Page 27 of Savage Blooms (Unearthly Delights #1)

“Never mind,” Nicola said, picking up her book and opening it up to a random page as though she were actually reading it. “It was just an idea. Adam, if you aren’t up for it—”

“I’m up for it,” Adam snapped. Was he totally terrified of what a kink lesson from Finley might entail? Sure. Was he going to back down now, when Nicola was clearly trying to get a rise out of him? Absolutely not.

“It isn’t up to Adam,” Finley said, directed at Nicola. He spoke to her sternly, like she was his to command, and Nicola snapped her mouth shut as though Finley had just gagged her. “It’s up to Eileen.”

Finley leaned down and began talking to Eileen in a low, quick voice, the words impossible to make out. Eileen nodded and responded back in a whisper, gazing up at him.

Then Finley nodded and said, “Eileen sleeps better after a scene anyway. I can show you a wee something, nothing inappropriate, if she’s willing to demonstrate. Does that sound all right?”

“Yeah,” Adam said, voice too bright, too eager. He hadn’t even known he had wanted this, but now, it was searingly obvious to him that he had been thinking about nothing but this since that first night at Craigmar.

“Stay on the ground,” Finley said to Eileen, pressing two fingers into her shoulder in a way that seemed deliberate, like some kind of code. “Adam, will you stand up?”

Adam did as he was told, and Finley held out a hand to him, helping him to his feet. It was only a moment of contact, but it was unexpected, and Finley’s fingers were still warm from trailing through Eileen’s silky hair. That instant of touch made it harder to breathe.

What the fuck was he doing?

Nicola tossed her book aside and leaned forward, studying the scene-in-progress with an academic’s eye. Or it would have been academic, were it not for the peaks of her nipples through her thin shirt.

Adam came to a stop six feet in front of Eileen, and Finley pressed a hand between Adam’s shoulder blades, straightening his spine. He was slouching, just like always.

“Feet shoulder width apart,” Finley said. “You’re in charge here, so stand like it.”

Adam didn’t even have a pithy quip to offer in response. It was so easy to do what he was told, when Finley spoke to him like that.

“Isla,” Finley said, using that pet name that Adam had come to suspect carried the same weight as any formal kink diminutive. “Crawl.”

Eileen crawled. Hands and knees, nice and slow, before she came to rest sitting back on her heels in front of him.

She only crossed a short distance, but those seconds stretched on into eternity.

She looked up at Adam, no doubt parsing the wild panic in his eyes, and gave him a mean little smirk, like he wasn’t man enough to handle her.

Then, as though remembering her manners, she dropped her eyes to the floor.

Finley clapped Adam on the shoulder, then took his seat.

“You’re in charge now,” Finley said, gesturing broadly at Eileen as if Adam would have any idea what to do with her. “Go ahead.”

This had sounded fun ten seconds ago; now, Adam sort of wanted to die. He felt horribly, searingly alive, but he also sort of wanted to die.

“What do I do?” he asked.

“Whatever you want to do,” Finley said, like he was telling Adam to hurry up and pick a beer at the pub, not decide how to handle Finley’s girlfriend, who also happened to be housing and feeding Adam and Nicola.

“Don’t get too handsy, obviously, this is just a dry run in case you want to do something like this in the future with someone else.

The point is to get comfortable being in control. So. What do you want to do?”

“I want to do… what she wants me to do?”

“That’s very service top of you,” Finley said with a smile that edged right up against patronizing, sparking that instinct in Adam to get physical with Finley in a way that was becoming more and more confusing with each passing day, “but the impetus is wrong. What Eileen wants – I can promise you this – is for you to enact your own will on her. She wants you to make good use of her, in whatever way pleases you best. Isn’t that right, Isla? ”

Eileen glowed in the light of the fire, especially when she looked back to nod at Finley, eyes shining with perfect trust. This, Adam realized in a lightning bolt of insight from heaven, was not about him.

It wasn’t even about Nicola, who was watching them with puerile delight.

It was about Eileen, surrendering herself to another man at Finley’s request, and Finley, holding her in safety and love without even touching her.

It was a trust exercise between them, just another game, with Adam functioning as nothing more and nothing less than a piece on the board.

It should have been insulting, to realize they were both manipulating him for their own inscrutable pleasure.

Instead, Adam had never been harder.

“What if she doesn’t like what I do?” Adam asked, swallowing through a dry throat.

“Eileen likes having her boundaries pushed,” Finley responded. “And if you do something she really doesn’t like, she’ll use her safeword. What’s your word, Isla?”

“Geranium,” she said obediently.

Adam flexed and unflexed his hands at his side for a long moment.

Then he reached out and very gently tipped Eileen’s chin up with his fingers.

He expected her to resist, or maybe even burst out laughing, revealing that this was an elaborate prank.

But instead, she obeyed, exposing her pale throat and the thrumming pulse in her neck. Adam barely had to apply any pressure.

Finley made an approving sound from the couch but said nothing. That sound, little more than a rumbling hum, dropped right into the pit of Adam’s stomach. Moving of their own accord, Adam’s fingers trailed slowly up Eileen’s chin, coming to brush against her lips.

All he wanted was to touch her right there, very softly, on that mouth the color of a rosebud. He just wanted to brush his index finger over her lower lip and memorize the sensation so he could turn it over again and again in his dirtiest late-night fantasies. But then Eileen did the unthinkable.

She parted her lips, wrapped them around his index finger, and sucked.

Adam heard a sharp inhale as she did so, and he was so delirious with lust and that new, strange, tight feeling in his chest that flared up whenever Finley told him what to do, that it took him a second to realize it was Nicola who had gasped.

“Does her mouth feel good?” Finley asked, and there was no way he wasn’t getting off on this too. There was no way everyone in this room didn’t know exactly what they were doing.

In response, Adam slipped his middle finger into Eileen’s mouth too, making her moan with delight.

The sound vibrated through his palm as he stroked in and out of her mouth, once and then twice.

He used his thumb to smear saliva over her lips, leaving them shining and wet.

Then he pushed in again, deeper this time, all the way to the back of her throat.

It was a mindless impulse, and it took him a moment to realize exactly what it was he wanted from her, apart from the obvious thrill of the sensation of her tongue.

He wanted her undone, he realized with a kick through his cock. He wanted her gasping and ruined.

“Very nice,” Finley said, and Adam wondered if he could come like this, his fingers in Eileen’s mouth, Finley’s rich, dark voice praising them both.

Adam had no idea what was going to happen next. Even though he was supposedly in control of this scene, as Finley had called it, he felt totally helpless against the riptide that was gathering and pulling them all under.

But then he glanced over Eileen’s shoulder and saw something that made him surface from the dark waves with a bruised noise, somewhere between a gasp and a groan.

“What is it?” Nicola asked, already on her feet.

The haze of the scene dissolved around them as Nicola came up behind him and put her hand on his shoulder.

Eileen rose to her feet, a little unsteady, her pupils blown and her mouth wet, but herself once again.

Even Finley was up in an instant, eyebrows drawn together in worry.

Adam stared at the small framed photo on the gallery wall behind Eileen, the one he had looked past a dozen times before.

It was a photograph of Eileen’s grandmother at Christmas, school-aged, beaming, with her dark hair in curls and a porcelain doll hugged to her chest. The background was blurry, but there was something there in the corner of the image that knocked the wind from Adam’s lungs.

It was a little boy off to the far right, lifting up his hand to grasp at a bulbous ornament on the mammoth Christmas tree.

He must have been eight or nine, and he might have been some child of a houseguest, except it was impossible not to notice the exceptionally fair hair, the strong nose, and the cornflower-blue eyes that Adam saw every time he looked in the mirror.

Eileen followed his line of sight, identified the photograph, and then strode over with all the determination fitting her station.

She plucked the picture from the wall and, upon realizing it was stapled shut on the back, whacked the photo against the edge of her father’s desk to crack the frame.

Then, sliding the weathered photo from the mess of shattered wood and broken glass, Eileen held it up to the light.

Adam pressed in beside her, Finley and Nicola close behind. It was the nearest they had all been to each other, huddling around a picture to identify a ghost from the past.

Eileen turned the photo over. On the back, in spindly antiquated script, someone had written: Arabella and Robbie, Christmas Eve, 1970.