Page 21 of Savage Blooms (Unearthly Delights #1)

Eileen knew very well that he knew the precise word was contralto, that he was once again downplaying his own intelligence to make her feel better about having him trapped here doing manual labor for all eternity.

It wasn’t that she hadn’t offered to pay to send him back to university after he had been called home at the end of his first semester to care for his ailing father, or that she didn’t keep him in a steady supply of all the books he could want.

It was that Finley’s devotion to her, miserable though it was some days, prevented him from ever abandoning her to Craigmar.

If they were stuck here, he had told her many times before, then they would simply make a heaven of hell together.

The old guilt welled up inside her. Eileen decided to tamp it down with her most tried and true method before it had time to snap her up in its jaws.

“And how would you fuck me?” Eileen asked over her shoulder, a smirk playing at her lips. “If I was your boy?”

It was enticing, imagining Finley’s hand wrapping around the bob of an Adam’s apple in her throat, before sliding down her flat chest to grasp at the hardening length in her trousers.

Eileen could see it so clearly, more clearly than she saw herself in the mirror some days.

It was all too easy to envision what she would look like as a proper heir to Craigmar.

Her father’s wavy hair and her mother’s fair coloring and those dark eyes that were nothing but Eileen, transformed by the merest alteration of genetics into a boy worthy of her family name.

Finley said nothing, merely moved his hands on either side of her to brace her against the desk as he kissed behind her ear.

She could feel his desire, in the hitch of his breath and in the insistent press of his body against hers, but she didn’t know if he was going to take her roleplaying bait or not.

Sometimes he was inexhaustibly creative, an actor’s actor in the bedroom, and other times he got sullen when she asked him to play a part, insisting that he wanted to have her as himself and no one else.

“Would you be rougher?” Eileen pressed, arching back against him. He needed a distraction from his worry. They both did. “Or sweeter?”

She wasn’t sure which one she preferred: the fantasy that Finley might push her harder, driven by the competitive camaraderie of men, or handle her with more care, as intuitively aware of her own limits as he was of his own body. Both possibilities made the pulse pound hard between her legs.

In response, Finley used one hand to tug her trousers and panties down over her ass. She shuddered, her sensitive skin exposed to the draft of the house. When Finley squeezed her upper thigh, still bruised from where he had bitten her in a moment of petulance last week, she let out a moan.

“I’d fuck you like I always have,” he said, the warmth in his otherwise stern voice the only indication that he was playing a part.

She would hardly know he was smiling if she hadn’t been going to bed with him for the better part of a decade.

“Hard and rough, on top of all your father’s furniture, praying I can come before he catches us. ”

Eileen leaned further forward over the ancient desk as Finley unzipped his jeans. She heard him take himself in hand, giving himself a few stokes as he continued to weave a whole world with nothing more than words.

“If you were a boy,” he said, wetting himself by sliding the head of his cock along her entrance.

He would penetrate her only when he was ready, only when she was driven mad with desperation.

“It would be easier to sneak around. I could have taken you out drinking without your mother waiting up all night for us, and I could have sucked you off in the pub toilets while people banged on the door. We could have played sports together without worrying about ripping your pretty dresses, and I could have fucked you for my prize if I won.”

This was what Eileen had been after, Finley’s near-diabolical talent for sexual storytelling. She thanked the godless sky that he liked to read, and that he liked to root around in her mind until he found the perfect imagery to make her whimper.

“Finley,” she gasped, but he silenced her by pushing her down against the wood with a firm hand. Eileen barely had time to notice that the desk still smelled like her father’s favorite fountain pen ink before Finley sheathed himself inside her. It was all hot skin-on-skin union.

They hadn’t bothered with a condom in a long time.

Finley started to fuck her with the jackrabbit rhythm she most often witnessed him applying to himself with his own hand.

There was a selfishness to his relentless pace, a complete disregard for any notion of chivalry, that made heat curl in the base of Eileen’s spine.

He knew how she liked it best, senseless and greedy.

“A boy wouldn’t beg or cry,” Finley rasped, still holding her down. He pressed in tighter, nudging her legs indecently wide so he could find greater purchase inside her. “A boy would hold still, just like that, and be so grateful for this.”

Eileen wanted more than anything to reach between her legs and tip herself over the edge into orgasm, but Finley had left no room for her to do so, and moreover, he didn’t seem to care about her satisfaction right now.

Paradoxically (and probably exactly to Finley’s design), this disregard only got her hotter, making her pant while he took her.

“We could have been best friends, and no one would have ever known anything,” he said, voice tightening along with the muscles in his thighs as he neared his own climax, faster than Eileen would have expected.

Something about this scene was working for him too, or maybe he was just working all the stress from the last few days out of his system, or maybe seeing her with Adam had only made him want her more.

“We could have been friends, and no one would have ever tried to keep us apart.”

Pain shot through Eileen’s chest, chasing the spirals of lust. Finley was good at what he did, but sometimes he pushed too hard. Sometimes, in trying to create a world of fantasy, he uncovered the thorniest of truths instead.

“Inside me,” Eileen ordered. It would have fit the scene better if she had pleaded, but her head was swimming with visions of lives that neither of them would ever live, and disorientation made her grasp for power.

For station. For the little authority that was left to her as the ever-ill girlchild heir to a legacy of rot and ruin.

Finley bucked against her once more, twice, then spilled into her with breathless obedience.

Eileen squeezed her eyes shut and tried to catch her breath. The moment Finley pulled out, that old, aching emptiness opened up in her heart again.

She wondered sometimes if there was a sinkhole inside her, always hungry and never satisfied no matter how much cruelty or pleasure she poured into it.

Finley retrieved a tissue from the desk and gently wiped her clean. Eileen yanked her pants back up over her hips, shrinking away from his touch.

“Why bother?” she asked, mood careening towards dour. “Nothing will come of it, anyway.”

“Eileen,” Finley said with a long-suffering sigh. They had talked about this many, many times. It never got any easier. “It’s not your fault.”

Eileen knew, intellectually, that he was right. Dr Dasgupta had told her as much. She still felt like she was the root cause of their suffering, however.

“In less polite times they would have called me barren,” Eileen said, barking out a laugh as she tightened the ribbon in her hair to prepare for the work she and Adam had ahead of them. “Like I’m some sort of wasteland.”

Ten years of sex between them and three years of trying, really trying, and they still hadn’t been able to conceive.

Finley had done his very best, in the beginning, to pretend like he might be the broken one.

He tried to keep her in good spirits, to insist that they just needed to try harder, in new and exciting positions.

There was no one else he would rather raise a child with, he told her, no one else he would entrust with such a gift.

Moreover, a baby would forestall their doom and keep the Kirkfoyle line strong for at least one generation more.

Then Eileen and Finley could enjoy the happiness they were entitled to, the happiness that had been denied to them by the circumstances of their births and the wishes of Eileen’s family.

They could spend their days chasing a little girl through the heather or lifting up a little boy into the trees so he could pluck the highest apples, not worrying about being overrun with supernatural invaders.

Maybe they would even finally get married, when it was all over and done with.

Eileen had never conceived, of course. Endometriosis, Dr Dasgupta had said, and considerable scarring in the womb.

Eileen didn’t call her condition anything other than what it was: a curse.

“I really hope this works,” she muttered, the satisfied throb between her legs already abating.

Nothing kept her happy for long any more.

Nothing sated her. “I don’t think I can go another year waiting for madness or death to claim me.

I’m tired of wondering if I’m going to fall and break my neck every time I leave the house, or get swallowed up by the earth, or succumb to some other Shakespearean tragedy. ”

“They haven’t killed you yet,” Finley said, echoing the words Eileen always told him every time he worried.

“I hear them more, these days,” she said, gazing out the window.

She wasn’t sure why she was telling him this; it would only make him more anxious.

But Eileen had never been able to keep a single secret from Finley, not one, no matter how ugly.

“Bells out my window, or voices singing in the middle of the night. Calling me underground. Sometimes, I want to listen to them.”

Finley didn’t say anything at all in response. He just walked right up to her, wrapped his arms around her as tight as they would go, and pressed Eileen to his chest. She dug her fingernails into his back and took a deep, shaky breath, blinking away her shameful tears.

“We’re going to find a way through this,” Finley said into her hair. “One way or another. I swear it.”