Page 32 of Savage Blooms
“Very comfortable. We appreciate it.”
“Then why does it sound like you’re about to apologize for something?”
Adam stepped up onto Eileen’s stair, and suddenly he was taller than her again. He was taller even than Finley, who was only a hair’s breadth taller than Eileen, and she felt slightly loomed over as Adam looked down at her.
This was, for Eileen, not an unpleasant sensation at all. Her heartbeat quickened.
“Do you really think I ended up here for a reason?” Adam asked, pitching his voice low as though he were afraid of being overheard. “That we’re supposed to help each other?”
“I don’t think, I know. Have you ever felt the truth of something like that, deep in your bones?”
“Yes,” Adam said quietly, with such a naked vulnerability that Eileen could have kissed him.
Finley stalked past at the bottom of the stairs, then paused as though struck by lightning as he looked up at Eileen and Adam. Eileen casually took another step down the stairs, putting a little more breathing room between her and Adam.
“How are things, Finney?” she asked, as though she hadn’t been caught on the edge of a dalliance.
“Well enough,” Finley said, giving Eileen a hard look before continuing his determined walk towards the library.
Eileen sighed heavily.
“He’s in a mood. I should make sure he’s all right.”
“Did I do something wrong?” Adam asked, craning his neck to see further down the hallway Finley had disappeared into.
“Besides having the audacity to be good-looking and friendly?” Eileen said, slapping him companionably on the shoulder like they were old school chums. “Not at all. Why don’t you do a bit of exploring before dinner? Then you and I can start digging through those records.”
With that, she was gone, jogging down the stairs to go find her dearest friend and sometimes tormentor and lover, always lover.
Finley was standing in front of the stack of boxes on her father’s desk, gnawing on his thumbnail.
“Are you pondering the mysteries of cardboard?” Eileen asked, swinging the library door gently shut behind her. There was only one surefire way to make up with Finley in an expedient fashion, and it required privacy. “You can get it at Tesco, I’m told.”
“They’re not going to buy our story,” Finley said, barely looking at her. She didn’t need to ask what he was referring to. It was damn near the only thing they had been talking about – or fighting about – for months.
“Yes, they are,” Eileen said levelly. It was a voice of total authority, the voice she used to talk to her lawyer.
“Adam is going to kill you when he finds out.”
“No he won’t,” Eileen said, walking over to the desk to take one final look at the arrangement of papers. It looked unintentionally messy, perfectly accidental, just as she’d hoped.
Finley came up behind her and wrapped his strong arms around her waist, resting his chin on her shoulder. He smelled like rain and sweet hay and the greenery of outdoors, and maybe the musty edges of those old books he kept stockpiled in his cottage. It was sexy and soothing and so perfectlyFinley.
Finley let out a big breath, just a little bit shaky. He was wound tight as a pocketwatch.
“You look like a pageboy with your hair tied back like this,” Finley said, nuzzling the ribbon at the nape of her neck. “Like one of those girls who sing the boy parts in operas.”
Eileen knew very well that he knew the precise word wascontralto, that he was once again downplaying his own intelligence to make her feel better about having him trapped here doing manual labor for all eternity. It wasn’t that she hadn’t offered to pay to send him back to university after he had been called home at the end of his first semester to care for his ailing father, or that she didn’t keep him in a steady supply of all the books he could want. It was that Finley’s devotion to her, miserable though it was some days, prevented him from ever abandoning her to Craigmar. If they were stuck here, he had told her many times before, then they would simply make a heaven of hell together.
The old guilt welled up inside her. Eileen decided to tamp it down with her most tried and true method before it had time to snap her up in its jaws.
“And how would you fuck me?” Eileen asked over her shoulder, a smirk playing at her lips. “If I was your boy?”
It was enticing, imagining Finley’s hand wrapping around the bob of an Adam’s apple in her throat, before sliding down her flat chest to grasp at the hardening length in her trousers. Eileen could see it so clearly, more clearly than she saw herself in the mirror some days. It was all too easy to envision what she would look like as a proper heir to Craigmar. Her father’s wavy hair and her mother’s fair coloring and those dark eyes that were nothing but Eileen, transformed by the merest alteration of genetics into a boy worthy of her family name.
Finley said nothing, merely moved his hands on either side of her to brace her against the desk as he kissed behind her ear. She could feel his desire, in the hitch of his breath and in the insistent press of his body against hers, but she didn’t know if he was going to take her roleplaying bait or not. Sometimes he was inexhaustibly creative, an actor’s actor in the bedroom, and other times he got sullen when she asked him to play a part, insisting that he wanted to have her as himself and no one else.
“Would you be rougher?” Eileen pressed, arching back against him. He needed a distraction from his worry. They both did. “Or sweeter?”
