Page 35 of A Fae’s Guide to Tactical Botany

“So you have been annoying other women. Should I be jealous?”

He wasn’t sure how to answer that. Was she flirting or just mocking him? “Don’t worry,” he said at last. “I only have annoyingness for you.”

“You saved it all just for me,” she mused, spraying his Ace bandage with the vodka, then draping it along the cooler to air out. “How kind of you.”

“It’s not like I’ve never, um, annoyed another woman before. I went to college.” He was starting to get lost in their wordplay. Was annoying a code word for flirting? Or dating? Or sex? Or was it not a code word at all? Maybe Mara really was just talking about the fact that he was a pain in her ass. But why was she back to stroking his foot? David Lynch could only do so much. “You said something about a truce.”

“I have been considering,” she said in a steady voice, “allowing you to complete your research.”

Ethan gaped at her, wondering if maybe he had hit his head again. “You’re going to let me what?”

“I do not believe,” Mara went on doggedly, “that you will learn anything. I have told you that the answer lies in my magic and not in the world of science. You will not find your precious tenure here. But I may have been…impolite…in my refusal to allow you the opportunity to fail on your own.”

Summing up a campaign of weaponized cacti as impolite was certainly a choice. But Ethan wasn’t about to call Mara on it. Not when she was offering an olive branch.

An olive branch that might have secret thorns, to be sure, but a gesture nonetheless.

“Thank you,” he said.

She shrugged and picked up the Ace bandage again. “You are stubborn and determined,” she said as she began to wrap his ankle snugly. “If you leave without your curiosity being satisfied, you will no doubt return to annoy me again. Or perhaps another scientist will. If you do your work and tell your fellow scientists that there is nothing to be found here, I may have my peace again.” She raised her unearthly gaze to his. There was that glow again, predatory and searching. “So I will ensure you are satisfied before you leave.”

By the time he consciously parsed that last sentence, his subconscious had leapt on it like a hungry coyote, and not even David Lynch could save him now. No, his only hope was that Mara was either too innocent or too annoyed to care that he had a full-on erection straining at his jeans.

He essayed a casual smile, just in case. “You’re very kind.” Nothing to see here. Especially not down there. “I’ll do my best not to get in your way.”

Her lips curved in a sly smile. “I know it will be hard for you.”

“I… Yeah. I do take up a lot of space.”

“You are not so large.” Her smirk grew.

There was no fucking way she was throwing out innuendo on purpose, but damn if he didn’t wish she was. That he’d somehow woken up in the HBO version of his life and she was about to pop the button on his Levi’s and go to town on his poor neglected dick. Which was a perfectly acceptable size.

But it was the real world, and she just fastened the clips on his bandage, set his foot back on the cooler, and stood up.

“When you can walk,” she said coolly, “I will take you to where you may begin your research, then. Is there anything else you need this morning? Shall I look at your head?”

“No,” he said faintly, managing a smile. “You’ve done plenty.”

“Then I will be off.” She ran a narrow-eyed glance along his body. Ethan braced for her shocked denouncement, but instead she simply smiled and sank back into the sand.

“Bye,” he said belatedly.

And then he was alone with his thoughts, his throbbing ankle, and desperate arousal that was destined to go unquenched.

She was definitely trying to kill him.

Chapter thirteen

Turning Point

Mara watched Ethan as he peered at a brilliant cluster of blossoms, sketching and making notes as he worked. He was not a skilled artist, but now that she’d watched him work for many days, she had come to understand that he was not attempting to create art, but to record what he saw in a shorthand all his own. He’d scribble notes all around his sketches, measurements and observations, and sometimes phrases that seemed entirely unrelated.

What down boy, know your place, and remember Actaeon had to do with botany, she had no idea, but they must have some meaning to him. Perhaps Actaeon was the name of another scientist, or one of those ancient words scientists liked to throw around to pretend they knew answers about something.

Ethan was obsessed with answers. It was vastly irritating, how he’d be sitting there sketching and suddenly pop out yet another question about the fae world, most of them unrelated to whatever he was supposed to be studying. She’d deflected or ignored the more personal questions, of course, but now that they were allies, of a sort, she saw little harm in telling him how fae came from and called upon the elements, the ways they now interacted with the human world.

She hadn’t had many answers, to be truthful. How did she pass through the sand? She didn’t know. She just did it. How did she make flowers bloom? She asked them to, fed them bits of herself in a way that she couldn’t possibly explain. Finally, she’d huffed in exasperation.