Page 9 of A Fae’s Guide to Tactical Botany

“That’s weird,” he said, bending down to investigate the entwined prickly pears. “You can’t have grown that much in just a few hours.”

He tried to insert the boards even so, but after a few minutes’ wiggling and shifting them, he withdrew. Mara followed him as he proceeded along the barrier, testing a few other gaps to no avail. It took him most of the afternoon to traverse the entire ring, and Mara stayed with him the entire time, gleefully watching failed attempt after failed attempt. When he returned to where he’d started, he set his boards aside and gazed wistfully up the hill. The sun was low behind him, casting his long shadow onto the hill.

“Well,” he said heavily. “This is going to be harder than I thought.”

It’s going to be impossible, Mara vowed. You will never sully my haven with your footsteps again.

And it was as if he’d heard her, because he trudged back to his campsite, methodically packed everything back into his Jeep, folded the tent into a case strapped to the roof, and drove away. Other than his tire tracks, the desert hill looked as if he’d never been there.

As a final act of spite, Mara called on the sand where he’d passed to quiver, then resettle. Now there was no hint he had ever been there.

Mara laughed aloud then, letting her triumph echo through the hills before hastening up the hill to her garden. She swiftly found the cactus whose flower had been stolen, used the last of her flagging energy to encourage a new flower to grow in the vacant space.

And everything was right in the world again.

She made her way to the center of her garden, the grove she’d called forth as her private shelter, choosing the tallest of her trees to sleep beneath. She’d exhausted herself again, but the tree would give energy back to her, as would the sand, and she would be refreshed in the morning. Refreshed and alone once more, ready to return to her task.

Ready to think only of Tristan again, not the huge blond brute of a man who had disturbed her peace.

She smiled again as she sank into the sand’s embrace, remembering Ethan’s expression as he’d understood he’d been bested. If she didn’t despise him so much, she’d almost feel sorry for him. He had looked so very disappointed, recognition of his loss burning in his blue-gray eyes as he prepared to leave. Perhaps she should add some more subtle fortifications to the landscape to ensure no future traveler considered her domain for their explorations, but for now, she could take comfort in her victory.

Mara had won. Her hill was hers again, safe and private and unsullied. And that man, that Ethan, was gone, never to return.

By tomorrow, she would already have forgotten his name.

Chapter five

Strategy

Ethan Jacobson had been called many things in his three-point-something decades of life. Some had been complimentary, some had been insults, some had been outright slander. But one thing he had never been called—as long as one didn’t consider the mutually agreed, perfectly rational dissolution of his relationship with Sarah—was a quitter.

So when he’d reluctantly admitted to himself that he was not imagining things, that there was an impassable wall of cacti blocking his access to the botanical anomaly that was his key to tenure, professional acclaim, and even possibly wider fame, he’d allowed himself the barest moment of disappointment before he’d moved on to the next step.

Finding a new solution.

It would be easy, he knew, to just acquire a chainsaw and hack his way through. But besides the fact that some cactus species like the saguaro were protected, making any harm to them illegal, he recoiled at the very thought of damaging the pristine landscape. They were far from civilization here, which was of course inconvenient in some ways, but also meant a lack of pollution, litter, and human-caused damage. He’d spent a lot of money making his overlanding gear as ecologically sound as possible while still allowing for basic comfort and his research needs. And if there was any rule that had been drilled into him from his youth, from countless camping events and tournaments and festivals, it was to leave the site better than you found it.

Chopping through cacti to get to other cacti he wanted to study was against every tenet he held dear, every moral and ethical and spiritual standard he adhered to. He was absolutely going to take every possible step to keep from damaging the plants, the soil, and the environment. But he’d also be damned if he was going to let them stop him from doing what he needed to do.

So once he’d navigated the wash back to the highways, he made a beeline to the nearest town with a home improvement store. Fortunately, the one he found was open late. It required some creative Tetrising of the Jeep’s contents, but he soon had a goodly supply of cut-down lumber, hardware, and equipment, along with a couple of cordless power tools.

He drove back to the highway motel closest to his desert destination, booked a room, plugged his new tools in to charge, and sat down at the pathetic excuse for a table to create his plan of attack.

The problem was, when he tried to sketch out diagrams, all he could see was the strange woman’s face.

He wasn’t an artist. He couldn’t put her visage on paper, not in anything other than a stick figure doodle. But he could see her, clear green eyes and golden skin and two-toned hair and heaving breasts, so real he couldn’t believe she was just his imagination. So real he’d felt he could reach out and brush grains of sand from her cheeks.

Where had she come from? He knew his subconscious was a horny bastard, and after five years of regular sex, the weeks of celibacy he’d endured since his so-mature agreement with Sarah had been rough, but his heat-and-hormones-addled brain cells had clearly been working overtime to come up with a mirage so detailed, so realistic, and so unexpected. She reminded him of something…

Titian. Something by Titian. Not the formal portraits, or the peaceful nudes, not his best known works, but… Ethan set aside his notes, opened his laptop to search, scanning images until there it was. The Death of Actaeon, left in the artist’s studio at his death, possibly incomplete. A wild goddess, clad in filmy, revealing drapery, leaping forth as her hunting dogs tore to shreds a voyeur who had dared to trespass while she bathed.

The resemblance wasn’t physical. It was just the painting’s vibe, its emotional expression. That had been what he’d seen in her, the outrage and fury in her voice as she’d shouted at him to go away. The feral passion of a woman wronged.

But all he had done was find her. Seen her sleeping in the sand, in a place that was…well, technically not public, but he had a permit to be there. It wasn’t private property. If anything, she was the trespasser.

And she wasn’t real, so how did it even matter?

She was a hallucination.