Page 31 of Savage Blooms (Unearthly Delights #1)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Adam

Adam didn’t follow Nicola as she stormed off down the hall, and he told himself that he didn’t care if she caught pneumonia out in the grounds.

If she wanted to have a meltdown out on the moors like one of her Gothic romance heroines, so be it.

The tightness in his chest was just anger because she was being impossible.

And the pain in his jaw from grinding his teeth was just from sleeping so deeply after that late night.

Adam dressed and drifted down the master staircase, moving a little slower than usual.

He looked up at the portraits he had admired so many times, wondering what it would look like if his grandfather’s face had been captured in oils.

Wondering why his grandfather had ever left this place, and why he had never heard about a sister named Arabella, or about any family at all.

Nicola’s warning burned in the back of his brain, reminding him that he didn’t have the whole picture. There was probably something here he had missed.

Adam pushed away the thought as he made his way to the ground floor.

Sometimes, good things just happened. There didn’t have to be an ulterior motive or a cosmic scale being rebalanced.

Sometimes, families grew apart from each other then they reunited.

It was the oldest story in the world, and it didn’t have to have a twist ending.

Adam wandered into the kitchen, expecting Finley and Eileen to have already finished their breakfast, but instead he found Eileen alone, her shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows, her hands covered in flour.

She was trying to pry up the gelatinous dough spread out on the counter with a bench scraper.

“Morning,” Adam said with a chuckle. “What are you up to?”

Eileen started, then pressed a flour-dusted hand to her throat while she caught her breath.

“You scared me. I thought you wouldn’t be up so early.”

“It’s nearly ten,” Adam said, nodding at the clock. “Pretty late in the day, actually.”

“Oh,” she said, looking down at the various items spread over the counter.

Adam spotted walnuts soaking in a ceramic bowl, butter chopped into irregular cubes softening in a dish, and some sort of poultry defrosting in the sink while still wrapped in butcher’s paper and twine.

That didn’t even cover the utensils, scattered around the kitchen like shrapnel from a cannon blast, and the various plates and cutting boards, of which Eileen had already dirtied a dozen.

“I must have lost track of time. I’m not used to cooking big meals like this. Thank God I started early.”

“What’s the occasion?” Adam asked. “Had a hankering for something more than eggs and toast?”

“You’re the occasion,” she said, like it was the simplest thing in the world. “I gave up hopes of ever having a family years ago. You’re nothing short of a miracle.”

Adam felt suddenly dizzy, like Eileen had poured half a bottle of her cooking wine right down his throat.

Being looked upon with any sort of approval from Eileen, spoiled and beautiful and hard to please, was heady.

But being looked at like this, like he was the answer to her every fervent, secret prayer, was intoxicating.

“Um,” he said. What else could he possibly say in response to that? “Can I help?”

“Certainly,” Eileen said, with a wide, dazzling grin.

“What are we making?”

“Duck with rosemary jus and minced nut stuffing, yeast rolls, and a salad with radishes from the garden? Unless that’s not enough?”

“I think it will be plenty,” Adam said, sidling up next to her at the kitchen counter. “You didn’t have to do something like this just for me.”

“It’s a celebration for all of us. After all, you’re only reunited with a great cousin once, right?”

She sliced the dough into portions, then deposited a lump of would-be-roll into his hands and began to instruct him in shaping the bread.

Adam tried not to lose track of what he was doing, but he kept getting pulled back into her bottomless dark eyes, or gazing at her inviting mouth.

She stood with her hip pressed against him, the scent of her skin and her makeup and her iris perfume cutting through the cooking smells, and if he wasn’t careful – or rather, if he was very wicked – he could see right down the open collar of her shirt.

Adam couldn’t tell if learning that he and Eileen – legally speaking if not genetically so – were related worsened his attraction to her or abated it.

It was fucked up for his very not-platonic feelings about Eileen to be so tangled in his overwhelming feelings of relief and joy at being reunited with a lost relative, but they only got more tangled the longer he looked at her.

He wanted to hold her hand and listen to her tell him everything about her life up until the point they met, and he wanted to lift her up onto the counter and push her pencil skirt up around her hips and kiss her pussy until she cried and, most strangely and most powerfully of all, he wanted to drop his head to her shoulder and weep.

It wasn’t technically incest, he reminded himself. They were barely related at all, and didn’t share a single strand of DNA. This was fine. He was going to be fine.

He managed to get the rolls into the oven without burning himself or committing any sort of sex crime, and Eileen seemed so proud of having completed the task that he didn’t even point out that the rolls should probably go in last, not first. Nicola came through the kitchen door just in time to see Eileen feed Adam a bite of the minced nut stuffing, which featured too much mace but was otherwise very good.

Nicola shook the drops of rain, which had just begun to patter against the window, from her hair and sloughed off her coat.

“It smells good in here,” she said, to Eileen, not to Adam. “But sort of like burning. Is something in the oven?”

Eileen swore loudly and wrenched open the oven door, leaning down to rescue the rolls.

Adam tried to catch Nicola’s eye to no avail.

She didn’t look upset any more, but her eyes were rimmed red from crying, and she was making a point not to acknowledge him.

He had been on the receiving end of this silent treatment often enough to know it could last minutes or days.

This was exactly why Adam had never dated Nicola. She liked to wring her hands and weep about how people weren’t kind enough to her, but if you pissed her off, even accidentally, she was cruel as anyone else.

“No need to worry!” Eileen said brightly, as though everyone was holding their breath to see how her bread would come out. “They’re salvageable! Just more browned than I intended. Hello, sparrow. Been out for a bit of fresh air?”

“I walked to the ocean,” Nicola said, sitting down at the kitchen table.

She still surveyed Eileen with suspicion, but she looked a bit chastened, like she had come to the conclusion that she had been too hasty earlier in labeling Eileen a villain.

What sort of villian baked bread for her houseguests, after all?

“Just needed to stretch my legs and think.”

“That’s what walks are good for. Did you see Finley when you were out there?”

“No, I haven’t seen Finley all morning.”

“Hmm,” Eileen said, disapprovingly. “Neither have I.”

“Can I help?” Nicola asked. “This looks… involved.”

“It’s fun,” Eileen corrected. “And yes, you may. Chop those radishes for me, will you? And wash those spring onions while you’re at it. You’re on salad duty with Adam. I’m going to see if Finley is in the library.”

She stalked out of the room in search of her groundskeeper, leaving Adam to chop vegetables with Nicola in icy silence. This could go on for an eternity if he didn’t at least try to get through to her, so he took a risk and made a joke.

“Looks like you didn’t freeze to death out there after all.”

“I didn’t want to give you the satisfaction,” Nicola sniffed, but then she glanced at him, treating him to the privilege of her gaze.

She was still angry with him, that much was obvious. But maybe they could salvage the day together.

“Good, because I would have been bored without you. Besides, what’s the point of coming into a mysterious family if there’s no one to keep you humble about it?”

Nicola snorted. It was almost a laugh.

“What do you need me for when you have Eileen to show you the old money ropes?”

“Nobody’s said anything about money yet. And I like Eileen. Maybe I even like her a lot. But she’s not you. No one is.”

Nicola looked up at him, eyes soft and shining, and now she was the one who had him feeling tangled up inside.

She was his best friend, and they absolutely should not under any circumstances do anything as stupid as hooking up, but he had never in his life felt more grateful for her.

A vision of slipping his hand down the waistband of her jeans and showing her just how grateful he was came to him just as easily as that vision of lifting Eileen onto the counter had.

“Found him with his nose in a book, as usual,” Eileen said, striding back into the kitchen with Finley close behind.

Finley was dressed for the house today, not the grounds, in a cable-knit green sweater that made him look debonair.

Adam caught himself staring at the way it hugged Finley’s pecs, then he dropped his eyes into the salad.

He was going insane. He needed to get laid, or go for a long hard run, or discover religion and chastity along with it, anything to help him manage all the unruly, confusing desire inside him.

He was so horny he wasn’t even sure exactly who or what it was he wanted, he just knew he wanted, so badly that it ached.

“In my defense, it was a very interesting book,” Finley replied. He scrubbed his hands clean in the sink, mindful to avoid the duck.

“Maritime history is interesting?” Eileen scoffed.

“Very, when lighthouse keepers go missing and are never found again. Do you know what happened in the Flannan Isles in 1900?”

Finley filled them all in on what he had learned about the strange incident that had happened off the coast of the Outer Hebrides, a chilling tale that made time pass quicker and reminded Adam of one of his mother’s true-crime podcasts.

Finley had a nice voice for storytelling, low and smooth, and he didn’t need to raise it to have everyone in the kitchen hanging on his every word.

By the time his story was done, it was time to set the table.

By then, Nicola had begun to laugh along with Adam’s jokes and shoot him the occasional smile, and Eileen was soaring high on the triumph of having successfully not burned the house down in pursuit of dinner, and Finley was grinning at the rise his spooky story had gotten out of all of them.

As they laid out forks and knives in the formal dining room (Eileen insisted the occasion called for it), their cooperation felt dangerously stable, like something that might last past the week, or even past the spring. It felt, Adam realized with a pang in his chest, like they were a family.

When Eileen disappeared to change out of her flour-stained clothes for dinner, Nicola took her leave to put on something more festive as well.

This left Adam standing awkwardly with Finley in the kitchen, making a show of measuring the internal temperature of the duck for far longer than was necessary, just so he would have something to do with his hands.

Finley examined his nails, which were already scrubbed spotless, and just about the moment Adam was working up the courage to be the one to break the awkward silence, Nicola came back into the room.

She looked as pretty as he had ever seen her, maybe even more so, if that were possible. She wore the one dress she had brought with her to Scotland, a confection of floral ruffles with a short hemline that showed off her creamy thighs. No shoes, no stockings, just little white socks.

Adam stared at her, a damning beat too long, but Finley and Nicola were too busy staring at each other to notice.

“Eileen will be right down,” Nicola said, cheeks dusted with pink. “I’m gonna go sit; see you both in there.”

As she disappeared, Finley and Adam shared a glance.

Adam wasn’t sure what exactly that glance meant, but it felt warm and heavy, like a commanding hand settling onto the back of his neck.

The look was only broken by Finley reaching around Adam to pluck up a bottle of claret from the counter and stride after Nicola.

Adam, who had always been one for adventure even when it wasn’t wise, squared his shoulders and followed Finley into the dining room.