Page 186 of Auctioned to the Cruel Highlander
“So, ye arenae hiding from me? Look me in the eyes and tell me honestly.”
He stared at her eyes, at the blue flecks surrounding her irises.
“I kent it,” she scoffed.
He could hear the mild hurt in her voice, even though it was clear she made an effort not to show it.
“If this continues,” she warned, “I think I shall visit me father by the end of the week.”
The words landed cleanly. Of course, she had decided that absence might be better than this half-marriage of approach and retreat.
Something inside him tightened so quickly that he almost let it show. For one reckless second, he wanted to stop her there. To tell her that she had no notion what effect the very thought had on him. To put the map in her hands and say,See, I did think of ye. I did listen. I do carry ye when I never meant to.
Instead, he did what he had always done when the truth came too near the surface—he hid it. He turned just enough that the map disappeared entirely from her sight.
Ava’s gaze sharpened, though whether she had noticed the movement or only the pause around it, he could not tell.
“Well?” she prompted.
Ciaran forced words into his mouth in a bid to show he was unaffected by her decision. “Do as ye think best.”
The answer was poor even to his own ears.
Ava held his gaze for a beat longer. She did not plead or try to argue with him. If anything, her expression cooled a little, as though she had expected disappointment and was annoyed to have been proven right.
“Very well,” she said.
That should have ended it. It did not.
The silence that followed carried too much: her calm decision, the hidden map, the fact that neither of them had said the true thing.
Ciaran knew if he stayed there one moment longer, he would either harden further or break in some direction he did not trust.So he did the safest thing—he stepped back. “I have business to attend to.”
Ava nodded and stepped aside to let him pass.
Ciaran headed to his chambers first and sat on the bed for a few hours.
Why couldn’t he just admit what had happened? Why did he have to be stubborn and adamant about something as mundane as this?
His mind remained crowded with those thoughts until the sky darkened and the usual hubbub around the castle dulled because the servants were trying to prepare for a new day.
When he stepped out of his room, he did not go to the study or even the courtyard. Instead, he climbed the stairs to the tower. The map remained in his hand the whole way, his fingers curled around it tightly like it was some kind of life support.
By the time he reached the tower, he was breathing harder than usual.
He set the map down without unrolling it.
The telescope stood where it always did, by the window. The piano waited further in, dark wood and familiar keys, a thing he had once used for solitude and now reached for because there were no words in him fit for use. Not ones he could trust anyway.
He hadn’t played in a long time.Averylong time. But now, with the conflicting thoughts swimming through his head with almost no end in sight, he realized he needed to do something about all of this.
He exhaled and sat at the piano. For a moment, he only rested his hands there, not yet playing, the keys cool beneath his fingers. Then he began.
The music came rougher than he meant to, with too much force in the first few lines, as though the notes had been waiting behind his ribs all day and resented the delay.
He let them go. There was no one in the room to hear what lay in them anyway. Evenhecouldn’t describe it. They just came out in several words at the back of his mind.
Frustration.
