Page 20 of Savage Blooms (Unearthly Delights #1)

CHAPTER TWELVE

Eileen

Something about the excitement of the morning triggered one of Eileen’s unpredictable migraines, so she retired to her room to sleep it off.

As it turned out, she slept for four hours.

When she finally emerged in the late afternoon, her eyes puffy from sleep and her hair lazily tied into a ponytail with a ribbon, the sun outside her windows was low in the sky.

Eileen felt as though she were a rumpled female Christ, emerging from her tomb after a sleep like death.

She hoped her guests were settling in and learning their way around the manor.

Finley would no doubt have helped them, as grumpy as he might be about new blood at Craigmar.

Finley was often grumpy, so that didn’t bother Eileen much.

He always went along with what she wanted, bad attitude or no.

And she hadn’t missed how he had done his best to protect Nicola from Eileen’s designs, or the way he had thrown his arms around Adam to haul him bodily back from that cave.

Finley had never had anyone else to defend besides Eileen, nor had he ever had a single person in the world who could be relied on to come to his defense as sure as he came to hers. They had only ever had each other.

But now, the world had expanded. The knife’s-edge balance of Craigmar, so painstakingly maintained by Eileen and Finley’s games up until this point, was tottering under the weight of Adam and Nicola.

Eileen had worked very hard to cultivate ironclad privacy at Craigmar, so she and Finley could be left in peace, but she did, occasionally, find herself lonely.

She knew Finley must as well, from his occasional ventures into town to chat up someone at a pub and sometimes even go home with them at the end of the night.

New people in the house, much less pretty young people, weren’t the worst thing in the world, especially not when it came to what Eileen had in mind.

Dr Dasgupta had asked her during one of his house calls why she never left Craigmar. He had tried to convince her to go somewhere warmer for a season, to breathe gentler air and get the sun on her face. Eileen had brushed him off with a fib about her delicate health.

It wasn’t that Eileen didn’t want to leave Craigmar, that she didn’t dream of sailing away to some new and glorious country.

It was simply that she couldn’t leave, not without bringing ruination upon them all.

She was pretty sure she could, technically, walk off the grounds without turning to dust. But she hadn’t been beyond the boundaries of the estate since her parents died, because there were no other Kirkfoyles left now to sit grim watch for their neighbors under the ground.

She barely even went into Wyke, even though that was technically within the bounds of her family’s land and therefore covered by the treaty, because she didn’t like risking it, and because she didn’t like the people in town much either.

Dr Dasgupta might have been a friend of her father’s, and he was a good man, but he wasn’t family. He could never understand the truth. So Eileen always lied.

But now, even though Eileen could not leave Craigmar to find diversions, entertainment had come to her. It was like when she was sick in her pre-teen years, laid up for days at a time, and her mother would put on shadow puppet shows for her at the end of her bed.

Adam Lancaster wasn’t a puppet, exactly.

But Eileen still very much enjoyed pulling his strings.

Eileen paused in her mirror to wipe the mascara smudges from under her eyes and to straighten the iron badge on her lapel, then she went in search of her impossible American.

She found him on the stairs, staring up at a painting of her father.

Eileen had learned how to creep through the house undetected at a very young age, and effortlessly dodged creaking floorboards as she approached.

As she peered down at Adam from the upstairs landing, she saw he was unaware of her presence.

Eileen drank in the sight of him, his strong profile and long pale lashes and well-sculpted mouth. He looked so different from her, from Finley, from any of the handful of people she regularly saw. She could get used to looking at a face like that, maybe even for a very long while.

Despite his laid-back mannerisms and Midwestern accent, in that moment, with his shoulders back and his chin tipped up to admire the painting, he looked like a prince. Like one of Arthur’s knights who had gone searching for the grail and found a girl instead.

“That’s my father,” Eileen said, making herself known. “He was very handsome, and very kind.”

Adam’s blue eyes cut over to her, and Eileen’s heart stuttered.

He really was lovely, in that arrestingly fair way that read more Scandinavian than Scottish.

Eileen mentally chided herself as she made her way down the steps towards him.

This was a mutually beneficial arrangement of her design, nothing more.

She had to remind herself of that, lest her heart run away with her.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Adam said.

“It was years ago,” Eileen replied, coming to a stop on the step above him. “The hurt has scarred over by now. But I appreciate your condolences.”

“Finley said you had a headache. Are you feeling better?”

“As better as I’m liable to feel anytime soon.”

Eileen gazed up at her father, who shared her porcelain skin and dark hair, but with warm hazel eyes so unlike Eileen’s piercing black gaze.

Her eyes, her father had once told her, were a little piece of the moonless sky from the night she was born.

They didn’t come from her father or her mother, they were entirely hers and hers alone, and she was the first Kirkfoyle in generations with eyes like that.

Eileen had wondered, ever since she was a girl, if her eyes marked her as different somehow, doomed by a story that had been set in motion long before she was born.

Her eyes had always felt like an omen, fitting for a girl born wearing the legacy of a dying family around her neck like an albatross.

“How are you finding your rooms?” Eileen asked Adam, reminding herself to stay present and not drift off into memories. “Comfortable, I hope.”

“Very comfortable. We appreciate it.”

“Then why does it sound like you’re about to apologize for something?”

Adam stepped up onto Eileen’s stair, and suddenly he was taller than her again. He was taller even than Finley, who was only a hair’s breadth taller than Eileen, and she felt slightly loomed over as Adam looked down at her.

This was, for Eileen, not an unpleasant sensation at all. Her heartbeat quickened.

“Do you really think I ended up here for a reason?” Adam asked, pitching his voice low as though he were afraid of being overheard. “That we’re supposed to help each other?”

“I don’t think, I know. Have you ever felt the truth of something like that, deep in your bones?”

“Yes,” Adam said quietly, with such a naked vulnerability that Eileen could have kissed him.

Finley stalked past at the bottom of the stairs, then paused as though struck by lightning as he looked up at Eileen and Adam. Eileen casually took another step down the stairs, putting a little more breathing room between her and Adam.

“How are things, Finney?” she asked, as though she hadn’t been caught on the edge of a dalliance.

“Well enough,” Finley said, giving Eileen a hard look before continuing his determined walk towards the library.

Eileen sighed heavily.

“He’s in a mood. I should make sure he’s all right.”

“Did I do something wrong?” Adam asked, craning his neck to see further down the hallway Finley had disappeared into.

“Besides having the audacity to be good-looking and friendly?” Eileen said, slapping him companionably on the shoulder like they were old school chums. “Not at all. Why don’t you do a bit of exploring before dinner? Then you and I can start digging through those records.”

With that, she was gone, jogging down the stairs to go find her dearest friend and sometimes tormentor and lover, always lover.

Finley was standing in front of the stack of boxes on her father’s desk, gnawing on his thumbnail.

“Are you pondering the mysteries of cardboard?” Eileen asked, swinging the library door gently shut behind her. There was only one surefire way to make up with Finley in an expedient fashion, and it required privacy. “You can get it at Tesco, I’m told.”

“They’re not going to buy our story,” Finley said, barely looking at her. She didn’t need to ask what he was referring to. It was damn near the only thing they had been talking about – or fighting about – for months.

“Yes, they are,” Eileen said levelly. It was a voice of total authority, the voice she used to talk to her lawyer.

“Adam is going to kill you when he finds out.”

“No he won’t,” Eileen said, walking over to the desk to take one final look at the arrangement of papers. It looked unintentionally messy, perfectly accidental, just as she’d hoped.

Finley came up behind her and wrapped his strong arms around her waist, resting his chin on her shoulder.

He smelled like rain and sweet hay and the greenery of outdoors, and maybe the musty edges of those old books he kept stockpiled in his cottage.

It was sexy and soothing and so perfectly Finley.

Finley let out a big breath, just a little bit shaky. He was wound tight as a pocketwatch.

“You look like a pageboy with your hair tied back like this,” Finley said, nuzzling the ribbon at the nape of her neck. “Like one of those girls who sing the boy parts in operas.”