Page 29 of A Fae’s Guide to Tactical Botany

But Mara’s grudging first aid was somehow…better. Even when she was doing her best impression of Florence Nightingale, if the famous nurse had been really pissed off. Just the grouchy look on her face as she set up his tent a few feet away was weirdly enchanting, made him drift off into mental montages of all the expressions she’d shown him thus far. Furious. Mocking. Cold. Sad.

Vulnerable.

Stop being a creeper, he admonished himself. She hates you. You’re an unwelcome invasive species of weed in her world, worse than buffelgrass or stinknet, and she wants to tear you out of her garden and toss you on the compost pile to rot. And if that convoluted metaphor isn’t enough, she could probably come up with worse. She looked vulnerable because you were a threat she wanted to drive away, not because she wanted to let you in.

And how fucked up was he that the knowledge that she despised him made her infinitely more attractive?

Made him think risking death-by-brain-bleed was a pretty cool course of action.

At least if he died, his last memory would be Mara’s face radiating long-suffering annoyance.

Worth it.

She turned to him then, and he basked in her glare. “You have a place to sleep now. Is there anything else you need?”

“You…took my lantern?”

Mara narrowed her eyes. “Do you intend to create more diagrams and plans with which to annoy me?”

“No, I just want”—you to stay—“to not be in the dark.”

“You are afraid of the dark?” Her lips twisted in a smirk. Something inside him twisted in response.

He tried to grin, though it probably looked ghastly. “When the dark holds scorpions, rattlesnakes, and bobcats, yes.”

She huffed and set her hand on the ground beside her. A few moments later, the sand began to shiver as if there were an earthquake, and his lantern emerged from the vibrating earth.

Holy shit. “Thank you.”

Mara sniffed. “I must go.” She stood abruptly, leaving Ethan staring at her sandy brown knees.

He tried to focus back on her face, though his head spun when he moved it. “Wait! I need…” There, there were her eyes. Her furious absinthe eyes. The rest of her face cleared in his sight just in time for her frown to turn to speech.

“You have food and drink, your tent and your air mattress and your lantern. What more can you—”

“My armor,” he gasped out through the hypnotic trance of her angry lips. She’d removed his boots when treating his injured ankle, but otherwise he was still in the red-and-black protective gear he’d worn to avoid cactus spines. He’d made an attempt to remove the armor pieces himself at one point but had given up in waves of dizziness.

“Ohhh,” she sighed in a sweet, patronizing tone. “Are you not comfortable in your jester’s garb?”

“Well,” he said cautiously, “it is kind of, um, hard.”

What he didn’t want to tell her was that his plastic armor wasn’t the only thing that was hard. Concussion or no, he’d spent the entire afternoon vacillating between semi-aroused and fully, desperately aroused, his erection fighting the painful constriction of the athletic-cup-slash-fashionable-codpiece he’d strapped on that morning. As if his sprained (hopefully not broken) ankle and bruised (hopefully not brain-bleeding) noggin weren’t enough.

And he definitely wasn’t going to suggest she put an ice pack on his penis.

She continued to glare at him for several minutes, the setting sun turning her long brown hair to gold, then fell back to her knees beside him. “Very well.”

Much to Ethan’s surprise, she did not ask for instructions, her fingers immediately going to the ties of his elbow pads, then his gorget. He tried to speak anyhow. “I usually—” She lifted his head to get at the ties at the back of his neck, and he lost the sentence to a whimper. He tried again. “I have a rack. Um, to keep it from getting smelly. And there’s a spray bottle of vodka…”

“I am done fetching and carrying for you tonight,” she said firmly. She set his head back down with gentleness that belied her tone of voice.

“Okay. Okay.” He sighed and watched her. Not her hands—they’d gone to his shoulders, and he’d have to twist his neck to see them—but her face. There was something different about her expression. It wasn’t pure annoyance now. There was something else…

Shit. There went his fucking erection again. Despite the dizziness and the fact that he wasn’t looking at her body. But her lips were plush, parted as if she were about to speak, and her eyes were intent on her hands, almost serene in their focus, and it was so mundane and normal, but also unbelievable, and he wanted to reach up and…

He didn’t. He still had some sense of self-preservation.

Mara removed the first of his arm pieces, and a rush of coolness chilled his arm as his sweat-soaked shirt was exposed to the air. He gasped at the sudden relief.