Page 33 of A Fae’s Guide to Tactical Botany

His voice was distracted, and Mara was unaccountably offended. Was her leaving nothing to him, then? After all of their struggles? She huffed and bent to the cooler she’d placed within arm’s reach, selecting a can of the Bee-lini. Her victory wine. It felt deeply anticlimactic.

But then she felt something at her ankle. A touch so faint she might have thought it the wind. Yet it was not. It was him, his cautious, gentle hand. His fingers forming a careful circle, the barest caress of her skin.

“This is my favorite thing,” he said quietly. “The stars coming out in a place like this, where the skies are unpolluted.”

She swallowed. “Do you…still see two skies?” His fingers were warm, rough from use. She should kick his presumptuous hand away before he presumed more.

“Just one. That was a metaphorical plural. Or poetic.” He shrugged against the sand. “It sounds better. I don’t know.” He grinned weakly. “Maybe I’m just a fool, but I feel like she might care after all.”

“She?” What would it be like if he stroked his fingers up, touched her calf? She didn’t want him to, of course, but she wondered. And it would give her something to reject.

Disappointingly, he did not try. “The sky. Nox, or Nyx, or whatever you want to name the night.”

“The sky cares as little for you as I do,” Mara said, trying to sound forbidding. “I am leaving.”

His warm fingers tightened infinitesimally on her ankle, and then he released her. Perversely, she immediately missed his touch.

“Good night,” he said, turning his head in her direction. The lantern light made his eyes seem bluer.

“Good night,” she replied.

She stood there meeting his gaze for far too long before she turned and fled into her garden with her cool can of sweet mead.

At least you saved him, she thought fiercely. At least he is not dead at your hand.

But she could not quell her agitation.

What could she do about it?

Chapter twelve

Truce

Ethan was going to die.

It had been three days now since his ignominious injury, and he and Mara had settled into something of a routine. The morning after, she had grudgingly fetched him a few more necessities, including his armor rack and, thankfully, his portable camp toilet. She’d arranged them around his tent so that he could access everything without overly straining his injured ankle. And then, with a scathing farewell, she’d vanished into the ground like the Wicked Witch of the West.

And then returned every hour to check on him.

It was unnerving, how her hands could be gently replacing his bandages or wrapping his sprained ankle while her eyes were glaring daggers at him. And meanwhile, she spoke as little as possible, replying to his jokes and conversational gambits with dry mockery and occasional reluctant laughs. She helped him change into clean clothes and inspected the various bruises that had bloomed overnight all over his body, a testament to his struggles, with no apparent embarrassment even when he was down to his boxers. And she deflected his attempts at flirtation—wisely made when he was not down to his boxers—deftly and firmly, whisking herself away whenever he asked anything remotely personal.

But then there were moments he would catch her looking at him with an expression that he wanted to define as hunger, her green eyes intense and… He couldn’t think of a word that described them, actually. Inhuman seemed rude; magical was too cliché. But they were somehow other, not of his world, and they entranced him, even though he knew there wasn’t any magic involved at all. It was just her, the goddess-ish truth of her, and he was under her spell.

And god, he wanted her. He was going to die from wanting her. Just expire on the sand, leaving his body to be eaten by bobcats and his bones to be bleached by the sun. Here Lies Ethan, Victim of His Own Hubris.

It wasn’t only her lush body or the symmetry of her face, the flow of her hair or the earthy green-dappled brown of her skin. It was the way she moved, entirely lacking in both self-consciousness and coyness. She did not care if her movements were beautiful or ungainly, though every action held a natural, earthy grace. Her expression was remarkably still at rest, but expressive and unmasked when she laughed or smiled or scowled. She seemed entirely without artifice when she was speaking to him.

And when she did not want to speak to him, when his questions pushed too far or he flirted too overtly, her face and her body closed, impenetrable as a fortress.

She was like a bud refusing to bloom. Not a rosebud—never roses. Roses were too common for Mara, too commercial. An orchid cactus, perhaps, or a night-blooming cereus. A flower whose blooming would mandate a celebration.

He wanted desperately to make her bloom. To see how her mobile, expressive face looked softened by real affection, brightened by a true smile. Heated by desire. He wanted her gasps and her cries, his name on her lips, her gentle, healing touch turned to passionate caresses.

She would never give them to him. He knew that. She despised him.

But he wanted her nonetheless. Yearned for her like the desert yearned for the monsoon rains, like plants yearned for the sun, inevitable and irresistible, helpless before their need for sustenance. When she appeared, he turned to her like a magnet, unable to look away from her until she was gone and he had to settle for the stars, for the sky, for the desert that had always been the home of his heart. For the few mundane entertainments he’d brought on a research trip, which was not a lot. Especially with his phone long out of charge. He could ask Mara to plug it into his generator, but it was a waste of time. There were only so many times he could read the field guide to invasive plants of the Sonoran Desert or his own research notes. And he didn’t want to read them.

All he wanted was to look at Mara, and when she was gone, all he wanted was to remember her—every last snippy insult and eyeroll.