Page 84 of Auctioned to the Cruel Highlander
All that lingered in his mind was the memory of the dance and Ava in his arms under her father’s watchful gaze.
Great.
As if he didn’t have a lot to deal with already.
CHAPTER 24
Later that evening,Ciaran shut the study door behind him and reached for the whiskey before he took off his gloves.
He poured some into the nearest cup and downed half of it in one gulp. The liquor burned cleanly down his throat, but it didn’t help afterward.
His body remained keyed up, and his mind remained fixed where he did not want it. Ava’s hand in his at dinner. Ava’s waist under his palm. Ava looking up at him while her father watched from across the table.
He set the cup down harder than he had meant to.
The study should have steadied him. It usually did. The sight of papers, ledgers, and wax was usually enough to clear everything else from his mind. Those things had served him well for years. He could come in here, shut the door, and become only what he needed to be—a laird with decisions to make.
Tonight, however, the room offered no such respite.
He sat back in his chair and pressed his palm flat against the front of his trousers. He was already hard. He had been since the dance, since her hand in his, and since her face tilted up to him in the candlelight. The leather was tight against him, and the pressure of his own hand made his jaw clench.
He began to move his hand slowly, his mind drifting once again to moments involving Ava.Her waist under his palm, the scent of her neck when he stood close enough to catch it. The sound she made in the tower with her head tipped back and her fingers curled into his hair.
He worked himself through the leather, his breath coming heavier and the ache growing more pleasurable.
He gripped the armrest with his free hand and let his thoughts grow more heated. He was thinking of her hands on his shoulders and the way his name had broken in her mouth. He pressed harder, moved faster, and felt the grain of the wood bite into his palm. His hips bucked, and his breath came in through his nose and out unevenly.
Then, a knock sounded at the door.
Quickly, he adjusted himself and looked up. Hector walked in without waiting long enough to be invited, which told Ciaran exactly how visible his unrest had become.
Hector shut the door behind him and took one look at the bottle on the desk. “That bad?”
Ciaran reached for the cup again. “Did ye come for anything useful?”
Hector leaned one shoulder against the door. “I came to see whether marriage had finally bettered ye. It appears it has only made ye thirstier.”
Ciaran drank and said nothing.
Hector’s mouth twitched. “A husband needs nae sit alone fighting himself in a study.”
Ciaran shot him a look. “Choose yer next words carefully.”
There was no real heat in the warning. Hector noticed that, too. His expression stayed much too calm.
“Aye,” he said. “That bad, then.”
Ciaran turned away and set the empty cup down. The fact that his brother could walk in, make one crude observation, and land so near the mark put him in a black mood at once. He had not even managed to carry himself like a man in control of his own body, let alone his own marriage.
Hector pushed off the door and stepped further into the room. The lightness dropped from him in small increments.
“So I was thinking,” he started. “Now that we have Laird MacKenna here, this would be the time.”
Ciaran did not ask what he meant. He knew.
“If an annulment is what ye still want,” Hector continued, “better to speak while the old man is under our roof than wait and make a bigger mess later.”
The words settled heavily.
