They were partners. Equals. She had earned the right to face danger how she saw fit. All he cared was that she allowed him to stand by her side.
“All right.” She held up her hands. “I’m not getting between two potentates.”
One potentate and one… He didn’t really know how to classify himself. As her assistant? The first member of her team? He would have to ask her, after the wedding, where she saw him fitting into that part of her life.
He paid her a tight smile for the joke. “Call me when the blood tests come back.”
Cocking her head to one side, she studied him. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“You’ve read Grier’s file.” He kept a hard copy himself, which he manually updated with notes that would never see the light of day, but the original had been downloaded from the cleaners’ database. They kept files on each member of every supernatural race. Gilly wouldn’t have contacted him before reading it for herself. “You must be thinking the same.”
“Volkov.”
“Yes,” he agreed, then checked his watch. “I should go if I want to catch the florist before he closes for lunch.”
A quick chat with the owner at Flower Power, and then Linus could return home and climb into a warm bed with Grier. She hated waking alone, so he did his best to keep his daytime ramblings to a minimum.
Exiting the house, he dialed up his mother’s car service, hating to waste time on ceremony.
While he waited, he leaned against the siding to comfort a distraught Woolly.
“This will all be over soon,” he assured her, but the curtains behind him rustled on a sigh. “It’s not your fault Lethe got hurt. We all missed it.” That had been the point, to slide it past their guard but ensure it would be found sooner rather than later. “We’ll be more careful going forward.”
The nearest light flashed, but it was hard to catch the meaning with the sun overhead.
“I have to visit River Street.” He straightened with reluctance. The hustle of strangers within her preyed on her insecurities, and he regretted the necessity of leaving. “I’ll go to Lethe’s from there, but Grier and I will both be home tonight.”
Home.
The simple word resonated with enough force to shatter him. His mother loved him, and his father had too, but the home where he grew up was nothing like this one. Not because Woolly was a thinking, feeling being, but because Grier kept her full of laughter and love the likes of which he had never experienced until she opened her heart to him. Maud had done her best by Grier, but she was a Society Dame to the bone. Grier was… More genuine. More real. More everything.
She was his everything for certain.
The planks beneath his feet bucked, shooing him off the porch, and he got the message. The sooner he left, the sooner he could return. With Grier.
The standard-issue crimson sedan arrived before he reached the gate, but that was to be expected for the premium rates charged to the Lyceum for the vehicle’s use. The driver hopped out and rounded the car, and Linus allowed him to open the door and then close it after he settled on the backseat. He hated the show, the attention it brought to him, but spectacle was the price of being Clarice Woolworth Lawson’s son.
“Where to, sir?”
“Flower Power on River Street.”
His eyebrows twitched higher up his forehead, which was peculiar considering Morrison took care to maintain a mask of professional boredom even during the most trying circumstances.
“Something the matter?”
“There’s a young man running behind us, waving his arms. I believe he’s yelling stop.” He jerked his chin toward the rearview mirror. “Should I?”
The avowal, and what it portended, had wiped his young escort from Linus’s thoughts. It was for the best that he stay behind, considering the florist was the origin of the contaminated bouquet. Ty was young by gwyllgi standards, and he would be more susceptible than most. Those were the excuses he made to Ty when he texted him orders to return home.
“No.” He waved him on. “Keep going.”
Behind them, Ty stopped in his tracks, eyes on his phone, but he didn’t look happy about the dismissal.
Morrison continued on, his expression once again a solemn mask, until they arrived at their destination. He parked in front of the florist, and while Linus waited to be released from the confines of the car, he admitted, at least to himself, that he missed the freedom Atlanta had given him. Savannah came with the bonds of expectation, tradition, and familial responsibilities that grew suffocating at times.
However, Savannah also came with Grier.
For her, he would fold himself behind the mask of Scion Lawson and play dutiful son in public. Soon he would be married, and the only expectations a Society husband was truly expected to meet were his wife’s.
A soft laugh took Linus by surprise, and Morrison flicked his gaze into the rearview mirror before returning it to the front windshield.
Grier would have her fingers beneath any and all of his masks, prying them off his face for good. Her insistence she see him, the truth of him, made it harder to push back the howling abyss that swirled through his thoughts as his power coiled beneath his skin, but she was his light in the dark, and she would never allow him to get lost as he had in the beginning.
“This won’t take long.” Linus straightened his jacket. “You can circle around. Once ought to do it.”
River Street’s cobbled road made driving jarring. There were also the trolley tracks and trolleylike tour buses to consider. Pedestrian congestion, especially now as it drew closer to lunch, would keep Morrison mired in standstill traffic for a while, giving Linus plenty of time to conduct his interview.
Flower Power was impossible to miss. The facade blended in with its neighbors, but a tie-dye painting covered every inch of its storefront window in swirling reds, yellows, and oranges. On this scale, the name was easier to read, but he couldn’t fathom why anyone would risk a migraine to enter the shop.
A bell above the door tinkled when he did just that. The tie-dye motif continued on all four walls, but thankfully those were mostly covered floor to ceiling with simple black plant stands and flowering stock.
The air smelled green, not floral, but lush. Sprays of flowering white dogwood branches leaned against tubs overflowing with cupped and double roses. Magnolia blossoms rested in bins, and a large ceramic planter held peonies, azaleas, sweet peas, and hydrangeas in soft colors. Water-filled bins stuffed the aisles, and arrangements in the making littered a large workspace behind the counter, further tickling the back of his mind.
“Can I help you?” An older gentleman wielding a hose stepped from behind a display of live plants. His shirt matched the theme, but a dark-green smock made looking at him easier. “We’re having a ten percent off sale.” He gestured around his shop to the eye-popping signs. “You’ll have to forgive the mess. I’m prepping for a big wedding, and the delivery truck just left.”
“The Woolworth-Lawson wedding,” Linus said, the shop name finally gelling for him.
“That’s it.” He smiled wide. “The bride is a sweet little thing, wanted a theme to make her mother proud. That’s what she said. It’s country garden, if you can’t tell.” He laughed, clearly in his element. “You must have seen a notice in the papers.”