Page 83 of Savage Blooms
“You’re welcome to join,” Nicola said, sliding her arms around Adam’s waist. He was warm and solid, and she felt dopamine-drunk and drowsy. “If that’s all right with Adam.”
“Fine by me,” Adam said, and together all three of them walked towards the kitchen.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Eileen
“What’s the damage?” Eileen called, cupping her hands around her mouth to help the sound carry. Finley was balancing at the top of a rusty ladder they had hauled out of the gardening shed, taking stock of the state of the roof. In response, he tossed a few crumbling shingles down onto the ground. They landed at Eileen’s feet, ancient and useless.
“I’ll take that as an indication we might be looking at repairs,” she said.
Finley dusted off his hands, then climbed down the ladder and came to stand at Eileen’s side. He had left his coat in the house, and his forearms were slick with the mist hanging in the air. Eileen was bundled up in her biggest tweed coat, a newsboy cap protecting her hair from the damp. She had slept nearly twelve hours last night, and woke to the undeniable sense that somethinghad happened in her house when she was asleep, something that she would have very much liked to be consulted about beforehand. Finley’s guilty-dog look when she caught him in the kitchen told her most of the story, and the confession he had made when she pulled him into the pantry for privacy told the rest.
Eileen put on a good show, pretending not to care. Why should she? Finley wasn’t her husband, and she wasn’t his wife. They had always run around with other people, even if Eileen’s options had been limited. And Adam and Nicola were the right people to run around with, if it came right down to it. Anything to bond them all more tightly together, to make Adam feel like he never wanted to leave, and to encourage Nicola to support him in his desire to stay.
And if Eileen felt a little bit left out, and like her health had prevented her from participating in a game she would have liked, that was her wound to nurse. She had laid into Finley about locking her in her room, at any rate, and he had insisted it was for her own protection. It felt good to fight with him aboutsomething, fighting felt familiar, made her feel like there was life left in her yet. And she had won that fight, by such a landslide that Finley had offered to do that chore he had been putting off and look at the roof to make amends.
“Lots of the shingles are shredded from weather, and others have been ripped off altogether,” he pronounced. “Your parents didn’t ever have this roof replaced, did they?”
“I doubt it. Even then, there wasn’t much spare money for large repairs.”
“Well, add the shingle damage to the accumulated wear and tear of the years, and we’re seriously overdue for calling in a contractor.”
Eileen wrinkled her nose and shook her head.
That simply wouldn’t do.
“No outsiders,” she said. “We’ll fix it ourselves.”
“Eileen, I’m not a roofer. If I don’t break my neck from climbing up there, I’m liable to do more harm than good to the house. I’ve done what I can to keep the grounds clean and make essential repairs, but I don’t have the expertise for this. I know you’re tight on money, but this isn’t something you ignore. Call a contractor.”
Eileen shook her head again, more forcefully this time. Craigmar had stood for hundreds of years, and it would stand for hundreds more. ShewasCraigmar, it was in her blood. It wouldn’t fall while she lived.
“You want me to bring a stranger in and tell them that my house needs to be defended against supernatural creatures, is that it?”
Finley sighed long-sufferingly in a way that made him seem twice his age. Eileen resented him for his old-man habits; they only served to remind her that he was technically a couple days older than her, and that he liked to act like it.
“I’m not saying anything like that. I know you don’t like bringing in outsiders—”
“It’s not that I don’t like it. It’s that it’s dangerous.”
“But exceptions have to be made. You see the doctor, don’t you? Well, your house needs a doctor now.”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m a child,” Eileen said, turning and walking towards the house with long, determined strides. God, she wasfuriouswith him. Any of the goodwill he had earned by promising to fix the roof while trapped in the pantry had completely evaporated.
Finley jogged to catch up with her, then caught her by the wrist.
“I need you to listen to me, Eileen. This is getting serious, and I don’t think—”
“It’s been serious for me from the start,” she bit out, her temper snapping like a dry twig. “It’s been serious since my parents were murdered. This place is my albatross, Finley, my home,mine.I don’t expect you to understand.”
A dark warning flashed behind Finley’s eyes, an indicator that she was skirting too close to a sore subject, but she pressed on, gathering momentum as her anger mounted.
“You can leave anytime you want. You could move to Edinburgh, or go back to university, or go live with your father on Skye. Nothing is holding you here but some misplaced loyalty to my family, from which I release you. I can’t leave, Finley, and I never will. I was born here and I’ll die here, so I’ll make the decisions about what happens to the house.”
“Releaseme?” Finley said, barking out an unkind laugh. “You want me gone now, is that it?”
“I don’t care what you do,” Eileen said, even though she knew she did care, to a desperate, sickening degree. It was just so hard to control her tongue when she was angry, or frightened. She couldn’t stop thinking about how close she had been to losing Adam, to destroying an innocent life and her only hope at survival in the process. There was so little holding the fae back from devouring Craigmar whole, just old promises and tenuous magic she didn’t totally understand.
