Regrets
Chapter fourteen
Ethan watched Mara settle back onto the sand. Her body was poised, calm, but he hadn’t spent days parsing her every word and expression to not be able to see that it was a false serenity.
He didn’t know her enough to know the truth, but he could tell when she was lying.
Her hungry kisses had been somewhere in the middle—a half-truth sent forth like a decoy to distract him from the real, painful truth underneath.
The missing link that would explain everything he’d experienced since his arrival, explain Mara’s mixed signals, the way she alternated between indomitable strength and fragility, the push and pull they’d been tangled in since he first saw her sleeping at the fringes of her garden.
“You don’t have to tell me,” he said when her silence stretched on. “I don’t want to…” He swallowed. “I don’t want you to be in any pain.”
She laughed like birdsong. “You are too late,” she said, bitterness laced through her voice. “The pain was there before you arrived. You are just poking the bruise.”
“I’m sorry for poking.”
Mara shrugged. “Perhaps I needed to be poked. Ofelia would say so.” She cast him a sleepy, seductive look. “She sometimes has good ideas.”
“Are you trying to distract me again?”
“Probably.” She shivered, wrapping her arms around herself. “I do not know where to start.”
Ethan swallowed. “You said it wasn’t joy. That was what I said that made you…” He tried to gesture in a way that communicated upset and not inexplicably horny.
She rolled her eyes as if to say this silly prudish man, but then she nodded. “Yes. It is…frustrating that you have seen so much, and yet you see so little.”
A puzzle piece fell into place. “The garden is you. And you’ve been here alone for five years.” Nobody spends five years alone because they’re happy. Not for rage, not for joy…
“Five years,” she agreed. “Since Tristan died. My husband.”
Grief. Five years of grief. You loved him, he thought but was smart enough not to say. Of course she had loved her husband. It was there on her face, in the deliberate tranquility of her words.
Mara reached out, touched the same blossom he’d been stroking in his asinine experiment in seduction-by-proxy.
“I did not plan to stay so long,” she said.
“Nor did I plan this garden. Not at first. I only knew I needed to be alone. And I came here, and I wept, and I slept, and when I awoke, the flowers were there for me. To comfort me.”
Ethan swallowed. The hum of bees and trill of distant birdsong seemed heavy on the moment, like he and Mara were both being pressed down into the earth. Like her grief might drag them both under at any moment.
“It was an accident,” she said. “A ridiculous accident. He was driving to work—”
“Seriously?” Ethan blurted out. “Why would a fae need to…” He trailed off, face heating. God, he was an idiot, interrupting her.
“He was not a fae,” she said softly. “He was human. Like you.” She regarded Ethan steadily, her green eyes bleak.
“He had a human job, and we lived in the human city, and partook of the human world as much as the fae underworld.” She smiled then, nostalgia brightening her features.
“He loved music and museums, the nights and days of the city. And so did I, when he was with me.”
A memory tickled at Ethan’s brain. Something about music and the night, flowing hair and green eyes. He ignored it. “You were happy,” he said carefully.
“We were. We had been for so many years I cannot even count them.” Her mouth twisted slightly. “When a human spends much time in the fae world, they are changed. The magic changes them—not enough to make them not human, but enough. Enough that I could have expected centuries more by his side.”
“C-centuries?”
Mara suddenly dashed her hand through the sand by her side. “It was foolish. He was late returning home. I had gone to meet him, flying along his usual route, and I saw—” Her voice caught sharply.
“God.” Ethan reached out, almost touched her knee, hesitated.
She took his hand and grasped it tightly. “There was nothing that could be done. Not by man or fae. And I…” She heaved a breath. “I did what I had to do. Endured the rites for his family and for mine, let him be laid to rest in my own earth. And then I ran.”
Words were inadequate, but he gave them anyway. “I’m so sorry.” God, he was a dick. Insisting that his tenure was more important than any reason she might have, not knowing anything. She was right. He was a fool.
“I am no stranger to loss,” she said in a quiet voice.
“I have lived long. I have lost friends and family to the cycles of the elements. But we were not finished.” Her fingers gripped his tighter.
“There were plans. Hopes. Journeys we wished to take. Adventures. Children. So many things we were not ready for, and now will never be.” She hitched in a sob, then released his hand.
“I am sorry, as well. I have been told I am overly dramatic.”
“No, it’s… You’re fine.”
“You must think five years is too long to mourn.” She cast him a glance.
“No. Of course not.” He scratched his head. “I mean, it’s a long time, but… Grief doesn’t have a set timeline. Only you know when it’s been long enough.”
She smiled wryly, gazing up her hill. The setting sun had turned it all to gold.
“Each blossom on this hill, each plant and cactus and tree, is a memory. Decades of them. They are my tears and my wails, my lamentations against the cruel world.” She looked back at him.
“I do not cry out to the skies as prettily as you, but it seems the skies were watching me nevertheless.”
Ethan took in a deep breath, let it out. “I understand now,” he said softly. “Why your garden called to me. Why I can’t walk away from it.” He looked at the garden so that he didn’t have to look at Mara’s face, feel her sadness stab him like the penance he deserved. “You loved him very much.”
“I will always love him,” she whispered.
And never love again, Ethan completed in his head.
Well, he hadn’t come here to find romance. He’d come to get his head together, earn tenure, and salvage his job. And Mara was helping with that. The fact that she was unattainable, that her heart was spoken for, was beside the point.
And he’d keep telling himself that any time his hormones started getting ideas again.
“Thank you for telling me,” he said at last. “Did it make you feel better?”
“Somewhat.” She cast him a considering glance, then shook her head. “Well enough for tonight.” She smiled, a smile that was almost happy.
And that did it.
“I saw you,” Ethan breathed.
Mara blinked. “Yes,” she said. “You have said so.”
“No, not the satellite pictures, not the sleeping and the wings.” Ethan struggled to his feet, wincing. “I saw you and him. Tristan.”
Bleak shock crossed Mara’s face. “When?”
“Five years ago. There was music—a festival. And I saw you through the crowd. Your hair, your eyes.” It was the smile that had hidden the memory from him.
She had looked so different then. “I saw you across the crowd, and for a moment I thought… There she is.” He gulped back his shock.
“I was going to go talk to you, but then there was a man. You smiled at him, and he kissed your cheek and…” And he’d turned away and run right into Sarah, nearly spilling her drink.
He’d offered to buy her her next drink, and it had turned into a date. “Holy shit.”
“A music festival…” Mara got a faraway look in her eyes. “Yes, I remember.”
It must have been right before… Ethan didn’t say it. “He looked kind,” he said instead.
“He was,” Mara said, but there was a question in her voice.
“I remember,” Ethan replied. “I remember how happy you both looked. How your eyes lit up when you saw him, how he smiled like you were the sun and the moon.” He could feel a babble coming on, repressed it. “If he’d looked like a jerk, I would have said hi.”
“He was a good man,” Mara said.
“I’m glad.”
She rose to her feet with fey grace. “Come. You must be hungry.” With a kind, sad smile, she stepped closer.
“That’s okay,” Ethan said quickly. “My ankle’s a lot better now. You don’t have to help me.”
He started to walk toward his camp, keeping his pain off his face. When he heard the sibilant hiss of her departure behind him, he sighed with relief.
If he’d known what she was going through…would he have changed anything he’d done? Maybe. He liked to think so. But he couldn’t say for sure. After all, he was just a man. But regardless, he’d trespassed on her kindness enough for one night.
Tomorrow, he’d speed up the research process a bit. Hone in on the most important specimens, get it done and get back on the road. Leave Mara to the peace she deserved. It was the chivalrous thing to do, for certain.
Even if he’d fallen for Mara, the masochist that he was. Taken her mixed signals to mean actual interest instead of interrupted grief.
He’d finish his work, and he’d leave, just like she wanted.
Goddammit.
Sometimes chivalry fucking sucked.