Page 167 of Auctioned to the Cruel Highlander
Her father’s face did not harden. If anything, it softened with sorrow, as though he understood that her refusal had not come lightly.
“I trust that I shall be safe here,” she added, looking first at him and then briefly at Ciaran.
This place was now hers in a difficult and unfinished way. If she ran from it, she would only teach herself that belonging could be postponed forever.
Her father’s eyes flicked to her husband, measuring perhaps the weight of the statement and the man beside it.
“And,” she went on, “I need to get used to me new home anyway.”
Her father eyed her for a moment, then nodded. “Aye,” he said softly. “I think ye do.”
The pride in his answer was quiet, which made it cut deeper. There was sadness there too, of course. The sadness of any father seeing his daughter choose the threshold she must cross without him.
But he did not reach for persuasion. He did not turn the offer into a second test. He accepted her answer for what it was—a choice. And because he accepted it, Ava felt more strongly that it had been truly hers to make.
Rory stepped forward and took her hands in his own. His grip was warm, familiar, and steady enough to make her throat tighten.
“If ye ever need me,” he said, “ye just send word.”
“I ken.”
“At once,” he added, his voice clear.
A faint smile touched Ava’s mouth. “Aye, Da.”
He bent and kissed her brow, and for one brief moment, she let herself lean into the comfort of him as she always had.
When he straightened, his eyes had gone suspiciously bright, though whether from feeling or fury at the whole day’s violence, she could not tell. Perhaps both.
He nodded once to Ciaran, a gesture of measured respect and unfinished judgment, then made for the door.
It opened again almost immediately to admit Isobel, who must have been waiting nearby for the conversation to finish. Her gaze darted first to Ava, then to Rory, and she seemed to read enough of the room’s stillness to understand that something had been decided.
“I shall stay with her,” she declared.
Rory gave a grunt that was half approval, half relief. “See that ye do.”
Isobel came to Ava’s side, warm and immediate in her quiet way, as he made for the door. He stepped out, gave them one last look, and then left, the door clicking shut behind him.
Silence settled over the chamber for a moment, and Ava stood in the middle of it, feeling the strange growing weight of her own answer.
She had now been given a way out twice. And twice she had refused it.
That truth rested differently inside her than anything that had come before. She was no longer only the woman who had been chosen at an auction, or the bride who had nearly been killed at her own wedding, or even the wife who had been kissed into silence a few minutes ago.
She was the woman who keptchoosingto remain.
And somewhere beneath the silence, beneath Isobel’s proximity and the sound of her father’s retreating footsteps, she wondered if she had just made the wrong choice.
Twice.
CHAPTER 13
For the next few days,Ciaran focused on work.
After the bloodshed at the wedding, the quickest way to ensure everything went back to normal was to focus on work. The study had been put back into order after the chaos, though the castle itself still carried the quieter signs of what had happened.
His men moved with sharper purpose in the passageways. The doors opened and closed with more care, and the voices dropped when they passed the room. As if everyone understood that some wounds had been dealt with in public and others were still being attended to in private.
