Page 31 of Savage Blooms
He paused to think his next words through more carefully. Nicola was undeniably prone to flights of fancy. She had once put away two wines in quick succession at a holiday party and decided that she could see angels dancing in the light of his tiny Christmas tree. But that didn’t mean she was wrong about this, and it didn’t mean that everything Eileen had told them was a lie either. Adam didn’t quite believe in the faery angle, but he certainly believed in places that had bad energy, or families that couldn’t break free from an ouroboros cycle of misery so all-consuming it felt supernatural. There was something going on here, whether it was swamp gas or a trick of the light or roaming wild animals or, maybe, even something supernatural. Something to explain the way he had felt standing at the mouth of the cave, like every single one of his atoms was on fire. Like he was being pulled forward by a force his body responded to even as his mind rebelled.
“I’ll keep my eyes peeled for anything creepy. If you see anything else, let me know. Let’s just not jump to conclusions until we’re sure, okay?”
“Okay,” Nicola said, taking one more deep breath. “Thanks for believing me.”
“I always believe you,” Adam scoffed, like he was irritated by her doubt. Not like it was a testament to his unwavering devotion.
Nicola gave him a golden smile, and for a brief, flickering moment, Adam felt at home.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Eileen
Something about the excitement of the morning triggered one of Eileen’s unpredictable migraines, so she retired to her room to sleep it off. As it turned out, she slept for four hours. When she finally emerged in the late afternoon, her eyes puffy from sleep and her hair lazily tied into a ponytail with a ribbon, the sun outside her windows was low in the sky. Eileen felt as though she were a rumpled female Christ, emerging from her tomb after a sleep like death.
She hoped her guests were settling in and learning their way around the manor. Finley would no doubt have helped them, as grumpy as he might be about new blood at Craigmar. Finley was often grumpy, so that didn’t bother Eileen much. He always went along with what she wanted, bad attitude or no. And she hadn’t missed how he had done his best to protect Nicola fromEileen’s designs, or the way he had thrown his arms around Adam to haul him bodily back from that cave.
Finley had never had anyone else to defend besides Eileen, nor had he ever had a single person in the world who could be relied on to come to his defense as sure as he came to hers. They had only ever had each other.
But now, the world had expanded. The knife’s-edge balance of Craigmar, so painstakingly maintained by Eileen and Finley’s games up until this point, was tottering under the weight of Adam and Nicola.
Eileen had worked very hard to cultivate ironclad privacy at Craigmar, so she and Finley could be left in peace, but she did, occasionally, find herself lonely. She knew Finley must as well, from his occasional ventures into town to chat up someone at a pub and sometimes even go home with them at the end of the night. New people in the house, much less pretty young people, weren’t the worst thing in the world, especially not when it came to what Eileen had in mind.
Dr Dasgupta had asked her during one of his house calls why she never left Craigmar. He had tried to convince her to go somewhere warmer for a season, to breathe gentler air and get the sun on her face. Eileen had brushed him off with a fib about her delicate health.
It wasn’t that Eileen didn’t want to leave Craigmar, that she didn’t dream of sailing away to some new and glorious country. It was simply that shecouldn’tleave, not without bringing ruination upon them all. She waspretty sure she could, technically, walk off the grounds without turning to dust. But she hadn’t been beyond the boundaries of the estate since her parents died, because there were no other Kirkfoyles left now to sit grim watch for their neighbors under the ground. She barely even went into Wyke, even though that was technically within the bounds of her family’s land and therefore covered by the treaty, because she didn’t like risking it, and because she didn’t like the people in town much either.
Dr Dasgupta might have been a friend of her father’s, and he was a good man, but he wasn’t family. He could never understand the truth. So Eileen always lied.
But now, even though Eileen could not leave Craigmar to find diversions, entertainment had come to her. It was like when she was sick in her pre-teen years, laid up for days at a time, and her mother would put on shadow puppet shows for her at the end of her bed.
Adam Lancaster wasn’t a puppet, exactly.
But Eileen still very much enjoyed pulling his strings.
Eileen paused in her mirror to wipe the mascara smudges from under her eyes and to straighten the iron badge on her lapel, then she went in search of her impossible American.
She found him on the stairs, staring up at a painting of her father. Eileen had learned how to creep through the house undetected at a very young age, and effortlessly dodged creaking floorboards as she approached. As she peered down at Adam from the upstairs landing, she saw he was unaware of her presence.
Eileen drank in the sight of him, his strong profile and long pale lashes and well-sculpted mouth. He looked so different from her, from Finley, from any of the handful of people she regularly saw. She could get used to looking at a face like that, maybe even for a very long while.
Despite his laid-back mannerisms and Midwestern accent, in that moment, with his shoulders back and his chin tipped up to admire the painting, he looked like a prince. Like one of Arthur’s knights who had gone searching for the grail and found a girl instead.
“That’s my father,” Eileen said, making herself known. “He was very handsome, and very kind.”
Adam’s blue eyes cut over to her, and Eileen’s heart stuttered. He really was lovely, in that arrestingly fair way that read more Scandinavian than Scottish. Eileen mentally chided herself as she made her way down the steps towards him. This was a mutually beneficial arrangement of her design, nothing more. She had to remind herself of that, lest her heart run away with her.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Adam said.
“It was years ago,” Eileen replied, coming to a stop on the step above him. “The hurt has scarred over by now. But I appreciate your condolences.”
“Finley said you had a headache. Are you feeling better?”
“As better as I’m liable to feel anytime soon.”
Eileen gazed up at her father, who shared her porcelain skin and dark hair, but with warm hazel eyes so unlikeEileen’s piercing black gaze. Her eyes, her father had once told her, were a little piece of the moonless sky from the night she was born. They didn’t come from her father or her mother, they were entirely hers and hers alone, and she was the first Kirkfoyle in generations with eyes like that. Eileen had wondered, ever since she was a girl, if her eyes marked her as different somehow, doomed by a story that had been set in motion long before she was born. Her eyes had always felt like an omen, fitting for a girl born wearing the legacy of a dying family around her neck like an albatross.
“How are you finding your rooms?” Eileen asked Adam, reminding herself to stay present and not drift off into memories. “Comfortable, I hope.”
