Page 198 of Auctioned to the Cruel Highlander
She turned and walked away before he could answer.
He did not stop her or call out her name. He stood in the middle of the yard and watched her go with her shoulders stiff and her steps too quick to be calm. She did not look back once.
The men around him returned to work by degrees, and practice resumed ever so slowly. But he remained where he was.
He still believed he had made the right decision. Sending her into danger would have been madness. He would make the same decision again if forced. The road was uncertain. The cause of the fire was unknown. He had men for speed, strength, and search. She had none of the things that would make that ride safer. But he had handled the delivery rather poorly.
The realization settled in him ever so slowly as he closed his hand around empty air where the note had been.
A few minutes ago, he had stood here confessing to Hector that liking his wife was already too dangerous. Now, he had proof of the danger that started to grow inside of him.
Fear for Ava did not make him gentle. It made him controlling. He reached for authority the moment vulnerability became unbearable.
And she had felt the difference immediately.
Something told him, through the clang of wooden swords and screams of the men around him, that this wouldn’t be the last time.
CHAPTER 21
For three days,Ava kept the door shut.
Ciaran knocked each morning and evening. Sometimes he spoke her name first. Sometimes he only struck the wood with his knuckles and waited. She never answered. Once, she stood close enough to the door to see the line of light under it darken with the shape of his boots and still said nothing.
The room grew stale around her. Her wedding things had long since been put away. The fresh gowns Isobel had sent in lay folded where they had been set. Food came and went in trays she scarcely touched. She slept badly, woke with her throat dry, and sat for long stretches looking at nothing while her mind ran in circles around the same few facts.
MacKenna Castle had been set on fire. No one had told her whether her father lived or not, and the same man who had carried her bloody from an attack and held her with such careone moment had turned hard the next and told her she would obey him.
The hurts would not separate cleanly. Fear for her father kept tangling with anger at Ciaran until she could not pull one free of the other.
When he knocked, it only made it worse. His voice through the wood was controlled every time.
“Ava.”
“Open the door.”
“Ye must eat.”
That one almost undid her because it sounded so much like him—care shown in the shape of an order.
She pressed both hands over her face and stayed silent.
On the fourth morning, she heard his knock again and did not move from the chair by the bed.
“Ava.”
Nothing in her softened.
The handle turned down and then up. He was trying the door only to prove to himself that it remained locked. She could picture his face too easily, the set jaw, the controlled impatience, the strain he would never willingly bring into words.
Then another voice came, sharper and feminine. “Leave off.”
Ava lowered her hands.
There was a pause outside. Then Ciaran spoke, his voice flat enough that she knew exactly how annoyed he was. “Isobel.”
“Aye, me. And ye may stop standing outside her door like a jailer.”
“I am making certain she has food.”
