Page 39 of Savage Blooms (Unearthly Delights #1)

Adam probably should have played it casual. He should have stuck to something safe, like saying it excited him just to kiss her, which wasn’t exactly a lie. Or he could play it a little more louche, pretend like he was down for anything if she was, which wasn’t exactly the truth.

Adam wasn’t totally sure what he wanted from Eileen, but last night had certainly brought a few things that excited him into sharp relief.

“It excites me to hold you down,” he said. “Maybe even to hurt you. But it also excites me when you tell me what to do. Especially when you’re mean about it. I guess those two things don’t really go together though, do they?”

Eileen studied him with those black eyes, hard and glittering, like he was a stallion she was deciding whether to take for a ride or not.

“You’d be surprised,” she said, and something about the weight in her voice took him from half hard to so painfully hard he could barely see straight.

What the hell was happening to him out here, with the memory of society’s rules and morality so far away?

“I’m a hard guy to surprise,” Adam blustered.

Eileen laughed at him. Laughed, like she could see all the way through him and out the other side.

A gust of wind rippled through her dark hair, laughing along with her.

Genuine frustration grew inside Adam alongside his sexual angst. Is this why Finley always seemed at the end of his rope with Eileen?

Always on the verge of some outburst of intimate violence that left Eileen grinning and triumphant and Finley debased, even with his hand around her throat?

“You don’t want me to tell you what to do. It would frighten you.”

“Why do you think that?” he challenged.

“We aren’t cut from the same cloth, you and I,” she said, smile falling away. “I’m unkind as winter, when you get right down to it. You’re warm. Like summer. You can’t help but be kind, even in your cruelest moments. I’ve seen it.”

Eileen was talking in spirals again, in circuitous riddles that seemed to lead towards some greater truth just to arch out into incomprehensibility again.

But Adam was determined to get closer to the heart of Eileen this time, even if he never found his way through her labyrinth.

Even if all trying to solve that labyrinth did was draw him deeper inside.

“I can be cruel,” he said, putting steel behind the words. Surely, this is what she wanted. This must be what got her off. That was fine with Adam, so long as she welcomed his participation.

A cold sensation crawled across his skin, that sensation of being watched. Adam pushed it aside. He was being paranoid. And he wasn’t going to choke now, not when Eileen so obviously wanted him to take charge.

Eileen glanced over her shoulder into the woods, took a deep breath, and then came to her own conclusion.

“I’m sure you’ll learn how, with time,” she said, suddenly sad in a way that nearly took Adam’s breath away.

He had only ever seen anguish like that in museums, in the eyes of painted martyrs.

But then the sadness was gone, replaced with a dark mirth that promised exactly the sort of transgressions Adam had been hoping for since he laid eyes on Eileen.

“But if you want to show me how mean you can be, I’ll let you try. ”

That was all the permission Adam needed. He slid his hand into her hair, tightened his fingers in the tousled waves, and pulled her into a merciless kiss.

It was inexpert, and Adam’s palms were clammy with nervous sweat, but Eileen didn’t seem to mind the way his grip shook before it steadied, the way he knocked his nose against hers as he worked her mouth open with his own.

She just made a low, animalic noise of delight, then kissed him back, harder than Adam thought people were capable of kissing.

Eileen slipped her cool hands up the back of his shirt, dug her pearlescent nails in at the top of his shoulder blades, and raked them all the way down to his hips.

Adam hissed in pain, instinctively breaking the kiss and grabbing her hands by the wrists.

Hard, like he wasn’t playing a game with her at all.

“Fuck, Eileen,” he said, wounded as a child who had put their hand out for a sweet and been given a tadpole. “That hurt.”

“Then hurt me back,” she challenged, pressing her warm, lithe body up against his. “Show me how angry you are with me. Or are you too good to get your revenge?”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Adam huffed, his head swimming with contradictions. “I mean, I do, but not like that, not for real, I—”

“If you want to fuck me, you’ll fuck me in the way I like, exactly as I tell you,” Eileen said, every word as clear and cold as ice.

“If I don’t like the way you fuck me, I’ll say geranium, and you will stop immediately.

You can also stop at any time of your own free will, but if you choose to keep going, you will do as I say until I am entirely satisfied. Do you understand?”

Adam stared at her for a long while, still grasping her wrists tight enough to bruise. He struggled to catch his breath and order his thoughts, to sort through all these rules of engagement that felt so needlessly complex and yet thrilling at the same time.

“What do I get?” he pressed, gathering his courage with a deep breath in the same way he did before tackling the high dive. “If I satisfy you entirely?”

“Permission to do it again,” she replied with a wide grin. “Now are you going to do what you’ve so obviously wanted to do since you arrived here or are we going to chastely walk arm in arm back to the house?”

Adam knew an out when he heard it, and he knew, deep in the part of his gut that alerted him to danger, that he should take this one.

Eileen unsettled him, on the same visceral level the mirrored flash of animal eyes in the woods at night unsettled him, but he was still drawn to her powerfully and undeniably, and he was drunk on the small taste of power she had given him, heightened to delirious effect by the total surrender she demanded of him.

“Tell me you want this,” he said, edging right up to the end of the diving board. He took Eileen’s face in his hands. “Be honest.”

“I want this,” she said quietly. “More than that, I need you in a way I don’t think I’ve ever needed anyone. So much it frightens me. Is that honest enough for you?”

“Yes,” Adam said, and sank his teeth into her plush lower lip.

They kissed like they were at war, Eileen surprisingly strong in his arms as she bit and scratched and giggled at him, like all of his efforts to overpower her were little more than cute.

Adam was soon breathless, heat spreading across the back of his neck, but he was determined to beat her at this game.

He would not back down now, not when he had her lithe twisting form in his arms, not when she was grinning at him with all her teeth and smothering her gasps like she didn’t even want to give him the satisfaction of hearing her moan.

Eileen pulled him down onto the earth, or maybe it was Adam who wrestled her onto her knees in the grass, it was so hard to tell.

The world was a flurry of breath and bared teeth, so enveloping that even as that dreadful certainty that they were being watched grew in his stomach, his arousal eclipsed it.

Somehow, Adam ended up kneeling behind Eileen with an arm bracketed around her waist, his free hand flipping up her skirt so he could grip her ass.

“Is this what you want?” he challenged, somewhere between talking dirty and begging for her approval. “You want it hard, in the dirt?”

Eileen only laughed, like he was finally starting to understand her.

Adam yanked her simple black thong and fumbled with the drawstring of his sweats.

Eileen arched back into him, making impatient noises until his stiff cock slid between her thighs.

Adam held her tight against him, refusing to enter her for a few more agonizing moments as he retrieved a condom from his back pocket.

He somehow managed to get it open with his teeth, a feat he had never managed before.

“Are you going to fuck me or are you just going to talk about it?” Eileen needled as he rolled the condom on. “I’m getting bored, Lancaster.”

Adam made a desperate noise, nudged her knees wider, and sank into her up to the hilt.

“Yes,” Eileen ground out, like she had been waiting for this for a week, for a lifetime.

Adam kept one arm around her waist and looped the other around her shoulders and collarbones, pressing her so tight against him she could have never hoped to escape.

Adam seriously doubted she wanted to, but something about holding her right where he wanted her, right where it felt best to thrust inside her over and over again, wiped any coherent thought from his brain.

Eileen surrendered herself utterly, even holding her skirt up for him to grant him easier access, even though the pebbles beneath them were undoubtedly digging into her bare knees.

She presented herself to him like a spoil of war, as though he was the king enjoying his tribute.

The rougher and more selfish he was, the louder her noises of pleasure got, until she was rubbing herself between her legs with three fingers.

Adam slid his hand down her belly and covered her hand with his own, applying more pressure than she could possibly give herself.

He worried for a moment that he might be hurting her in a way she didn’t like, but then she tipped her head back against his shoulder and moaned in earnest. She was close, and Adam was hurdling towards his own climax embarrassingly fast. He wanted to get her there, wanted to satisfy her enough that she welcomed him back into her body again and again.

Adam yanked her collar to the side and sank his teeth into the juncture of her shoulder, hard enough to leave teeth marks.

Eileen let out a cry loud enough to startle a rock dove from a nearby tree, and clenched down around him.

Adam’s own orgasm rushed up like a wave to drag him down into the depths and he spilled into her with a choked gasp, but Eileen didn’t relent.

She bucked back against him until she was entirely spent, until Adam was so overstimulated he was on the verge of begging for her mercy.

The muscles in his thighs were little better than jelly by the time it was done, so he was relieved when Eileen pulled him down into the grass with her.

He didn’t care about the damp, cold ground, or the rocks beneath his body.

He was wrapped in the smell of crushed moss and sweet rain and sex, draped in Eileen’s arms.

“Thank you,” she said, pressing the words into his mouth like she was pressing her signet into an oath. “You did so well. I had to know you could give me what I needed.”

“I’ll give you whatever you ask,” Adam said, the post-coital haze intoxicating enough to make him terrifyingly honest.

“I know you will,” Eileen purred, stretching out underneath him like a contented cat. “You’re such a good little soldier in bed.”

Adam probably wouldn’t be recovered enough for another round for at least twenty minutes, but his cock kicked weakly at her praise, eager to be used by her regardless.

“Was that mean enough for you?” he teased, trying to regain some sense of normalcy, of control. But nothing felt normal around Eileen, and he would probably have better luck trying to maintain control of a roiling Highland storm.

“Yes,” she said, kissing him very softly, almost shyly, like she was embarrassed to be caught acting tenderly. “But I still think you’re kind, deep down.”

Then, the cuddling was over. She smoothed her skirt down over her thighs, heedless of the mess it hid, and stuck out a hand to Adam. He let her pull him to his shaky feet, the world spinning around him.

Eileen’s face hardened suddenly, snapping over Adam’s shoulder as though she was displeased by an intrusion. That certainty that they weren’t alone flooded back in a sickly rush. Had Finley been out here the whole time? Had Nicola?

He followed Eileen’s gaze into the forest, but there was no one there. There were only shadows, so dark and deep they seemed to move of their own accord. A tree branch shuddered and shook, but no hare ran out from the underbrush, and no family of birds rustled in the leaves.

“We should go,” she said. “Walk me back to the house?”

She extended her arm like a regency gentleman, like Adam hadn’t just knocked her to the ground and fucked her in the muddy grass. Adam took her arm, grateful for the steadying touch, and let her lead him away from the mushroom ring and back towards the manor.

He couldn’t help but look over his shoulder most of the way, however, as that ambient sense of presence followed them like a shadow.

He also couldn’t quite smother the instinct in the back of his brain screaming at him to run.