact feels like a detonation.
I go rigid. Every muscle locks and my wings snap open in a sharp, involuntary flare. For one humiliating second, I can do nothing but stand there with my mouth on hers.
She doesn't flinch.
Her mouth is soft and blazing warm against mine, coffee, vanilla and chocolate, and instead of pulling back from how cold I am, she leans into it. She comes up onto her toes, and puts her hands on me. One on my chest. One curling around the side of my neck.
Her thumb strokes once along my jaw and my entire stone body instantly warms.
Under her palm, under her mouth, heat spreads through my granite the way it does when a gargoyle in in thrall to the strongest of emotions.
When fury or terror gets deep enough to light the core of us.
But this time, it's not fury that burns through me. It’s not terror, either, although it comes close.
It’s not even a feeling I have a world for.
I don’t think I can formulate a single rational thought in my state, anyway.
I make a sound against her mouth that I will deny to my grave, low in the chest, half growl, and she answers it with a small hum of pure satisfaction, smug even now, smug with her hands full of gargoyle.
I stop being careful. Heck, I stop being the civilized, reasonable man I that I am. That I’ve always been.
I wrap an arm around her waist and lift her into the kiss, off her heels, her toes leaving the ground,. She grabs my shoulders and kisses me back like this is an argument and she intends to win it. It's the same thing she does with words.
Push, escalate, never retreat. Fuck if it’s the sexiest thing I’ve ever experienced.
I kiss her slower, deeper, until the smug little hum breaks into something helpless.
Good. I'm not going down alone.
A year of this woman. Her heels coming down the athletics wing, click-click-click past my office window while I pretend to concentrate on game film.
Her hands flying when she talks in the staff room.
The way she greets half the building by name and somehow makes each person sound like the one she was hoping to see.
I told myself that was simply Rory. Warm with everyone. Nothing meant for me.
It doesn't feel like nothing now.
I don't know how long I keep her up there. Long enough for her fingers to find the base of my neck and the edge of my collar. Long enough for the cold to stop existing anywhere she's touching me. Long enough to know that putting her down is going to hurt.
She pulls back first. Barely. An inch of fogged air, her forehead tipped against my chin, both of us breathing like we just ran a marathon.
And the warmth stays.
Her mouth leaves mine, but the heat doesn't. It remains in my lips, in my jaw where her thumb traced, in my chest under her palm. Stone doesn't hold a human touch like this. I know that much.
The warmth is spreading, slow and quiet, all the way out to my wingtips.
There are stories about fated mates. Old gargoyles gathered around holiday tables, talking late into their third glass of something strong. Going on about knowing from a single touch, about a warmth that reaches out and fill a gargoyle’s body, never to dim away.
No. Those are just stories.
This is a kiss. A very good kiss, sure, but there's no reason for it to be anything else.
Except the warmth isn't fading.
I don't trust it. I don't trust anything that feels this good this quickly. But I could map every place she touched me with my eyes shut.
"Huh," she says, against my chin. Her voice has gone smoky and unsteady and about an octave below her staff-room register. "So that's what finally shuts me up. Somebody should've told the faculty."
Still mouthy. Kissed half stupid, dangling off a gargoyle's arm a foot off the ground, and still mouthy.
If I put her down and say goodnight, tomorrow we can go back to the copier and the staff room and pretend this was one strange Sunday night.
I don't want to. As much as I try to convince myself that it would be for the best, I just can’t.
"Have you flown before?" I ask.
She blinks up at me. Lipstick wrecked, finally. I did that, and the satisfaction that rises inside my chest is not civilized. Not civilized at all.
“What?"
"Flying." I set her down on her heels, slow, and keep a hand at her waist until she's steady on the frost. The street is empty in both directions, the diner’s gold windows behind us. "Have you ever flown with someone?"
"No." A small crease starts between her brows. "Unless you count the middle seat to Boston. Why?"
Because I want her in my nest. Because the night sky over this bay is the one thing I've never shared with anyone, and suddenly I want her up there with me.
"You have a choice." Gravel grumbles in my throat, low, steadier than I feel. "I can walk you home, say goodnight, and tomorrow this is whatever you want it to be."
"Or?"
"Or I fly you to mine.”
The words land and the entire universe goes very quiet. Somewhere behind me the harbor slaps at the pilings. My wings stay tight behind me while I wait.
She stares up at me.
The pause can't be more than a few seconds, but I feel every one of them.
Then Rory Hale steps in, reaches up, and hooks both hands behind my neck. Warm palms flat on my stone, like it's nothing, like it's a habit already.
"Fly, boy."
The laugh that comes out of me is short and rough and involuntary, the first one in longer than I care to remember.
Boy, she called me. I’m seven feet tall of granite, and she says it like she's calling a goddamned Golden retriever.
I lift her, one arm under her knees, one across her back, her purse crushed between us and her arms tightening around my neck, and she weighs nothing. Every inch of her is warm through my shirt, bright against the November cold.
My wings open all the way. Full spread, slate and striation, streetlamp light through the membranes, and I take one deep breath of frosty, salty air.
"Hold on."
She holds on.
I drop, coil, and launch, and the sidewalk lets us go with a crack of displaced air that rolls down the harbor like Sunday-night thunder. She makes a sound against my neck that starts as a shriek and comes out the other side as a whoop, and her arms clamp down hard around me.
Three wingbeats and the streetlamps are below us.
Five and the Wandering Gnome is a gold postage stamp on a black street, the whole town shrinking into a scatter of window-lights around the dark curve of the bay.
The water spreads out under us, black glass with the moon smashed across it, and the air up here is clean and cold enough to make her teeth chatter.
She doesn’t though. She’s all wrapped in warmth, because she's pressed against my chest with her face tucked under my jaw, laughing, actually laughing.
This is mine. The sky, the bay, the silence between wingbeats. For eight years I've flown over this water alone and never thought I was missing anyone beside me.
Five wingbeats with Rory laughing against my throat proves otherwise.