Parley
Chapter eight
Ethan felt her before he saw her, felt the aura of her presence approaching like a storm, and it took every ounce of will to ignore the magnetic pull and keep trudging along with his first load of lumber and ladders. It wasn’t until he’d set them all upon a rocky ledge that he looked up.
She wasn’t there.
He frowned, scanning the hillside. “Hello?” he ventured.
Silence. But he could still feel her eyes on him.
With a dismissive shrug, he turned to walk away. “I didn’t expect you to be a coward,” he tossed over his shoulder.
There was a hissing of sand. “And I didn’t expect you to be a fool.”
He turned slowly toward her voice. There she was, just past the thick cactus barrier, leaning casually against a boulder. She wasn’t even looking at him, instead gazing off to the north, as the fitful wind tugged at her filmy skirts.
There you are. But she wasn’t the only one who could pretend nonchalance. He shrugged again, turned away, and continued on the path back to his campsite.
After only a few steps, the sand rustled behind him again, and he stopped walking but did not turn around.
“If you bury my supplies,” he said lightly, “I’ll just go buy more. I’ve got an American Express card and plenty of savings. Hell, I’m just petty enough to cash out my 401k.” He tugged at the cuff of his overshirt, listening.
The rustling stopped, and for a long moment there was silence—or as silent as the desert got, whispers of wind and sand, the buzz and chitter of insects, furtive hints of animal movements just out of sight.
“Am I to be honored?” Her voice came from in front of him, and a moment later she stepped out into his path, her luminous green eyes steady on his face. “You have endless money, and you will spend it all to disturb my peace.”
Ethan inhaled, willing himself not to tremble at her nearness.
It almost worked; when he replied, his voice was close to nonchalant, though the tension beneath it had to be palpable.
“I’d rather not. I’m already in the hole a few thousand dollars because of you.
” The cacti were thin enough here that he could get past her, and so he did, striding out into the sandy wash.
She fell in beside him, matching his pace. “Then don’t spend it. I have asked you to leave. You can leave now. I will not pursue you. I may even return your drone, if you promise not to come back.”
Ethan didn’t turn his head, though the waft of her hair in his periphery was maddening.
“So you know what a drone is.” The word had sounded strange in her voice, though she’d said it easily enough.
“And here I thought you were a mystical desert goddess, all nature and…and magic.” He turned to look at her then, needing to see her response to the m-word.
Her expression gave him nothing. She shrugged. “I live in the same world as you, the same century. And I am no goddess.”
“Aren’t you?” Now that he was looking at her, he couldn’t look away. Up close, her brown skin was dappled with green, delicate freckles on her cheeks and larger spots scattered over her shoulders, like sunlight was shining on her through spring leaves. “What’s your name?”
She scoffed. “Why should I tell you?”
“You’ve declared war on me,” he said, resisting the urge to catch a lock of her hair, see if it was as soft as it looked. “I should at least know my enemy.”
A frown lined her brow, but she did not answer.
“It makes for better lamentations,” he coaxed. “You know, when I lose and I have to rue the day I dared to challenge the random-gorgeous-desert-woman-who-says-she’s-not-a-goddess-but-yet-remains-nameless. That’s a lot of syllables to cry out to the uncaring skies.”
A smile curved her freckled cheeks. “When you have been defeated,” she said in a soft voice, “you may curse the day you met Mara.”
“Mara.” His foot caught on a half-buried rock, and he turned to watch his path.
“Two syllables is good. And that final ah makes for a good dramatic hold. Like, um…” He stepped out into a wide stance and raised his hands high in dramatic agony.
“Maraaa!” he cried out, doing his best Marlon Brando. “Maraaa!”
“Yes, very good.” She kept walking. “You may howl like that as you leave. Perhaps with more anguish.”
He caught up with her swiftly. “I’m not leaving, Mara.”
“I did not say you could use my name now.” She slanted him an annoyed glance. “Unless you are admitting defeat?”
“Nope. Sorry, Mara.”
“You will be sorry, Ethan.” She mimicked his emphasis. “Your fool’s armor will do you little good this day.”
Ethan sighed. “You could just ignore me and let me do my work.”
“I cannot.” Her voice was like stone.
But stone could be worn away, with time and friction. “My career depends on this research.”
“And what do I care for your career?” She was suddenly in front of him, hair and dress flowing from movement so fast he hadn’t seen it.
“You have a job,” she said with scornful emphasis.
“My garden is my…my life. My life, and my soul, and… You must go.” Was that heartbreak on her face?
Something was broken, even if it wasn’t her heart.
But he couldn’t let that sway him. “My job is my life,” he replied.
It wasn’t entirely true—he had friends, family, hobbies—but it held enough truth for the moment.
It would take too long to explain what he found in his work, the thrill of discovery, of knowledge, of understanding, the near-magic held in every seed and sprout and blossom.
The way it would eat at him forever not knowing what he had come here to learn.
Even if tenure weren’t dangling just out of reach, he’d want to know.
“You don’t know me, and I don’t know you.
Who’s to say which of us has a more noble goal? ”
There was a flash of something soft in her eyes before her expression hardened again. “Well, then. You will be shouting my name soon enough.”
Oh, god. “Will I?” Ethan said faintly, his mind suddenly full of images, green-dappled brown skin under his fingers, sighs in his ears, her voice on his lips. Shouting as he— as they— She can’t have meant the double entendre, but he’d sure as fuck heard it. “God, I hope so.”
She was still looking at him, inscrutable, the faintest line between her brows, one that could mean anything from confusion to contained fury. He looked back at her, drinking his fill while he could.
It didn’t last long. There was a flash of movement, and then she was gone without even a final word of challenge.
“Coward,” Ethan muttered again, though he knew it wasn’t true. No, she was a strategist. She’d come to negotiate a treaty, and then gone to fortify her defenses. What would it be this time? A sandstorm? A barrage of rocks? A wall of cholla that actually jumped?
For a moment—just a moment—he considered the fact that he might be fucking crazy.
Especially when he turned the last bend in the wash and saw the lumber and supplies he’d just carried to the hill Mara claimed as her own, scattered like matchsticks in front of his Jeep.
It was certifiably insane to keep trying when he was up against some sort of fucking dirt magic. Or plant magic. Or both.
But I’m not a goddess she’d said, and she’d laid out a challenge before him plain as day. And she wanted him to cry her name in defeat. Which, he reasoned, he couldn’t do if he didn’t fight to win in the first place.
Far be it from him to disappoint her.
He gathered up his supplies for another trudge toward Mara’s cactus fortress.
It had been a mistake to speak to him.
Mara lay on her back just inside her lowest barrier, arms and legs splayed, fingers and heels sunk into the earth.
She needed to regain her strength. Sending Ethan’s equipment back to his Jeep had been spiteful and petty, but she knew it was ultimately futile.
That it had gained her a reprieve of mere minutes.
She might be surrounded by her element, but there was a limit to how much strength she could take before the elements had nothing left to give.
It had taken her years to create her garden, years of nurturing and tending and feeding the plants with her grief.
No, satisfying as her latest act of defiance had been, transporting his equipment through the earth was too exhausting to be a useful tactic in the long term. Even now, his burdened footsteps were thudding along the wash as he carried another load of dead wood and metal and plastic.
He had called her a coward—twice, his parting words chasing her as she fled back to safety.
And so she was. She couldn’t put into words what she was afraid of, but the fear coiled in her throat like smoke, black and formless, pollution choking her breath.
Stealing something away from her, no matter how she clung to it.
Ethan had made her smile. A smile that wasn’t wry, or sad, or forced. It had bloomed on her face like springtime, her lips curving against her will, and something had cracked inside her.
And there was the mistake. Because no matter how Mara wished him gone, she knew what had broken was her disdain and dislike.
She’d enjoyed their conversation far too much, the push and pull of their banter, his clever wit and ridiculous hyperbole.
And somehow between their last encounter and this one, he had stopped seeming too big. He was just…man-sized. A man.
A man whose eyes had glazed over at the thought of shouting her name.
Those had not been the eyes of a man picturing defeat.
No, his expression had been all desire, sending heat spearing through her, all the way down to her toes and down into the ground beneath her like an earthquake.
And she had almost let that tremor launch her forward, almost succumbed to the magnetism of his rough voice, barely regaining her wits in time to flee instead of learning the taste of his lips.