Page 7 of Coached By the Grumpy Gargoyle

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.

Chapter 3

Rory

I am kissing a gargoyle three hundred feet above Saltford Bay, and somehow he is still flying.

His mouth is on mine, his eyes are mostly closed, and we are very high over some very cold water. None of that seems to concern him. His wingbeats keep rolling through his body, steady and powerful, while he kisses me like he could do both forever.

I have no idea how. I find that I don’t care.

I've gone completely crazy. Somewhere below us is the town where I am Ms. Hale, licensed professional, owner of color-coded files and one firm, sensible rule about dating coworkers.

Thing is, Ms. Hale is not on this flight. Twenty-six years of little miss perfect, always careful, always reasonable, always earning it are out the literal window. Tonight, for once in my life, I am going to do exactly what I want in the exact moment I want it.

And what I want is currently holding me like I weigh nothing and kissing me like it's his second language.

The wind roars past. His arms don't move an inch. I knot my fingers into his collar and kiss him back harder, and I feel it when we start to descend, my stomach going weightless, his wings tilting us down through the dark.

We land on a porch with one soft boom of displaced air, his knees absorbing it so smoothly I barely feel the impact. I get a two-second impression of a nice-looking little Cape Cod, cedar shingles silver in the moonlight, white trim, woods crowding close on every side, before his mouth leaves mine and finds my neck.

"Door," I manage.

"Working on it." His voice is pure gravel against my throat. He shifts me to one arm, holding me there like it's nothing, and unlocks the door without lifting his mouth from my neck.

Inside smells like cedar and woodsmoke and that distinct mineral scent of rocks. That's about as much attention as the house gets. He carries me down a hallway and I get my coat off one shoulder before I give up and he peels it off me and it lands somewhere behind us. My purse goes with it. His shirt requires teamwork, careful maneuvering around his wings until a seam gives with a rip neither of us bothers to acknowledge. My shoes drop one at a time, little punctuation marks on the floorboards. He never bumps me into a single wall or doorframe, and then his hands find the zipper of my skirt and I stop noticing the house entirely.

By the time we reach the stairs I've lost the skirt. By the top of them, the tights, which do not survive and honestly were never going to. He walks me backward into a bedroom that runs the whole length of the house, rafters overhead, moonlight coming through wide glass doors and lying across the floor in long silver bars. The air in here is genuinely cold, much colder than any interior I’ve ever been in. As cold as outside.

I barely feel it. I press both palms flat against his bare chest and I feel the heat coming off of him in blazing waves.

"Your skin," I say. "It feels so hot."

Granite, warm as a sun-baked wall in July, under my hands. All that cold carved stone I've watched across a staff room for a year, and it's burning.

"You're the reason I'm on fire." He says it low and rough and completely without armor, and then his hand comes up and cradles the whole side of my face. Those green eyes move over me, standing there in the moonlight in nothing but my underwear and my wrecked lipstick, and he says, "You're beautiful. Perfect."

Oh no.

The words hit somewhere much more dangerous than lust. I do the only sensible thing available to a woman in my position, which is refuse to look at that too closely.

"So," I say, tipping my chin up at him, sweet as whipped cream. "Given up on your threat, Coach?"

His face changes.

The smirk arrives slow, one corner of that carved mouth curling, and it is not the staff-room deadpan and it is not the pie-dispute scowl. It is purely, gorgeously predatory, and every drop of blood I own reports for duty at once. A new kind of heat spreads between my legs and my clit pulses to life.

"No," he says.

The world rotates. One second I'm standing; the next I'm over his shoulder, upside down, with a truly premium view of the small of his back, yelping like I didn't spend the whole flight over asking for exactly this. Three unhurried steps. A bed comes into view beneath me, an enormous timber four-poster, and then I'm rotating again, and I land face-down across his thighs with my pulse trying to punch its way out of my throat.

His palm smooths over my backside, slow, taking its time. My underwear goes south with zero ceremony and then I’m completely bare.