Page 58 of Savage Blooms (Unearthly Delights #1)

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Robert

Robert Kirkfoyle sulked on the stairs as his sister bid her suitor farewell in the foyer.

It was an old-fashioned word, suitor, but there was no other word for the friend of a family friend who had started hanging around Arabella, always with their parents just a room away tittering over tea about what a perfect match they were.

Robert hadn’t bothered to learn his name: it was Daniel or Darren or something like that, and it didn’t matter anyway, because Arabella would get tired of him soon and stop taking his calls.

Still, Robert couldn’t help but feel a hot protective prick when Arabella let her suitor kiss her on her cheek, or on her mouth, or even on her neck in the few stolen moments after family goodbyes when they thought no one could see.

Robert saw. He always saw what everyone else in the house didn’t want to.

Right now, the suitor was murmuring something to his sister while he hugged her long and lingering, smoothing his hand down the back of her dress to rest right above the curve of her ass. Arabella giggled in response, tossing her hair, which had been curled into gleaming show-pony ringlets.

Robert watched, and he seethed. His sister could do whatever she liked; she was twenty years old.

She could carry on with whoever she wanted, even if it was some too-old square-jawed blockhead from Stirling who could barely carry an interesting conversation and didn’t care about anything eighteen-year-old Robert might have to say.

Arabella could do whatever she pleased. But that didn’t mean Robert had to like it.

Arabella gave her suitor one more kiss and then waved goodbye as he strode off into the rainy night. There had been unseasonable lightning in the distance all evening, along with the rumble of thunder.

A storm was about to break. Robert could feel it.

Arabella all but skipped up the stairs, her silky dress flowing around her long legs. It was flimsy, not suited for the weather, but Robert’s sister somehow never got cold. Even when he shivered, she thrived. Like she was a serpent clad in nothing but gleaming scales.

“Spying again, Robbie?” she asked, pausing on the landing beside him.

“It’s hardly spying if you’re carrying on in plain sight,” he said.

“Well, you’ve always liked to look,” she replied, voice light and airy as she leaned against the banister.

Robert’s chest tightened. They never talked about it, the way she sometimes stripped down to nothing but stockings and panties and changed dresses while he sat on her bed gossiping, the way he always tried to avert his eyes but could never succeed, not completely.

They never talked about all the times they had broken loose from lessons to run out to the loch, peel off all their clothes, and dive into the bracing waters together, a pastime that had felt much more innocent when they were children.

And they certainly hadn’t talked about last week, when Robert had passed by one of the bathrooms to find the door ajar, revealing Arabella lounging in the tub with her hair piled on top of her head and one of their father’s cigarettes smoldering between her fingers.

They hadn’t talked about the way her eyes had flickered to the crack in the door before she had continued as though she were entirely alone, as though Robert wasn’t riveted to the spot, watching.

Watching Arabella run her hand idly over her breasts and over the soft curve of her stomach down into the water, between her legs.

They certainly hadn’t talked about the way she had only arched her back more and rubbed herself more vigorously when he pressed his hand down against his hardening cock.

They hadn’t talked about the way Robert had slipped his hands beneath the waistband of his trousers and stroked himself beneath the thin fabric of his boxers, making her moan.

And they hadn’t talked about how they had stayed like that for a whole damning minute.

Touching themselves with nothing between them but a doorway and a few feet of tiled floor, desperately trying to pretend they weren’t aware of what the other was doing.

But Robert knew she knew. They had grown up together after all, and they both knew damn well how he hung on her every word, how every one of their arguments had an increasing undercurrent of desperation these days.

Like they ached to get a rise out of each other in every conceivable way that didn’t involve touching each other.

Robert knew it was wrong. Just because it wasn’t something the courts could find him guilty of, that didn’t mean it was right, and just because Arabella wasn’t his blood, that didn’t mean she wasn’t his sister. It didn’t mean wanting her wasn’t a sin he could burn for.

But Arabella was all he had ever known, his tormentor and protector, and she had grown up just as lovely as he had grown up curious and strong.

How was he not supposed to love her, when she was so cruel and so clever?

How was he not supposed to long to touch her, with her skin like milk and her hair dark as night?

“Thank God he’s finally gone,” Robert said, steering the conversation into safer waters. “I would have been sick if I had to listen to Mother fawn over him for another minute.”

“Oh, be nice,” Arabella said. “He’s not so bad, you know.”

“He’s stupid, Belle.”

“He comes from a good family and he makes me laugh. Most importantly, he’s taken with me. That counts for something.”

“You’re actually thinking of going steady with him,” Robert said, with a little laugh to cover up his betrayal. Arabella might be flighty, but she was a romantic at heart just as surely as Robert was. This was a change in her tune he didn’t like.

“More than steady,” she said, tangling her fingers together in an anxious knot. She was putting on that city girl air she had picked up at the cinema, trying to speak with bored disaffection, but Robert didn’t buy it. “He asked me to marry him, you know.”

“When? Just now?”

“In the parlor, with Mother and Father. You would have seen it if you had been there and not up here sulking. He got down on one knee and everything. It was very romantic.”

Robert stared at his sister, struggling to scrape together words.

They had sworn to each other years ago they wouldn’t marry unless it was for love.

Arabella had said she would sooner become a wild abbess sworn to the land than consent to nuptials with a bore of their parents’ choosing.

Robert had said he would rather be a wandering vagabond without a home than settle down with someone with no taste for adventure.

He hadn’t been lying about any of it. Had she?

“But, Belle, you said—”

“Whatever I said, I was a child when I said it, and I’m an adult now. He’s a sound match, Robbie. And he’s got enough money to keep this place running for at least a few decades more. Mother and Father are happy for me. I hope you can be too.”

Robert could have let it go. He could have given her a stiff hug, forced a smile, and congratulated her on her upcoming wedding.

He could have sat through picking out flowers and the dress and the cake and then sat in the front row of the church and clapped like everyone else.

If he had been younger, he might have. If he had more to lose, he certainly would have.

But he was a grown man already suffocating under the weight of his parents’ double-sided expectations, and the only thing he had ever had to lose was standing right in front of him in a silk dress, telling him she was going to marry another man.

“You can’t marry him,” Robert said. He wished he could be more articulate and come up with a convincing argument on the spot. But there was none. There was only his heart, and the way it beat and bled for her.

“Why can’t I?” she dared.

“You know why.”

“Do I?”

“Belle,” he groaned. “Come on. You know that I… The way we are, I thought… Last week, when you were in the bath and you saw me standing there—”

“The things you do when you’re bored and there’s no one else around,” she said, glancing down at her satin shoes so she wouldn’t have to look him in the eye when she broke his heart, “Those aren’t the things you want to do for the rest of your life.”

Robert felt like she had punched the wind out of him.

This wasn’t right. This wasn’t the way any of this was supposed to go, if either of them ever plucked up the courage to be honest about the way they adored each other, the way they trusted only each other, the way they slipped handwritten initiations under each other’s doors to the games of chase-and-seek that had only grown more deliciously aggressive as they had gotten older.

Last Boxing Day, Arabella had found him in the broom cupboard before dragging him into the hallway, straddling his chest, and pinning his hands above his head with a triumphant grin.

Why would she have done that if she didn’t feel the same way he did?

Robert pushed up from the wall he had been slouching against and drew himself up to his full height. He was tall for a boy his age, much taller than Arabella, and she glared up at him with watery eyes as he stood over her.

“Is that all I am to you?” he demanded. “A toy you can take up when you’re bored and discard when someone else comes around?”

“God, don’t be dramatic—”

“I’m not being dramatic; I’m being honest. If I have to be the first one to say it, I will. I love you, Belle. I love you as my family and I always will, but you must know by now that I love you more than that, too.”

“You’re just confused,” Arabella said, trying to slip past him in a whip of hair and a rustle of silk. Robert caught her wrist tightly. When she spun around to glare at him, he softened his grip, rubbing a circle into her palm with his thumb.