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“Of course,” he said, taking it from her hand.

“Thank you.” She was watching him, so he took a large bite; juice dribbled down his chin.

He licked it off, using his fingers to mop up the bits that his tongue could not reach.

It was tasty enough but a bit unripe; as he sucked the juice off his fingers he thought back to the last peach he had eaten, plucked at its peak perfection from a tree in Argentina.

Perhaps he could fetch one of those for Poppy someday; it seemed unfair that she was wasting her limited funds on anything less than delectable.

Oh, she was still watching him, probably to ensure her hospitality was a success. He hastily took another bite and smiled around it.

She looked down at her plate, abruptly popping one of her slices in her mouth. “You’re welcome.”

They ate in silence for a few minutes; when Rai had finished off his peach, he set the pit on the dish beside the other. “For your murder,” he said solemnly, giving his fingers a final lick.

“They’ll never see it coming,” she said dryly, her gaze still riveted on him. “Did you want more?” She still had three slices on the plate.

Would it be rude to refuse? “If you wish.”

She laughed and picked up a slice between two fingers, holding it out. He politely stepped forward and caught it between his lips, sucking it into his mouth .

Poppy made a little strangled noise, and he hastily put another smile of gratitude on his face as he chewed and swallowed. “Thank you.” Had that been a hungry sound? It had sounded hungry to him; he plucked another slice off the plate and raised it to her mouth, returning the favor.

She stared at it for a long moment, but then she leaned forward and delicately nipped it up in her pink lips, pulling back swiftly to chew. She mumbled something that was probably thanks.

The electric light from the porch was inadequate, but he could see her cheeks had darkened. He leaned closer. “Are you pink again?”

She met Rai’s eyes boldly but did not answer the question, instead whispering, “What are you doing?” Her gaze dropped slightly, looking at his lips, and sudden knowledge burst over him.

Poppy was not terrified of him. She was not annoyed or dismissive or disinterested.

She wanted him.

She was looking at his lips because she was considering kissing him.

And with that realization came a wave of more. That was why she’d shivered at his touch. Why her heart had beaten faster at his approach. That was why she’d shyly asked if there were a Mrs. Storm , of all things.

He withdrew a few inches, mind whirling.

He knew that humans and fae could be lovers; he’d been with companions who had told tales of seductions and conquests, games and torments and secret trysts.

He’d met others who had been raised in the human world as changelings, and they had spoken of past relationships, exotic tales of going on dates and other mystifying human traditions.

And though they were rare, he had even met children of such unions, half-fae who moved between the faerie underworld and the human world above.

He simply had never considered it something he himself would engage in.

Humans were like ants to him, scurrying on the ground to escape his power.

They were victims and playthings, not companions.

He had never imagined he might be in a situation like this, gazing at a human woman’s pink cheeks and pinker lips and wondering how they might taste.

Realizing that the simmering frustration inside him was something more than petulant anger.

He was a fool thrice over, not to have seen it from the start, to have understood why he coveted her presence so. But how could he have? Nobody had ever warned him of this. He’d never even thought it possible .

She had asked him a question. What are you doing? He met her eyes and answered truthfully, “I do not know.”

She heaved a shaky breath and looked away, at her plate, the one remaining slice. He followed her gaze downward. “Do you want it?” she asked.

He licked his lips, watching her fingers take the piece of fruit. “Yes.” He was not certain what she was offering, what he was agreeing to, but whatever it was, that was the answer. “I want it.”

She held the peach slice between them, and he took it in his mouth, soft and succulent.

Her eyes gleamed in the faint light from the porch, and he leaned closer and brushed his lips against the tips of her fingers, his tongue darting out to catch the drops of juice from her skin, sweet over salty and she gasped and trembled and thunder rolled and her pink lips were right there and—

“Poppy? Where are you?”

She jolted away from him. “I’m right here, Mom,” she called out, staring at Rai’s face in something like horror. “I just had to get something out of the car.”

He stepped back as she shoved herself off her vehicle and walked back toward the front of the house.

She had a smile on her face, a different smile to the ones she gave him.

It was soft and kind, but a little stiff.

He frowned, wanting to ask her about it, but…

She was concerned about her mother meeting him.

He remained silent.

“Oh, thank goodness,” came the mother’s voice. It had a similar cadence to Poppy’s but was pitched higher. “I thought perhaps something had happened. You were gone so long.”

Poppy was gentle and soothing when she replied, her words slower than when she spoke to him. “I’m fine. I’ll be in in a few minutes, like I promised.”

“All right. I… I’m sorry.”

The door closed, and Poppy walked toward Rai, her face unreadable. “I have to go,” she said, her voice tinged with regret. She stepped past him and collected the plate; the pits rolled precariously on the surface.

“You must water the plants,” he said, feeling ten times the fool he’d been before.

“I will.”

“I could assist.”

“No. She’ll worry if she sees you through the window.” Poppy laughed faintly .

He set his jaw and caught her hand, the one not holding the plate. He’d kissed it earlier, teasing, barely even thinking what he was doing. Now that he was thinking, he was nearly paralyzed. “I do not want to go,” he said, hearing the petulance in his own voice but not caring.

Her hand trembled in his. “Do you work tomorrow?” she asked.

“What?” It took him a moment to realize what she was asking, remember the lies he had told her in his pretense of humanity. “What is tomorrow?” he asked at last, trying to sort out an actual answer.

She was smiling again, as if he’d told her a joke. “Tomorrow’s Saturday. Do you have to sell toilet paper on Saturday?”

He could not remember if Saturday was a rest day for humans or not. He took a gamble. “No. I do not.”

“How do you feel about coffee?” When he did not answer immediately, she hurried on. “There’s a coffee shop not far from here. Kind of a Tucson institution. I was thinking…well, maybe you might want to have…coffee. With me.” Her cheeks were pink again. “Tomorrow.”

What he wanted was to set her back atop her vehicle and finish what her mother had interrupted, find out the taste of her mouth.

But he would settle for tomorrow , and coffee , whatever that was.

“Yes. I want that.” He tightened his fingers on her hand, relishing the warmth of her skin a moment longer, then released her.

“Okay. I can give you the address—oh wait, you don’t have a phone. I forgot.” She jiggled the plate in her hand, making the peach pits roll around. “So you don’t have Maps. And you don’t know your way around town.” She abruptly handed him the plate. “Gimme a sec.”

Poppy crawled inside her vehicle and rummaged for a moment before emerging with a pencil and a scrap of paper. She beckoned him closer with a nod, and when he was beside her, she leaned over the hood and started to draw, glancing at him as she explained her lines.

“This X is where we are now. And this line here is Speedway, okay? It’s a major road, so you probably have to take it to get back to your hotel.

” She drew a few more lines. “So, this is Fourth, and if you take that south from Speedway, you’ll hit University—the street, not the actual college—and then this X is the place.

” She wrote a line of runes next to the second X; he recognized an A, like on the mountain, and he thought a C in front of it, but she was still talking so he stopped trying to read.

“You’ll know you’re in the right place if you see the ants. ”

“Ants?”

“On the outside wall. Painted ants.”

He stared at her for a moment, a laugh springing forth unbidden. “Ants. Of course.”

She watched him laugh, a strange look on her face. “Welcome to Tucson,” she said when he was done. “We like to paint things on our walls.”

“I will look for the ants,” he said gravely.

“What time is good for you?”

Now. “Sunrise?”

Her eyebrows shot up. “That’s crazy o’clock. Can we do nine instead? That way we get there before it hits a hundred.”

“As you wish.” He had no idea what the numbers she was spouting meant. Nine what? A hundred what? No matter. He could always lurk about her house until she departed and arrange another chance meeting.

She gave him a brilliant smile, exchanging the paper for the dish.

“And he quotes The Princess Bride. Be still, my beating heart.” She was using her joking voice, for some reason.

Perhaps there was a book in one of the faerie archives that he could use to find out who this “princess bride” was someday, so that he, too, could laugh at the joke.

Beating hearts, though, he understood. He set his fingertips lightly on her chest, just where her green shirt ended and her soft skin began, where the pulse of her heartbeat was strongest. “I will meet you tomorrow at nine and before one hundred,” he said, thunder in his own breast.

She sucked in a breath; the peach pits rattled on the plate. “I… I have to…” She swallowed. “I have to water the plants.”

He nodded and stepped back. “Yes, to not be a liar.” He was a liar, a terrible one. Everything he was to Poppy was a lie, and he felt a flash of guilt, followed by a wave of anger. Anger at himself, at Poppy, at how ridiculous the entire thing had become.

He had never felt guilty over a human before, either. How pathetic he was.

He bade her goodbye and walked away, stopping when he reached a convenient pool of darkness, where he turned and gazed back at her.

She had a long tube in her hand with a metal device at the end; as he watched, she pressed a lever and water came out of the end, spraying into one pot after another.

He stood there until she tucked the water dispenser away and went inside.

A moment later, the porch light winked out .

He sighed and turned to depart…and stopped in his tracks.

Where was he to go?

He had made Poppy a promise, a promise to meet her at a designated time tomorrow—some time that was not as “crazy o’clock” as sunrise but not as late as “one hundred”…

which told him absolutely nothing. When they’d been speaking, when her green-brown eyes had been in front of his face, he had nodded and smiled and agreed, vaguely imagining them meeting and walking together, as they had twice now, but he had not accounted for the fact that he could not both lurk outside her house awaiting the appointed time and return to a safe body of water in a hospitably moist climate to await another storm’s formation.

Which might not even take him in the right direction!

In order to meet Poppy, he would have to stay here, in Tucson, where he could already feel the moisture the storms had deposited dissipating in the atmosphere.

Did this sprawling metropolis even have lakes?

He growled and leapt into the air, freeing his wings and discarding his human glamour for simpler invisibility, and scanned the area, extending his senses outward.

There was water, yes, just not the right water.

The rainwater had long since descended to the sewers—he curled his lip at the rank sensation—and there was groundwater deep within the earth, where it would do him no good.

There was also the water captured in the city’s pipe system, but he could not enter it, and it would be folly to enter a human domicile to access it.

He had passed over the downtown area before and knew that the tiny hints of open water there were desultory decorative fountains, far too public for his comfort.

The same was true of the tiny manmade lakes he could sense in public parks here and there across the city.

He would need at least a modicum of privacy.

To the west, though, he felt the pull of a current; he flew over the highway and found a deep, wide wash, one carved out of the desert earth by millennia of rainstorms. It was far from full, but it did have a stream traveling through it, rainwater flowing downward as it always did.

He alighted on the ribbon of floodwater silt beside the stream, considering it.

The water itself was largely unpolluted, fresh from the skies, though the wash had a scattering of human detritus, plastic bottles and cups and the occasional clump of waterlogged paper.

But the stream was narrow and shallow, barely strong enough to restore him, and there was no guarantee the flow would not cease overnight.

It was dangerous to remain. He could feel it, his skin already prickling as the desert air returned to its normal desiccated state.

He should fly south to safety, abandon his ill-advised promise to this human he barely knew.

If he returned to the lake he had found the day before, one of the many dark-eyed great-great-grandchildren of the kind fae abuela there would almost certainly favor him with kisses and sighs, enough to surfeit him.

They had been lovely and placid, those fae women, not skittish, unpredictable, confounding aliens with breakable mothers and arcane numbers and computers and coffee and cheeks that turned pink for no reason.

But he did not want them.

He’d come to this place riding a storm, and he’d found another, a tempest in human form. And no, it was not safe to stay. But, he thought with fierce determination, when has safety ever been fun? He had always sought adventure, the thrill and the rush, the chase and the ride.

Perhaps coffee with Poppy was worth dying for. Or at least coming close.

He found a place beneath a gnarled tree, its roots half bared to the air by stormflow past, where he could anchor himself and allow the water to flow over and through him; he lay down and sighed into the stream’s embrace, closing his eyes.

He would wake with the sun and make his way to the place with the ants, and he would see Poppy again, and he would kiss her.

And then he would know.