Page 78 of Savage Blooms
“Thank you,” Adam said, and the two men shared a charged look, charged enough that it damn near heated the room. Nicola certainly felt herself warm.
“Adam,” Finley went on. “You said the day we all gotback from the cave that you smelled something sweet out there?”
“Like booze and fruit and wet sugar,” Adam agreed. “It made me feel hungry, but also a little sick. Nicola, did you notice that?”
“All I smelled out there was forest,” Nicola replied. Adam settled his hand on her knee, rubbing his thumb back and forth in that nervous tic that was more about stilling himself than soothing her. Nicola took comfort from it all the same.
“I couldn’t smell it either,” Finley said, draping an arm over the back of the couch around Nicola’s shoulders. He leaned back, losing himself in thought. “But I’m not surprised you could. My working theory is that they were trying to tempt you underground. Kirkfoyles are… drawn to that place. All of them, without fail.”
“But why?” Nicola said. This was a twist in the tale even she didn’t understand, an anomaly in the story that she couldn’t account for through either research or observation.
“The Kirkfoyles and the fae used to intermarry,” Finley said. “I’ve heard stories about how, for a long time, there were always Kirkfoyles living above ground, tending the estate, while at least one of them lived below ground, bound in marriage as a sort of… peace offering. Sometimes black-haired children would just appear at the front door, like they had been sent above ground to visit their families, and every time, the child was taken in without question.Every Kirkfoyle has a little wild blood in them, and the cave calls to it.”
“But I’m not a Kirkfoyle,” Adam insisted, leaning over Nicola to get a better look at Finley. They were all very close together on the couch, wrapped up in the conspiratorial cloud of mutual discovery, by the heat of the blazing fire.” Well, I am, but not by blood. Why would they want to kill me?”
“They may not want you dead, is what I’m saying,” Finley replied, and the puzzle box Nicola had been turning over and over in her mind for a week finally sprung open.
“It wasn’t an assassination attempt,” she breathed. “It was an attempted kidnapping.”
They might not have been pulling you down to drown you, Adam. They might have been pulling you towards another gate, a back door into their world. They want Eileen alone and desperate, so that her family line will finally be extinguished. In their minds, you already belong to them, so why not bring you home? One above, one below.”
Nicola stared at Finley for a long moment, stunned into silence. He held her gaze, as though begging for her forgiveness for something done or left undone. He looked every inch the penitent man, like someone who had confessed every sin to the exacting letter. Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something else he wasn’t telling them.
“This is too much,” Adam said with that performative scoff that meant he was scared.
“This is Craigmar,” Finley said.
Nicola burrowed against Adam, slipping her arm through his own. He shifted closer, angling his body towards her so she could nestle in deeper. Tentatively, Finley petted her hair, like he knew no other way to comfort her. Adam watched Finley stroke her curls and said nothing, as though the seriousness of what they were all facing had burned away his petty jealousy.
“They can’t have you,” Nicola said, with the desperate conviction of a child declaring that their parent would never die. She held Adam even tighter, as though that would help anything. “I won’t let them.”
“It’s okay, Nikki,” Adam said softly. “I’m still here.”
“But I almost lost you today. Both of you.”
Nicola turned to press a kiss into Finley’s shoulder, breathing in his scent. Adam’s hand tightened on Nicola’s knee, gliding a few inches up her thigh. As close as she was to the two men in that moment, it wasn’t enough. She wanted to be enveloped in them, to hold them both so tight death could never touch them.
Nicola lifted her face and kissed Finley on the mouth, sweet and slow. Adam’s hand disappeared from her thigh, but she reached out and tangled her fingers in his before he could draw away, putting his hand right back where it had been. Then, she leaned over to Adam for their own kiss, earnest and searching. Finley’s arm stayed around her shoulders the whole time, his fingers digging a little tighter into her upper arm. Like he wanted to leave a bruise, but was holding himself back.
Maybe she was asking for too much, ruining a vulnerable moment with her greed. Or maybe this was a necessary comfort they could all take from each other, spoken in the body’s native language.
“It’s all right,” Adam murmured, tracing the line of her lips with his own. “Nobody died.”
Nobody died. Maybe that was the best any of them could expect, tangled in this strange web of magic and painful history. Her whole life, Nicola had dreamed of stumbling into a fairy tale, but now that she had, she didn’t feel lucky. She was scared, and she was confused, and sheached, every hour of every day, for the kind of intimacy she feared no one person could give her. Craigmar was poisoning the well of her heart with its heady, dark magic drip by damning drip.
Perhaps, one person would never be enough, not when her heart was so full of Finley and so full of Adam that she felt as though it may burst before she ever felt satisfied.
Nicola didn’t know if she was ever going to feel satisfied again. But she could feel good, she knew that much, and she could make other people feel good too.
Nicola kissed Finley again, hungrier, needier, as Adam’s mouth dropped to her throat, seeking her pulse under his lips. Then she was kissing Adam again, and then Finley, over and over again in a glorious unbroken circle. Sweetness turned quickly to fervency, made all the more desperate by the adrenaline spike of a brush with death. Finley’s arm slipped down to her waist, clutching herclose even as Adam’s hand tightened around her hip. Finley bit her lip, making her moan.
When she finally broke away, Nicola was gasping for breath.
“I want to do it again,” Nicola blurted.
Finley and Adam exchanged startled looks, as though they had just realized that the other one was in the room with them.
“Do what?” Finley asked.
