Page 19 of Savage Blooms (Unearthly Delights #1)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Adam

Adam’s head swam with possibilities as he followed Finley out to the car.

Yesterday he had been a college dropout on a quest to find a dead man’s bedtime story, and now he was the guest of an aristocrat who treated him like the knight who might be able to free her from her tower.

And then there was the matter of Finley, the man who looked at Adam like a trespasser and at Nicola like a revelation.

Adam distrusted him instinctively, for reasons that made his stomach knot up when he tried to make sense of them.

The ground squelched under Adam’s feet, rocky gravel knocked loose by the coagulating mud beneath.

Finley was silent for most of the short walk, keeping his shoulders hunched forward as though he were trying to physically ward off conversation.

Adam took the opportunity to steal a glance him, sizing the other man up.

Adam was considerably taller with a runner’s physique, but Finley was a bit brawnier, with the build that came from a lifetime of outdoor labor.

When Finley finally spoke, in a soft baritone that almost got snatched away by the wind, it took Adam by surprise.

“Did you know?”

“Know what?” Adam said, slowing his about-his-business stride just a touch.

“About the Kirkfoyles’ curse.”

“No.”

Finley made a hmph sound in his throat and stopped at the rental car, which still sat parked at the edge of the drive with its tires sunk into the mud.

“Eileen wasn’t joking about that rain,” Adam muttered, retrieving the key fob from his pocket.

“She doesn’t often joke,” Finley replied.

“You seem to know her better than anyone,” Adam ventured as he popped the trunk. He had a penchant for wiggling the truth out of people, even when it was uncomfortable for them. It was his nature to seek brutal honesty above all things. “How long have you two been an item?”

“Since we were teenagers.”

“And before that?”

“There’s never been anyone else. No one important, anyway.”

“Interesting,” Adam said, hauling his battered Kankan out of the car and handing it to Finley.

They had brought their duffels of clothes in last night, but Adam had kept his laptop in the car along with his passport, just in case.

Nicola had left her mauve toiletry bag with all her lotions and potions in the car as well, and Adam carried that one himself, because he didn’t like the idea of the other man touching her things.

“Do you really take this whole faery thing seriously? Does she?”

“Faeries are one thing Eileen is dead serious about,” Finley responded, shouldering the stuffed backpack without any effort at all. “And I’ve lived on Craigmar land long enough to see with my own two eyes things you couldn’t even dream of.”

Adam slammed the trunk shut with more force than was necessary, then started back to the house.

There was something about Finley that got under his skin.

Adam wasn’t sure if it was his brusque tone or his connection to Eileen or the way he looked at Nicola or even the fact that under different circumstances, Finley would have definitely been Adam’s type.

There was something disconcerting about all those factors swirling together in one person, so Adam just kept his eyes fixed straight ahead.

Adam thought Finley had gotten the message about them being done talking, but he spoke again just as they approached the looming oak doors.

“Eileen may seem…” Finley faltered, as though finding the right words was challenging. “High-spirited. But she’s a very sensitive person, at the end of the day. I’ll ask you not to abuse her hospitality. Or her trust.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Adam replied. Finley’s tone was bringing down his mood, and his hand still throbbed, and that strange sweet scent at the cave had given him a headache.

He wanted to lie down. “Nicola and I are very grateful to be put up for the time being. And we’re happy to help Eileen in any way that we can. ”

If it were possible, Finley’s expression darkened even more at the mention of Nicola’s name. Adam bit the inside of his cheek. He didn’t know when he was going to be alone with Finley again, hopefully never, so he should take advantage of the opportunity to level with Finley now.

“Nicola seems to have taken a shine to you,” he said in a tone that he hoped was slightly threatening in a still pleasant manner.

“Is this the part where you tell me to stay away from her?”

“This is the part where I tell you to be careful. She got her heart broken last year by some asshole on the lacrosse team. I would give her space, if I were you.”

Finley shot him a glass-edged look that had Adam spoiling for a fight, for closeness, for some kind of intimate violence that would burst the tension between them like a soap bubble.

“Why, because she’s yours?”

Finley, for some unhinged reason, was trying to get a rise out of Adam, and as much as Adam hated to admit it, it was working.

He always got defensive when people mistook him and Nicola for a couple, but he got even more defensive when she started running around with someone else.

It was a bad quality, he knew that, but Finley, with his strange ties to Craigmar and entanglement with Eileen, was the last person Adam wanted to see Nicola involved with.

“No, because I don’t want to see her getting hurt,” Adam said.

“I have no intention of hurting her,” Finley said, and there were his cards, out on the table. “If anything, I have every intention of making her feel very good.”

Adam considered shoving Finley against the ancient oak of the doors, maybe balling Finley’s collar in his fist and holding him there while he did…

something, but that seemed dangerous in more ways than one.

He didn’t want to piss off Nicola or Eileen by roughing Finley up, and he didn’t quite trust himself to get that close to the other man.

Besides, he couldn’t stop Nicola from doing exactly what she wanted, especially as far as romance was concerned.

“I’m the closest thing to family she’s got left,” Adam said, putting his cards down right next to Finley’s.

“If you’re just family, you won’t mind my stepping in, then.”

“We’ll see what Nikki decides,” Adam said, just to remind Finley who had known her the longest.

“That we will. Right of the lady to choose, isn’t it? Glad we could sort that out.”

Finley took Nicola’s toiletry bag from Adam without another word, bumped open the door to the house with his shoulder, then tossed a final glance back to where Adam stood fuming on the doorstop.

“You shouldn’t carry anything with that hand for a while,” Finley said, disappearing into the house. “Welcome to Craigmar, Adam.”

In the resulting quiet, with nothing but birdsong and the rustling of high grass to break the silence, Adam wanted to scream.

Adam did his best to get more settled in his room, trying to break the living-out-of-a-suitcase habit since he may be here for a few days, maybe even more. He took in the room as he put his army-rolled clothes away in the chest of drawers.

He could get used to sleeping here, he thought. That thought felt a little bit dangerous but it also felt a little bit good, like slipping into a hot Epsom salt bath after a long, hard run.

Adam resolved to learn the layout of the house as quickly as he could, so he wouldn’t have to rely on Eileen for directions – or worse, on Finley.

He only got turned around once before he found Nicola’s room, which she had marked with a silk scrunchie wrapped around the doorknob. She always thought of everything.

“Nikki,” Adam said, rapping on the door. “You in there?”

There was a rustling of fabric through the door, then a high, startled: “Uh, yeah! Just a second.”

Adam heard what sounded like bedsheets being tossed back and something small, like a tube of lipstick, clattering to the floor. A moment later, Nicola threw open the door. She looked even more windswept than after coming back from her walk with Finley.

Underneath the scent of old furniture and Nicola’s Daisy perfume, Adam caught an undeniable whiff of sex.

“Were you jilling off?” Adam said, laughter bubbling up to disguise just how turned on he was by that thought: Nicola touching herself in broad daylight under those expensive sheets, her inner thighs glistening, her toes curling as she reached for that sweet spot inside herself.

“Come on, you couldn’t even wait for it to get dark? ”

“I can do whatever I want in my own room,” Nicola said with a scowl.

Adam wasn’t surprised she had owned up to it.

Nicola was frank to the point of oversharing when it came to her sex life, which sometimes complicated being friends with her.

“It’s all that adrenaline from the cave. I needed to flush it out of my system.”

“Looks like you were giving yourself a very thorough flushing,” Adam said, nodding to a purple travel-sized vibrator lying on the floor behind her. “Since when do near-death experiences turn you on?”

“Since when do you care what turns me on?” Nicola shot back, tossing the door open wider to welcome him into her room.

With her usual complete lack of self-consciousness, Nicola retrieved her vibrator, washed it off along with her hands in the ensuite bathroom, and then tucked it away in a little satin bag in her duffel.

“I don’t care,” he said, bristling. “But I’m allowed to think it’s weird.”

“I once saw you get hard because a shot girl in New Orleans asked you to hold her drinks while she took a piss. You don’t get an opinion on what’s weird.”

“Fair,” he said, tossing himself down onto her bed.

Not too close to the rumpled sheets, but close enough that he felt a small guilty thrill at soaking up the last whisper of her body heat from the mattress.

Nicola continued the chores she had apparently left half-finished to attend to her own pressing needs, like lining up her skincare and toothbrush on the sink, and hanging up sweaters in the wardrobe.

She glanced over her shoulder at him, arching that eyebrow that told him he was about to be cross-examined.

“Are you going to tell me why coming out here was so important to you?”

Adam shrugged. “I told you. It’s one of the big things me and Grandad shared before he died. I feel like I owe it to him to come, you know?”

“Yes, but there’s something else, isn’t there?”

Adam let his gaze drift out the window, watching a cluster of sheep meander over the grazing green below. Somehow, it was always easier to unburden his heart to Nicola if he wasn’t looking right at her.

“It’s going to sound crazy,” he muttered.

“I’ve told you before, Adam, nothing is crazy. Not to me, anyway.”

“I felt suffocated in Grand Rapids. Like my life was going to be the same every single day if I didn’t change something.

It was all work, sleep, the same bar every weekend, repeat.

I tried to think of the last time my life really felt, I don’t know, full?

And I realized it was when I was listening to my grandad tell me those stories.

I guess I’m just trying to get that feeling back. Does that sound stupid?”

“No,” Nicola said. “But it does sound exactly like something you would say.”

“So it does sound stupid,” Adam said, a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth.

Nicola picked up a throw pillow and swatted at him, resulting in a burst of laughter from Adam.

But then Nicola gnawed on her lip, a surefire sign that she had something to tell him.

“What is it?” Adam asked, snatching the pillow away and rearing back as though he might hit her with it if she didn’t answer. “No lying, Nikki. We’ve got to put up a unified front out here.”

“It’s just…” Nicola kept gnawing, so long that Adam thought he might go crazy waiting for her to spit it out. “I’m worried you don’t really believe me. About what I saw out there in the woods. It was real, Adam. It was like something out of a nightmare, but I know I was awake.”

“After that freaky-as-hell weather and getting my hand nearly bitten off by a badger or whatever, I’m not writing anything off,” Adam said.

“It wasn’t a badger, Adam. You know that.”

“A wolf, then. Do they have wolves here?”

“It wasn’t that either,” Nicola said, slamming the wardrobe shut. She took two sharp breaths through her nose in that exercise her therapist had taught her. Adam didn’t understand the finer points of Nicola’s emotional regulation troubles, but he knew she was working on managing the outbursts.

He paused to think his next words through more carefully.

Nicola was undeniably prone to flights of fancy.

She had once put away two wines in quick succession at a holiday party and decided that she could see angels dancing in the light of his tiny Christmas tree.

But that didn’t mean she was wrong about this, and it didn’t mean that everything Eileen had told them was a lie either.

Adam didn’t quite believe in the faery angle, but he certainly believed in places that had bad energy, or families that couldn’t break free from an ouroboros cycle of misery so all-consuming it felt supernatural.

There was something going on here, whether it was swamp gas or a trick of the light or roaming wild animals or, maybe, even something supernatural.

Something to explain the way he had felt standing at the mouth of the cave, like every single one of his atoms was on fire.

Like he was being pulled forward by a force his body responded to even as his mind rebelled.

“I’ll keep my eyes peeled for anything creepy. If you see anything else, let me know. Let’s just not jump to conclusions until we’re sure, okay?”

“Okay,” Nicola said, taking one more deep breath. “Thanks for believing me.”

“I always believe you,” Adam scoffed, like he was irritated by her doubt. Not like it was a testament to his unwavering devotion.

Nicola gave him a golden smile, and for a brief, flickering moment, Adam felt at home.