Comfort
Chapter eleven
Ethan had forgotten how concussions felt, the vague nausea and vaguer headache and the way words danced just out of reach.
The pervasive awareness that something was simply wrong.
Like that children’s book about the red-haired girl with the hat and the circus and the nun waking up in the middle of the night, something is not right, and how did he even remember that book when he could barely remember how he’d ended up flat on his back with an ice pack under his head and another on his ankle, all while a gorgeous magical woman glared daggers at him as if he didn’t deserve the gentle touch of her hands.
Which, to be fair, he didn’t. He’d been a jerk to her.
And yet her hands were gentle.
It was the most concussiony puzzle ever to concuss.
He should, technically, go to the hospital. He knew that. Concussions could mean brain bleeds could mean death. But the chances of that were fairly slim, and he couldn’t very well drive himself, could he? He had no choice.
Well, all right, he had a choice. If he really wanted to go to the hospital, all he’d need to do is send Mara to get his satellite phone.
He had friends who would come get him. Hell, even Sarah would probably do it, for old time’s sake.
They might not be dating anymore, but she was a decent human being, despite her gray car, and they had specifically planned their separation in a way that they could remain friends.
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.
“Why do you do this?” Mara asked suddenly, her eyes flickering briefly to meet his before she busied herself with the fastenings of the other arm. “Endure such discomfort merely to invade the desert.”
“It’s…my job.”
“Is it? So others of your profession dress in plastic and assault the wilderness?”
“No, but—” The other arm piece came away. “Oh, that feels good.”
Her eyes went to his again, startled, and she licked her lips, and what was that look in her eyes?
She looked away before he could decipher it, starting on the shoulder fastenings of his gambeson, and he tried to find his way back to her question.
There it was. “I’m not the only one who…wears protective gear.”
“But the others do not come this far.”
“Well, I’m extra tenacious.”
“Ah,” she said, her tone clearly saying an extra tenacious pain in my ass. Her voice was amazingly expressive. He wondered what it would sound like if—
Back on topic. “I don’t usually come out this far either.
But I really need…something publishable.
Something nobody’s found before.” He sighed.
“I need to earn tenure, or I’m out a job.
Possibly out a career—pretty sure professors who lose out on tenure get their resumes shuffled to the bottom of the pile. ”
“And this tenure…” Her hands stilled. “You will find it on my hill?”
“Maybe.”
“Well,” she said stiffly, beginning on the fastenings at his side. “It is a great encouragement that you disturbed my peace for a maybe.”
Ethan’s head was cloudy again. “No. I came here because I had to.”
“Your university forced you?”
“No, it was the pictures.” Even through waves of dizziness, Ethan felt driven to make her understand. “I saw the pictures, and they called to me.”
“What pictures?” Mara’s hands stopped moving again. “There have been no visitors that could have photographed my hill, or painted it. Not in the five years I have been here.”
“Satellite pictures.” Ethan tried to sit up, sank back again.
Mara was silent for a long time. “I have heard of them,” she said at last. “Of satellites, at least. I did not know they would… You saw me?”
“Not you,” he murmured. “But I saw…the plants. The garden. How they changed and grew over just a few years and…”
“So you did see me,” Mara murmured. “Not my body, my face, but my garden is…” Her eyes held a shadow, sadness perhaps, or regret.
Why did he suddenly feel like Actaeon in truth, like he’d brazenly spied on something intimate, private?
And why did it all make perfect sense to his addled brain, so much that he replied, “I’m sorry I saw you.
” And hell, he’d already sinned against the goddess.
He might as well sin thoroughly. He reached up and touched a lock of her hair.
It was softer than he’d dreamed it could possibly be.
“I saw you,” he whispered, “and I had to come.”
Mara met his gaze, something unfathomable in her expression. Unfathomable and strangely familiar. Had he seen her wear that expression in a dream? Or was it a memory?
She made a small, low noise, and he realized he was still holding her hair, sliding the silky strands through his fingers.