The mention of Paula made her pensive, but not especially upset. “Were you—in love with her?” she asked cautiously.
“We loved each other,” Tyr said, ignoring his griffin doing the mental equivalent of snapping its beak in his ear to get him to shut up. No good would come of starting his life with Cela, whatever life they could have with the tattoos’ magical interference, on a platform of lies; he’d learned that lesson with Paula, and learned it well. “Whether we wereinlove, that’s hard to say after all these years. I didn’t really have anything to compare it to. I don’t think either of us did.”
But now he did, and, he could only assume, so did Paula: the all-encompassing, overwhelming feeling of meeting your mate and knowing they were the one meant for you. The look that he had seen in Paula and her mate Dan’s eyes when they looked at each other—shutting out the world, nothing in it but the two of them—was how he felt around Cela. He knew now what they had been feeling, and it was just as marvelous as he had thought.
He hoped Cela felt it too. From the intense looks she sometimes shot him from under those demurely lowered lashes, he suspected she did.
She seemed to be waiting for the rest of his answer.
“But we were close,” he said, committed to honesty. “In all the ways that two people can be. We had two kids together. I regret a lot of what I did when I was married to Paula?—”
Cela flinched. “What sort of things?”
He could have kicked himself. That’s right, she had been bonded against her will to a guy who had kicked her off the island without a second thought for the welfare of Cela or her—their—kids. Once again, Tyr was possessed of a wholehearted urge to go beat the jerk to within an inch of his life.
“Lying to her about being a griffin was the main thing. I couldn’t tell her because of the tattoo, not outright, but Iknow there were better ways I could have handled it—with her and with the enforcers. I ended up imprisoned on Griffin Island for years, and then I was a fugitive. I wanted to keep her and the kids safe. Instead I hurt them in ways I can never make right.”
Cela’s body language had grown less tense and anxious throughout this speech, though Tyr wished he’d planned it a little better and wasn’t having this talk in the middle of the ladies’ underwear section of Big Mart.
“It seems like you’re trying to make it right,” she said quietly, glancing up at him.
“Trying is the operative word.”
But he felt a little lighter for having told her, a little more relaxed himself. As he looked around, abruptly something in the women’s accessories at the edge of the underwear section caught his eye. He pushed the cart over to it.
“At least let me buy you just one nice thing. I know you have clothes to wear, and necessities.” He nodded to the contents of the cart, to which she had surreptitiously added a practical cotton sports bra. “But let me get you this as a welcome-to-Autumn-Grove present.”
He pulled down a scarf, shimmering and creamy, patterned with pale green roses that matched her eyes. When he looped it gently around her neck, careful not to touch the graceful curve of her neck, it set off her silvery hair and startling seafoam eyes. Cela fingered it cautiously, touching exactly where his fingers had touched, as if she wished they were still resting on it.
“It’s soft,” she said uncertainly.
Tyr nodded toward one of the small mirrors scattered around the accessory section. “See for yourself.”
Cela peeked into a mirror. Her face softened in delight. “Oooh.”
“It would be my very great pleasure to buy it for you.” Hedidn’t add that he was having to all but sit on his griffin to stop it from making him swipe the entire rack of scarves into the cart.
She carefully unlooped it, rolled it up, and placed it on top of a pile of baby food jars and onesies. “This would make me very happy,” she said, looking at Tyr with warm green eyes. “Thank you.”
It felt almost as if shehadtouched him in that moment—hugged him, maybe. He felt warm all the way to the checkout line, and even the staggering charge on his credit card didn’t quite bring him down from walking on air.
It did remind him, though, that if he was going to support Cela and her children as well as himself, at least until she got her feet under herself, he was going to need to get the greenhouse up and running as a viable business.
CELA
The next fewdays settled into a strangely comfortable routine. Cela slept in the downstairs bedroom with the twins. Tyr taught her to use the appliances and showed her where everything was stored. The urge to touch him was a constant background ache, but both of them got much better at moving around each other without brushing together, even in the close confines of the kitchen.
On the second day after their shopping trip, a cheerful, perky woman showed up who Tyr introduced to her as Paula’s friend Gaby Ruger. Gaby brought a car full of her three small children’s old things, including a collapsible playpen and a crib, along with some more clothes and toys.
Tyr spent most of his time out in the yard, working to clean up and restore the broken-down outbuildings. He had explained to her that it was a business that sold plants, and it was going to be his business to make money, but first he had to get it up and running.
Cela was delighted with this, but in the meantime, she wished she didn’t feel so much like an anchor dragging on Tyr’s life. She tried to make herself useful by cleaning thehouse from top to bottom, along the way—as Tyr had mentioned earlier—discovering a great deal of dusty old belongings that Tyr said had come with the house. These she left alone for him to look through later. She had plenty to do cleaning up after the kids, though they were a little easier to take care of now that they spent most of their time in their shifted forms and didn’t need to be carried everywhere.
But she neededmore. She tried helping out in the greenhouses, while the children napped in the playpen nearby. It was pleasant though messy work, banging nails into broken-down tables, collecting scattered and broken pots to toss into a large bin, putting up plastic panels that had fallen down from the greenhouses in storms. Tyr explained to her what it was going to look like and showed her some pictures on his phone.
“It used to be called the Tender Sprout, but I’m not sure I want to keep that.”
“Griffin’s Greenhouse,” she said promptly.
