Page 187 of Auctioned to the Cruel Highlander
Desire.
Ava.
He played harder, then softer. At some point, the window stood open wider than before, and the night air drifted through the room. The sound carried out over the grounds and down past the floors and into the dark grass and whatever parts of the castle were still awake.
Even as he continued to play, the tunes escaping the keys and drifting through the room, he still was unable to shove all his feelings into a box. He had fought wars and dealt with several injuries. He had even come close to death, and yet this strange, fascinating woman was the one battle he simply could not win.
What was it about her?
What was it about Ava Fraser that changed him?
CHAPTER 18
The music reachedAva before she started to question what it was and where it came from.
At first, she thought some servant had left a door open and sound was drifting oddly through the stone. Then she sat up in bed and listened again. It was too clear for that.
A piano.
This was real playing. Low at first, then fuller, the notes carrying through the sleeping castle with a steadiness that made her whole body go still.
Ciaran.No other person would dare play the piano in the castle this late at night. It had to be him. And if it was him, from the way the music carried, she knew exactly where it was coming from.
She pushed back the sheets. There could not be many people in the castle who would sit at a piano this late and play like that, and only one of them had a tower.
Ava rose before she could stop herself. She wrapped a cloak around her nightgown, thrust her feet into her slippers, and opened her chamber door with care.
The passageway beyond lay dim and quiet, one lamp burning low at one corner. Farther off, the castle had settled into the silence that came only when the fires burned down.
The music went on.
She followed it.
With every step upward, the sound grew clearer. Something about how private it felt pushed her forward for some reason. A part of her wondered if she would have even heard it if she’d fallen asleep early.
Ciaran did not exactly strike her as a man who made a habit of putting his mind into art. She knew, as she climbed, that she should perhaps leave it alone. Whatever was in the tower had likely been sought for solitude, not company.
Still, she kept going.
By the time she climbed the last step, her pulse had picked up in a way that had little to do with the stairs. The music filled thenarrow passage now. She slowed at the open door and looked inside.
Ciaran sat alone at the piano. The room was lit only by a few candles and the weak sliver of moonlight that slid through the open window. Her eyes moved to the large object beside the wall, and her lips quirked up.
The telescope.
Everything about the room was familiar enough from what she had imagined after his mention of the tower, but the sight of him there unsettled her more than she had expected.
He was not cold in this room. He was not the feared Laird from the auction, nor the distant husband from days ago, nor even the controlled man who had kept pulling back whenever they came too near one another.
He was simply there, bent over the piano, absorbed in the way his hands moved across the keys. His face looked different in that concentration.
He lookedunguarded.
Ava lingered at the threshold for one breath, then another. She could still leave. She could step back, let him keep the room to himself, and carry the knowledge of what she had seen in silence.
But for some reason, her feet remained rooted to the spot. Something in her rejected the idea of retreating from him yet again.
He had spent too many days hiding behind distance. She had spent too many hours wondering what he was hiding. Now she was here, and he was here, and the most honest version of him she had yet seen was a few steps away, sitting at a piano in the middle of the night.
