Page 136 of Auctioned to the Cruel Highlander
Ava smoothed her hands over her gown. From a distance, perhaps she looked composed enough. Inside, her earlier panic was hardening into something more definite.
All the assurances Isobel could offer rested on hope, on pride, on her brother’s supposed decency, and on the belief that a man Ava had never met would behave exactly as they wished him to.
The hall seemed smaller than it had moments ago.
Ava drew one careful breath, then another, keeping her face still as more murmurs rose around them. She stood where she was, since leaving at this moment would definitely draw eyes and questions, the very sort of attention she most wished to avoid.
Yet remaining had become its own humiliation. The hall pressed at her from all sides, and the whole gathering felt immensely pretentious and ceremonious.
And she was right in the middle of it.
She had known that already, of course. But knowing something and feeling it settle into her body were not the same misery.
Isobel watched her with growing concern. “Ava.”
Ava kept her gaze on the hall. “I heard ye the first twenty times.”
“Ye need to relax.”
“I am all right,” she responded, almost snapping.
She was standing in a bride auction because she had trusted affection, foolishness, and a plan built on hope.
The absurdity of it might have been funny if it had not involved her own skin.
A woman across the hall adjusted the fall of her shawl and turned slightly as two older men passed by. Another stood beside what looked like an aunt, smiling too carefully. A third kept her gaze lowered with such rehearsed modesty that Ava wondered whether she had practiced it in front of a mirror.
For some reason, the sight heightened her wariness. She was among them, whether she liked it or not.
Seen as one of them.
An auction bride.
Ugh!
Beside her, Isobel lowered her voice. “I will introduce ye to some of me cousins after this ends.”
Ava turned then, because that at least deserved the respect of a direct look. “As yer brother's new wife or yer friend?”
A hint of guilt flickered across Isobel’s face, brief and sincere.
That sincerity made the whole thing more maddening, not less. Ava did not doubt her friend’s heart. But she doubted her judgment, which was far less useful.
“Again, Ava, I truly believe me brother would never trap a woman,” Isobel said. “He would never humiliate ye.”
Ava held her gaze. “Yebelieve that.”
“Aye.”
“And I daenae ken him at all. I daenae even ken what he looks like. ”
Isobel drew breath as if to argue again, then let it go. Perhaps she had finally understood that no amount of certainty borrowed from sisterly devotion could settle the nerves of a woman asked to trustThe Silent Death.
Ava looked away first.
There was nothing to be gained now by circling the same fear until it swallowed her whole. She could not leave without making a spectacle of herself. She could not wring a promise from the air. She could not undo the past two weeks and return to the safety of her father’s study before this ridiculous plan had grown bones.
So she did the only thing left to her: she straightened. She needed to be prepared for anything.
