Savage Blooms

Book 1: Unearthly Delights

by S.T. Gibson

Genres: Dark Fantasy; Occult & Supernatural; Fantasy Romance

Synopsis

S. T. Gibson, the queen of erotic fantasy romance, returns with this ravishingly dark trilogy of gothic manors, faery magic, and forbidden desires set in the foreboding Highlands of Scotland.

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.

Release date: October 7, 2025

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 368

Sample

Adam Lancaster was euphoric. Granted, they had been walking in circles across the rocky 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.”

Adam dutifully followed behind Finley’s banged-up Volkswagen in the rental car, trundling slower and slower as the road narrowed and the rain came down with more dogged determination. It was astonishing how quickly the sky could open up out here. Finley hadn’t been lying about the single-track road, it was hardly wide enough for one car, unpaved and uneven, and Adam saw no other way to accommodate the comings and goings of other motorists than to pull entirely off the road.

“How far do you think it is?” Nicola asked, peering to see through the rain. Adam was following so close behind Finley that he could see the way the other man tapped rhythmically at the steering wheel with his thumb, how he glanced up into the rear-view from time to time to make sure they were still following.

“No telling,” Adam said. He had searched for Craigmar endlessly in the last few months, but the house wasn’t listed on any public maps, and when it appeared in sparse newspaper articles, no address or photos were included. It was likely the owner didn’t want Craigmar to be found, which wasn’t totally unheard of as far as misanthropic wealthy families went.

It would be nearly impossible to find, his grandfather had told him once, what felt like eons ago. Adam had been ten years old, begging for one more story and up way past his bedtime. But if anyone could do it, it would be you.

“We’ve been driving for fifteen minutes,” Nicola said, peering out the window as gorse bushes and scrubby trees rolled past. “Is that what ‘a few miles down the road’ means to a Scot?”

She nibbled her lip, a surefire sign she was nervous.

“Are you all right with this?” Adam asked. “If you start to feel weird, we can always leave.”

“I’d rather deal with whatever’s out in the hills than watch you pout the whole flight back to America because you didn’t find what you were looking for,” Nicola said, swiping on a bit of chapstick and fluffing her bangs in the passenger mirror. “Besides, the weirdo in the Volkswagen is hot.”

“A hot guy can still bury you under his floorboards,” Adam said. “And he’s not hot enough to be worth dying for.”

Nicola snorted. “Sure, like you don’t have eyes. Anyway, you’re my travel guide, remember? I go wherever you go.”

Adam’s heart clenched. He had spent as much of his college tenure as possible studying abroad or, at the very least, partying abroad on school holidays. He had somehow been to five countries in two years, funded entirely by scholarships or his total willingness to live on rice and beans so he could afford drop-of-a-hat plane tickets. Nicola was relying on his traveling expertise to steer them in the right direction, and he didn’t want to frighten her by worrying.

Suddenly, Finley turned left, disappearing behind an overgrown hedge dotted with bloody berries. Adam swerved to follow, swearing under his breath, and then Nicola let out an awestruck gasp.

A huge structure loomed above them at the end of a gravel drive, three stories of wind-lashed gray stone. Every white-framed window in the mammoth structure was dark, and the multiple chimneys atop the peaked roofline were heavily shadowed by the cloud-shrouded sun. The house was situated at the peak of a rolling hill, and as Adam pulled to a stop outside the large wooden front door, he saw that it overlooked a long, cleared grazing green dotted with sheep. The green stretched all the way to the hazy ocean coast at what, in that moment, truly felt like the edge of the world.

Adam stepped out of the car, struck silent by the grandeur of the landscape. Twisted trees edged up against the grazing lawn, as though the wilderness was straining to spill onto the cleared land and re-wild it by force. Even in the haze of rain, Adam could see that the estate must sprawl for acres and acres.

Somehow, it was bigger and more beautiful than even his feverish child’s brain had imagined.

Nicola’s boots crunched in the gravel as she pulled her hood up against the rain and peered up to see the tip-top of the house, which seemed to pierce the sky with its Gothic peaks. Some of the masonry had started to crumble, the hedges and flowering plants that lined the drive were scraggly, and the ironwork plate over the door that read Craigmar was corroded with age, but it was all still undeniably beautiful.

“Lovely old behemoth, isn’t she?” Finley asked, striding over with his hands tucked in his pockets. “Let’s get indoors before you catch cold. The lord of the manor will be happy to see you both, I’d wager. We don’t get many guests all the way out here.”

“Lord of the manor?” Adam echoed, falling into step behind Finley. He was aware that things like lords existed, especially out in the Scottish countryside, but it still felt like something better suited to one of Nicola’s storybooks.

“Don’t worry,” Finley said, tossing Adam a grin over his shoulder as he approached the massive oak door. “She barely bites.”

Before Adam had any time to figure out what that meant, a huge, waterlogged deerhound appeared from behind a hedge, trotting towards Nicola with alarming speed. It let out a curious whine, its red tongue lolling out between gleaming teeth, and Nicola stumbled back a few paces.

“Smoo!” Finley said. “Who let you free? You’re absolutely soaked.”

“She’s afraid of dogs,” Adam said quickly as he stepped between Nicola and the hound. Its coat was the same gray color as a clotted storm cloud. The dog reared up on its hind legs in excitement and Adam, astonished by its size, stumbled back a few paces too. “Send it away.”

“Down,” Finley barked, with such authority that Adam almost obeyed himself. “Down, now! You should be ashamed of yourself, jumping on guests. Go on back to the house. And no tearing up the garden in this rain, you hear me?”

The dog shook its head, jangling its heavy leather collar and splattering Adam’s jeans with mud, then trotted off with a spring in its step.

“Sorry about him,” Finley said, shoving open the front door. “He’s just a big dumb baby, but I thought I raised him better than that. Come inside and warm your bones.”

Finley strolled through a wood-paneled antechamber that was as big as Adam’s apartment back home, his shoes trailing damp prints over flagstones that turned to hardwood as they approached the grand staircase. Adam marveled at the feat of woodworking, like a twisting mahogany dragon that curved in on itself to create a landing before stretching into the darkness above. The space was not opulently decorated, and might even have been considered rustic by McMansion standards, but every detail Adam could see, from the mother-of-pearl inlaid coffee table to the gigantic oil landscape paintings hung on the walls, belied money so old most people probably forgot where it originally came from. There were landscape paintings missing from the walls, however, and open spaces on mantles where intricate clocks or jewelry boxes might have previously been displayed, suggesting that even the wealthiest old families needed to buoy themselves through hard times with selling off treasures.

“The lord’s a bit eccentric, fair warning.” Finley sloughed off his coat and hung it on an iron hook, then held out his hand for Adam and Nicola’s jackets. “No need to stand on ceremony, however. Just mind your manners and your host will be more than happy to tell you about Arabella, I’m sure.”

Nicola shot Adam a wary look, but Adam just gave her shoulder a squeeze and kept walking. Being invited right in was strange, sure, but rich people were weird, and Scotland had a different hospitality culture than America did, and most importantly, this may be the only opportunity he ever had to get his answers. Finley seemed relatively harmless, and Adam could probably fight him off if he needed to. Hell, Nicola probably could if she needed to. She was short, but she had a low center of gravity and she fought very, very dirty.

The pair followed Finley down a dim hallway, past a small parlor and into the home’s formal library. A merry fire, tantalizing despite the somewhat unsettling circumstances, blazed in a walk-in fireplace flanked by carvings of leaping hares. The room was painted sage green and paneled in dark wood, trimmed with wallpaper bearing tiny white flowers and vines. One wall had been turned into a gallery of framed photographs and little postcards, and there were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lining the opposite wall. A well-loved cognac leather couch beckoned, along with a bar cart topped with a sweating bucket of ice and a decanter of brown liquor.

A woman stood gazing into the fireplace, sipping from a cut-crystal glass.

“Finley,” she said in a throaty alto, not bothering to turn to face any of them, “who have you found?”

“Friends, I hope,” Finley said. “This is Adam and Nicola, sir. They were down at the pub asking about Arabella.”

At that, the woman turned around, a strange gleam in her dark eyes. She was wearing jodhpurs, and a green tweed vest over a white blouse and riding boots. Her thick hair was crow-black, offsetting her pale skin, and she wore it half-up, half-down in a practical style.

“That’s the lord?” Nicola whispered to Adam. “She looks like a grad student.”

The lord didn’t look like any grad student Adam had ever encountered, but he had majored in graphic design, and Nicola had a degree in literature, which tended to attract a much more theatrical type of person.

“Arabella?” the lord echoed, taking her time while giving Adam a once-over. It didn’t feel quite like being sized up or quite like being leered at, both of which would have at least been familiar. It felt more like she was committing every detail of him to memory, which was somehow more discomfiting. “Do you mean Arabella Kirkfoyle?”

“Yes,” Adam said, relief rushing through him. He had half convinced himself there was no one left alive who might remember that name. No one to answer his questions, and no one to give him closure. “I know this may sound strange, but I’m here on a sort of… pilgrimage? My grandfather was very important to me, and he died last year, but I actually don’t know that much about his life. I know he spent his younger years traveling, and he used to tell me stories about this place. Craigmar, I mean. But I never knew where in Scotland it was. Recently, I found this…”

Adam reached inside his vest and retrieved the letter. It never left his person during the day, and he slept with it within arm’s reach at night.

“It’s a letter from my grandfather, addressed to this house, made out to Arabella Kirkfoyle. I thought if she were still living here, she might be able to tell me more about who my grandfather was.”

Adam swallowed hard, embarrassment rising in his cheeks. He felt as though he had shared far too many intimate details, but also that he hadn’t shared enough for his story to make sense.

“You came all the way out here for that?” the lord asked. “Quite the quest.”

“I guess I, uh, don’t have a lot else going on at the moment.”

The lord of the manor walked right up to Adam, enveloping him with the scent of peaty whisky and her iris perfume. She wore a somewhat worse for wear clan badge pinned to her chest, displaying her family’s emblem and motto. It was a leaping hare encircled with iron into which the words “vivere militare est” were carved.

“May I?” she asked, holding her hand out for the letter. Adam wanted to deny her – this was one of the only clues to his grandfather’s life that Adam had left – but she spoke with such effortless command. Like she was asking Adam to hand her one of her own possessions that he had simply been tasked with minding. And she looked right at him with those black eyes, blacker than any eyes Adam had ever seen, never once wavering.

“It’s very delicate,” he said, trying to find the courage to tell her no.

“Precious things often are,” she said, the whisper of a smile touching her lips. Between the day-drinking and the jodhpurs and the antiquated formal title, Adam had assumed she was much older than him. But now, up close, he saw that she was thirty at the oldest, perhaps not even that. She and Finley might have been siblings, if it weren’t for their obvious difference in social station and the way the lord’s complexion, alarmingly pale and latticed with thin blue veins, clashed with Finley’s healthy, olive-toned skin. “I just want to take a look. I’ll give it right back, I promise.”

Adam took a deep breath, then placed the letter into her waiting palm.

The lord made a humming sound in her throat, like she was very pleased with him indeed. Adam’s stomach tightened, with arousal or with some other more fearful kind of anticipation. It was hard to say.

“Please have a seat, both of you,” she said, sweeping a hand towards the couch. “Would you like a drink? You must be hungry from the road. I can have Finley heat up the venison pie from last night, or tea and scones if you want something lighter?”

“Oh no,” Adam said. “We’re all right—”

“Tea and scones sound fab,” Nicola said, plopping down on the couch. She didn’t look exactly at ease, but she was good at making herself at home in strange situations. Finley slipped from the room and Adam sat down next to Nicola, eyeing a collection of very old and very complicated-looking board games stacked tidily in the middle of the coffee table.

“How did you come into possession of this?” the lord asked, unfolding the letter and holding it up to the firelight. Adam’s heart leapt into his throat, but she didn’t toss the note into the flames, just studied the script with a curious furrow between her brows. “Did someone give it to you?”

“Yeah,” Adam said. “Whenever my mom finds something of my grandfather’s, she passes it on to me. I figured no one else would be interested in it.”

“Oh, I’m very interested,” the lord said, flipping the paper over as though confirming its veracity. And then, in a curious lilt that sounded to Adam like stories woven by a fireside, she read the letter aloud.

My Arabella,

It’s spring here in Michigan, and I’ve never seen sunlight so bright. It hits Lake Huron like a mirror, and fills your eyes with stars. The people in this part of the country are very friendly, and respect hard work and honesty. I think I might stay here, at least for a little while.

Last night, I dreamed of Craigmar, at Easter this time. I miss your mother’s lamb roast, and the bonfires your father built, but most of all I miss going on morning hikes through the hills with you. I wonder if I’ll ever dream of anywhere else.

I hope you’re keeping well, and I hope these letters aren’t inappropriate. But I suspect that you read them and that they make you smile, even if you don’t write back.

Yours always,

Robbie

Adam had read the letter dozens of times, but hearing it in someone else’s voice made a lump form in his throat. He would go weeks without crying over his grandfather, and then it would hit him all at once. He stared into the fire, willing the heat to dry his eyes before anyone noticed he was getting misty.

“Thank you for sharing that with me,” the lord said, handing the letter back to Adam. She squeezed his shoulder before she moved away, an unexpected jolt of human warmth that startled him out of his grief. “I realized I never introduced myself. I’m Eileen Kirkfoyle. Arabella’s granddaughter. This is my land, and the fellow who was good enough to give you directions to the house is my groundskeeper.”

Adam’s shoulder burned where Eileen had touched him. It hadn’t escaped his notice that his grandfather’s letter could have been a love letter, and if Arabella had been anything like Eileen, Adam could understand the appeal of Kirkfoyle women.

“Pleasure to meet you,” Adam said, and he really meant that.

“I’m afraid I don’t know much about my grandmother. She died before I was born. But I’ve lived here all my life, and my family keeps thorough hereditary records, so I still may be able to help you.” Eileen sat in the chair opposite Adam and Nicola, leaning forward with her elbows propped on the knees of her spread legs. There was something masculine in the way she carried herself, like a country gentleman trapped in the body of a lithe girl. “I’m always happy to learn more about my ancestors, or any of their friends. It seems like your . . .