Read an extract from Savage Blooms by S.T. Gibson

Wuthering Heights meets Sierra Simone in the new Celtic-inspired erotic fantasy romance from Sunday Times bestseller S.T. Gibson, author of the cult phenomenon A Dowry of Blood.

For as long as Adam can remember, the legends passed down from his world-traveling grandfather have called him to a crumbling manor in the Highlands. His closest friend Nicola longs for the same adventure, as well as for Adam himself. She’ll follow him just about anywhere -even to the remote wilds of Scotland-if it pushes the pair to surrender to their shared attraction.

But when a storm strikes and strands them unexpectedly, Adam and Nicola find themselves at the mercy of the eccentric owner of the infamous house, Eileen, as well as her brooding groundskeeper, Finley.

Trapped by the weather, and bound by ancient faery magic, Nicola and Adam get more than they bargained for as they become entangled in Eileen and Finley’s world of mind games, deceit and forbidden desire. As ancestral sins are unearthed, Adam and Nicola will have to reckon with the spell Eileen and Finley have cast over them – and whether or not they even want to be free.

Scroll down to read an extract.

 

CONTENT WARNING

This is a gothic erotic romance, and therefore, it explores themes that may be distressing to some readers. If you choose to proceed, I hope you read with curiosity about desires that may be different from yours and compassionate engagement with themes that may be challenging for you.

Savage Blooms depicts:

Toxic relationships

Alcohol abuse

Sexual manipulation

Under-­negotiated polyamory

Consensual non-­consent

Group sex

Genderplay

Voyeurism and exhibitionism

Primal chase play

Impact play

General themes of dominance and submission

Child abuse and neglect

References to past traumatic childbirth

Hereditary mental health struggles

Chronic illness, including migraines, chronic pain and endometriosis

Forced marriage

Near-­drowning

Infertility

Suicidality

In addition, while no sexual activity between blood family members is depicted, incest is discussed and pseudoincest is explored.

 

To all the serpents courageous enough to break the cycles they were born into, even if that meant biting off the tips of their own tails

 

Prologue

The land had been lying in wait for half a Half a century of dormancy, of the deep, dark sleep of ancient things.

The moment he stepped out of the rental car in his battered hiking boots, a shudder went through the earth. The hares felt it, rippling through the long grass. The finches felt it, rattling the tips of the narrowest tree branches. Even the tiniest wildflowers felt it, coursing up through their trembling roots.

Beneath the earth, an old magic stirred.

He was tall, fair, and quick to smile. There was a girl with him, stoutly built with a bob of auburn curls. He beamed over his shoulder at her, golden and boyish in his goading.

As the young man – barely more than a boy, really – tightened the laces of his boots, the land rose up to meet him. Misty breezes caressed his scalp through his close-cropped blond hair, briars tugged insistently on his pant leg, and sedge grasses bowed beneath his feet like soldiers saluting their prince. He breathed in deep, filling his lungs with the scent of salt and primrose.

Earth, sea and sky ached to enfold him.

He turned his face up towards the clouds and closed his pale-­lashed eyes against the sun. The light slanted across his curved mouth, his strong aquiline nose.

It had been so long. Years of waiting, of slow rot anxiously gnawing away at tangled roots.

The pair of companions chattered, in high spirits as they shared a swig of water from their communal flask. Though the land didn’t speak the garbled child-­tongue of English, it knew what these two were after. There could only have been one destination, because the story had always been a circle, always a gyre turning in the sky, forever unfolding, forever beginning anew.

The young man strode out towards the cave, and the story began once again, with his name inked like blood on the first page.

CHAPTER ONE

Adam

Adam Lancaster was euphoric. Granted, they landscape for an hour already, and they had been forced to return to the car parked at the edge of the tiny village of Wyke to get their bearings, but Adam wasn’t deterred. His blood was singing in his veins from the sheer thrill of being here, in the right country, on the right patch of land. He had never been this close before, not in all his twenty-­ two years.

Nicola, however, was less enthused.

“I’m pretty sure we walked past every single house in the village,” she said, blowing a wind-­ tossed curl out of her face with a huff. “And none of them match that address. Are you positive this is the place?”

“Completely,” Adam replied, leaning against the compact silver Volvo they had rented at the airport. He produced the letter from his breast pocket, where it had been pressed against his heart, skin-­ warmed and secure beneath his fleece vest. The paper was soft to the touch, every sharp corner worn smooth with age and handling.

The return address was well known to Adam: it was the brick split-­level in a Michigan suburb where his grandfather had lived right up until his death Adam’s junior year of college. That had been the year Adam dropped out, mostly because he had acquired enough graphic design skills to freelance without having to flush more money down the drain on tuition, but also because his grandfather’s death had been a blow he hadn’t expected. It had shaken apart something inside Adam that hadn’t quite come back together again.

The recipient address was the mystery he had come to Scotland to solve. It was made out to Arabella Kirkfoyle, and the post code matched Wyke, a town hugging the rocky coast of the south-­ west Highlands. But there was no house number on the envelope, and no road listed. There was just one word, written out in Adam’s grandfather’s heavy but neat script: Craigmar.

Adam may never have heard of Arabella, and he may never have heard of Wyke, but he recognized Craigmar from his grandfather’s bedtime stories. Adam had hounded his grandfather with his bottomless appetite for tales of far-­flung adventures. His recalcitrant grandfather had been perpetually grumpy except around Adam, who he spoiled with stories. When Adam had been an awkward, lanky preteen on the cusp of finally grasping the queerness that was already getting him bullied by the other boys, his grandfather would take him on long hikes around Lake Michigan and tell him stories of enchanted fjords and haunted Bavarian forests and always, Craigmar.

Craigmar wasn’t just a house, his grandfather would whisper late at night when Adam should have been asleep but was instead wide awake tending the campfire. It was a living place, an ancient stately home ripe with the promise of magic.

At this point, Adam didn’t care if half the bedtime stories were made up, or even if all of them were. He was grown now, less interested in enchantment than he was in geology and civic history. He just wanted to feel close to his grandfather again, to close the circle of love and mutual understanding that had been broken when his grandfather had his stroke.

“We must have missed it,” Adam said. “We should try again.”

“There’s only one road in and out of town. And we just walked the length of it, all two miles. I know this is important to you, and I really want to help you find the right house, but can’t we stop at the pub first for a a pint or something? Maybe someone inside can give us directions.”

Adam leaned a little further over the car’s hood, tapping against the metal as he thought. He brought himself closer to Nicola’s height as he did so, giving in to that unconscious slouch he had developed in his teen years when he shot up to six feet tall in one summer. Nicola was roughly the size of a thimble compared to Adam, which was to say, five foot three.

“What if they don’t want us poking around?” he asked, feigning concern. Everyone they had met on their travels had been more than willing to help them interpret road signs or find milk for their tea at the hostel. If Adam was being honest, he wasn’t worried about encountering an unfriendly face. He was worried about having to share this private obsession with Craigmar with anyone at all except Nicola, his very best friend.

“What are they gonna do, run us off with pitchforks?” Nicola snorted. “Burn us in a straw effigy? I doubt it.”

“That’s dark, Nikki.”

Nicola beamed, one of those sunny smiles that inspired countless men and women to throw themselves at her feet back home in the States. It had also been very popular with the locals since arriving in Edinburgh and spending the night partying in the Old Town before getting up early to travel to Wyke. She had been collecting phone numbers like souvenirs at every stop on the road since.

“Oh, come on, they could do much worse,” she said, as though this would make him feel any better. “If this was the Iron Age they would slit our throats and dump us in a peat bog as a human sacrifice. But if we’re polite, I’m sure we’ll escape with our lives and maybe even directions too. Lead the way.”

Nicola gestured across the road to the pub three doors down, a charming red-­ shuttered stone building with a painted sign that read ‘The Hound and Grouse’. Adam’s stomach growled, betraying his lofty commitments to his pilgrimage.

“All right, we’ll grab a beer and a snack and some directions,” he said, striding across the street. Nicola followed him, just like always. Ever since they had befriended each other their freshman year of college, she had been content to let him take the leaps of faith. Whether it was downing a shot at a Greek life mixer, diving off a tall rock into the cold waters of Lake Michigan, or traipsing across Scotland with nothing to guide him but bedtime stories and a single letter, Adam always went first.

He pretended it was because he was brave, but it was really only because having Nicola at his side made him courageous enough to try anything, at least once.

The pleasantly dim light inside the pub came from low lamps on the tables and the fireplace near the back, which made the long wooden bar gleam. It was barely 3 p.m., and at this time of day there weren’t many patrons sitting down for a drink. One elderly couple enjoyed a platter of sausages together in the corner, lost in their reminiscing, and some roughscrabble farmer-­ types filled out crossword puzzles and chatted about overdue spring rains at one end of the bar. A dark-­ haired young man nursed a porter by himself at the other end.

The proprietor nodded as they walked up to the bar. He was Adam’s platonic ideal of a bartender: in his fifties, heavily tattooed, and with a no-­nonsense air that implied he had seen the best and the worst of people and was unaffected by any of it.

Nicola ordered a local red ale, delighted to be able to sample a regional brew, and Adam ordered what he was familiar with, a Stella Artois.

“A bag of cheese and onion crisps as well, please,”

Nicola said. “Also, we’ve got a question that maybe you could help us with?”

“Fire away,” the bartender said as he filled Nicola’s glass.

Adam leaned across the bar and lowered his voice slightly, as if there was anyone here who might care enough to eavesdrop on him.

“I’m trying to get in touch with a family friend. She might not live here anymore, but maybe she’s got relatives that do? We went looking for her house but couldn’t find it.”

The bartender set down a bottled Stella in front of Adam, and Adam’s hand brought it to his lips automatically. He was parched, he realized. He had been so excited he hadn’t really noticed he was getting dehydrated, or that he hadn’t eaten anything all day besides cereal and three dried apricots at the hostel in Edinburgh.

“What’s the address?” the bartender asked.

“I don’t have a house number or a street.”

“Then what’s her family name? I’ve lived here my whole life; if she’s a local girl I might know her folks.”

“Kirkfoyle,” Adam said, breezy as you please, like he hadn’t been lying awake at night for the last month turning that name over in his head like a riddle.

The bartender nodded sagely, as though this too was something he had seen countless times. A foreign seeker stumbling into his bar looking for some scrap of forgotten family history buried beneath the village cobblestones.

“Well, that’s your problem there. The Kirkfoyles don’t live in town. They own the town. You must be looking for Eileen.”

Having tossed out this titbit, the bartender turned from Adam, good deed done, and began wiping down the bar. Adam’s brain struggled to process this information. The idea that his grandfather could have been in touch with someone who owned a whole town was exciting, but it didn’t answer his question of where the Kirkfoyles lived, and he had never heard of any Eileen.

“The woman I’m looking for is named Arabella,” Adam said. “Not Eileen.”

The bartender stopped mid-­ wipe, then gave Adam the strangest look, like he had just broken some kind of prehistoric societal taboo. Like Adam had eaten human flesh or taken his sister for a wife or touched a dead body with his bare hands.

“Arabella doesn’t live around here anymore,” was all the bartender said, and then he disappeared into the back room.

Adam slumped down into his barstool, the first feelings of defeat creeping in. He had known there was a chance that Arabella had moved, or even died. Still, he had held the hope of meeting her close to his chest, like an exotic plant smuggled in through customs beneath his jacket.

“You’re looking for Craigmar,” a baritone brogue put in from nowhere, making Adam’s blood sing in his veins. He had never heard anyone but his grandfather speak that name.

He turned and took a second look at the man at the end of the bar, who had drained his porter and was now looking at Adam intently. He probably wasn’t that much older than Adam, but he was clearly closer to thirty than twenty, having already crossed that great quarter-­ life gulf. He wore a green cable-­ knit sweater and he had overgrown chestnut curls of hair and a frowning, full mouth.

“The house on the hill,” the stranger went on. “It’s the Kirkfoyle estate.”

“Estate?” Nicola chirped, intrigued as a sparrow who had just spotted a feeder full of seed. “Hi, by the way. I’m Nicola Fairweather.”

“Finley Buchanan,” the stranger put in, flicking a glance her way. His eyes softened slightly, catching the light of the fire. Adam saw they were not indeed brown but very dark hazel.

“Adam Lancaster,” Adam said, sticking out his hand for a shake. Finley stood and reached over the bar, his grip surprisingly strong. He was shorter than Adam – most people were – but he had the callouses and sturdy build of someone who worked with their hands. “Do you know how to get to that estate? Craigmar?’

“I certainly do,” Finley said, tossing down enough cash to cover his tab as well as Adam and Nicola’s. “It’s a few miles down the road. Single-­track, but it’ll get you there. I’m headed there myself; you two could follow me so you don’t get lost.”

“You’re headed there too?” Nicola said, already scooping up her bag. Adam wasn’t exactly sure about this; following a friendly stranger down a single-­track road to a mysterious estate seemed like a great way to get serial killed, chopped into little pieces and scattered through the woods.

“Why?” Adam asked, suspicion in his voice.

Finley gave him a once-­over, as though Adam was the interloper who had yet to earn his trust. Then he gave a very small smile, just enough to tug at the dimple tucked into his cheek, and swung his car keys once around his finger.

“Because I live there, and because my lunch break’s over. You’re welcome to come with me, or to stay here. But I suggest you decide fast, before the rain starts coming down any harder.”

Adam opened his mouth to point out that it wasn’t raining, then paused to hear the drizzle on the rooftop that was slowly building to a steady patter.

Adam had never been afraid of a little rain, and he certainly wasn’t afraid of a little adventure. He could handle himself, just like he always did, and he hadn’t come all the way out here to give up mere miles from the prize. Besides, with Nicola at his side, what couldn’t he do?

“All right,” Adam said, taking one more bracing swig of his beer. “After you.”