Page 9 of Savage Blooms (Unearthly Delights #1)

CHAPTER SIX

Adam

Adam awoke to Nicola’s prim triple rap on his bedroom door.

Blinking the sleep from his eyes, he hauled himself out of bed and staggered over.

His mind was still muddy with images from what he thought he had seen the night before.

It hovered just out of reach, hazy with sleep, but as Adam grasped for the sense that something real had happened last night, everything rushed back with scintillating clarity.

Finley’s strong hand gripping the riding crop, Eileen stripped half-naked on the floor, their searing shared kiss.

Adam shoved the memories – or the dreams, whatever they were – away before they could make the half hard-on he had woken with any worse. Stifled by the heavy blankets, he had tossed off his shirt in the night, and his chest was still covered with a thin layer of sweat.

Without thinking twice about dressing, Adam opened the door.

Eileen Kirkfoyle stood before him, his freshly pressed clothes in her arms, her dark hair swirled up on her head and held in place with golden hairpins.

She was fully dressed, in wide-legged pants that tied in a bow around her waist, and a dour black blouse buttoned up to her throat, but the sight of her brought images of creamy bare skin painted with a high flush flooding back all the same.

Adam opened his mouth, but no sound came out.

Eileen’s eyes flickered unselfconsciously across his bare chest, as though she were examining a horse before a pageant.

“You slept through breakfast,” she said. “I came to make sure you hadn’t died in your sleep.”

“Nope,” Adam said, voice too bright. “Here I am. Still alive.”

“Happy to hear it. Sleep well, I hope? No trouble with the bed?”

She was speaking at a brisk clip, as though she were impatient with him already. Adam glanced at the clock on his bedside table. It wasn’t even eight yet. Had he made some social faux pas by sleeping in, or were aristocratic country families the type to get up at the crack of dawn?

“I slept great,” he lied.

“No bad dreams?” she asked, in the light-as-air lilt that left everything open to interpretation.

Adam began to feel, for the first time since arriving, that perhaps Eileen was fucking with him.

“No nightmares,” he said, forcing a smile.

“Grand. There are leftovers in the pantry if you’re hungry. Join me in the library once you’re fed.”

“Is Nicola up yet?” Adam asked, feeling a bit disoriented and more than a bit naked, but absolutely powerless to close the door. Eileen’s eyes pinned him in place like an insect specimen under glass. “I’d like to say good morning to her first, make sure she had an okay night.”

“You can, just as soon as she’s back indoors. I saw her and Finley through the window touring the grounds. They’ll be out there a while, if he has his way. I’ll expect you in the library at the top of the hour.”

A lick of anger flared up in Adam’s chest. Who did this woman think she was, ordering him around?

And who did Finley think he was, absconding with Nicola without so much as telling him?

And what was Nicola thinking, wandering off with a man she had met hours before?

It wasn’t that reckless connections were out of character for her; quite the opposite, in fact.

Adam’s night had been ruined more than once by Nicola running off to the bathroom with some girl she had just met at the bar for seven minutes in sapphic heaven, or by her bringing a new beau who hadn’t yet been vetted to a group game night.

Nicola was good-hearted and generally a decent judge of people, but she was impulsive, and borderline reckless when sex was involved.

Adam had tried to talk to her about it once, but she had snapped back at him that he couldn’t get through a single trip abroad without getting into at least one situationship, and that had shut him up.

They were both bad at saying no to the greedy little fires within them that burned every hour of the day, begging to be fed with adventure or kisses or the heady rush of a whirlwind twenty-four-hour romance.

They had agreed to stick together on this trip, but it looked like that promise went out the window at the first pair of pretty eyes.

Eileen thrust the bundle of clean clothes into Adam’s arms.

“No need to stand on ceremony, but I would recommend putting on some clothes. Do you take tea or coffee in the morning?”

Eileen was still pretty in the morning light, but now Adam could see her human imperfections as well: the flyaway hairs sticking out of her chignon, the way her lipstick feathered at the corners of her mouth, the sickly pallor beneath her makeup.

Her under-eyes looked bruised, as though from crying or sleeplessness.

As a matter of fact, in the unforgiving sunlight streaming in through Adam’s window, Eileen looked like a lovely wraith, a thin-skinned blue-veined ghost doomed to haunt her own home.

“Coffee,” Adam said, filing all this away. “Thanks for the laundry.”

“Certainly,” Eileen said stiffly, giving a jerky nod as though she had forgotten an appropriate response to the niceties of conversation.

Adam was once again struck by her antiquated speech, like a child who had only learned how to talk to others by reading Frances Hodgson Burnett novels.

It seemed a bit pretentious but mostly earnest, and that was the strangest part.

And with that, she was gone, disappeared down the hallway in a gust of iris perfume. Adam was left reeling, feeling half like taking his chances hiking out to find Nicola and half like pursuing Eileen down the hallway towards whatever designs she had for him.

In the end, he realized that he didn’t really have a choice.

Swearing under his breath, he kicked off his pajama pants and changed into clean clothes.

The house was easier to traverse in the daytime, and the pathway to the library had been seared into his memory by last night’s excursion.

That scene hadn’t been a dream, of that he was more and more sure.

He had really witnessed something unspeakable transpiring between Eileen and Finley, which meant that Eileen had seen him spying with her own eyes.

And now, Eileen was either keeping a stiff upper lip about the whole thing and ignoring it entirely for the sake of courtesy, or she was pretending she didn’t know to toy with him, batting him around like a cat with a mouse. Either way, Adam hated it.

At least, hatred was the easiest explanation for the way his heart raced as he turned the corner and stepped into the library.

Eileen had, apparently bright and early that morning, brought a number of cardboard boxes out of storage and piled them on the desk.

They were the sturdy kind with lids, the kind Adam recognized from the years his mother worked as a legal assistant.

The gallery wall overlooked the strange workstation, faces from antiquity peering out at him from gilt frames.

“This is everything I could find in the attic from the years I figure it was most likely your grandfather was here,” she said, putting her hands on her hips as she surveyed the mess with bright eyes. She seemed even more excited than Adam was. “And a few boxes extra.”

“That’s very thorough,” Adam replied, not entirely sure what to say.

On the surface, nothing about this situation seemed wrong, exactly.

Strange, certainly, but strange in a good way, like an unexpected windfall of fortune.

Still, that bell of survival instinct that had saved Adam from being mugged, roofied or swindled on countless trips was ringing in the back of his mind.

It was very faint, but he still noticed it.

Something was off.

“Going through all this could take days,” Eileen said. “Or hours, if we’re lucky. Where would you like to start?”

“With something to eat?” he suggested. He needed breakfast, that was true, but asking for something from the kitchen was also an easy way to send her out of the room for a few minutes. “Sorry, I’ve never been able to work on an empty stomach.”

“Oh yes,” she said absentmindedly, as though she had forgotten eating was something human beings needed to do. “The porridge should still be warm. We’ve got toast and bacon too, if you want it.”

“Sounds great.”

Eileen nodded and disappeared into the hall, and Adam pressed his hand to his chest, trying to identify the root cause of the sudden urge he had to run.

He rubbed a circle over his breastbone, trying to massage away that tight feeling.

Was Eileen actually acting strangely or was this just him freaking out the moment someone invited him into intimacy, even if it was only friendship and cooperation?

He had been more reactive since his grandfather died, more erratic and irritable.

Maybe he was just looking for a way to ruin a good thing.

Adam looked up at the trio of hares captured in the stained-glass panel above the window, arranged in a circle with their ears touching. It took him a moment to realize that there were only three ears shared between the hares, joining them together in an optical illusion.

It was beautiful to look at, but upon closer inspection it gave Adam an unsettled feeling, a feeling that only grew within him the longer he looked at it.

He had the sinking sensation that he had seen it somewhere before, or even more unnerving, that he was in the presence of something very ancient that his animal hindbrain recognized even when his conscious mind could not.

“Here we are,” Eileen said, appearing from around the corner with a serving tray in her hands. The spread had been arranged nicely, even with a sprig of baby’s breath in a slim purple vase, and Adam’s stomach grumbled at the sight. “Take a load off, have your fill.”

“Happily,” Adam said. Eileen had brought him a huge serving of breakfast, far more than even Adam could eat, so he asked: “Want some of this toast?”