Page 18 of Auctioned to the Cruel Highlander
Ava narrowed her eyes. “About what?”
He looked toward the loch for a moment, then back at her, and when he spoke, his voice held the same blunt calm with which he had first chosen her.
“I daenae want a wife who fears me.”
Her breath eased a fraction.
“But neither do I want one who cares for me.”
The words landed so cleanly that she almost missed their force at first. Then they struck her all at once.
“What?”
“I thought ye understood that much already.” His tone remained just as level. “I chose ye because ye didnae seem eager. Ye didnae look as though ye wished for softness from me. That suited me.”
Ava could only stare at him as the night grew colder.
“This is to be a marriage of convenience,” he continued. “Apracticalone. Ye need nae fear that I expect foolish devotions or tender nonsense. After producing an heir, we may live mostly separate lives.”
Ava felt the words strike her very core.
He had looked at her and found her ideal precisely because he believed she would neither love him nor require love from him. As though she might be placed into a cold arrangement, used for its purpose, and left to settle quietly like furniture assigned to a room.
“So that is why ye chose me?” she asked. “Because I seemedconvenientfor emptiness?”
His gaze sharpened slightly. “Because ye seemed sensible.”
“Nay,” Ava said, heat now rising through the hurt. “Daenae make it sound like it is a good thing. Ye mean that I looked like a woman who might ask nothing and feel nothing, and therefore make little trouble.”
“That isnae what I said.”
“It is what yemeant.”
She could hear the force gathering in her own voice and did not stop it. Let him hear. Let him know she was not some quiet vessel to be filled with his arrangements and shelved.
His jaw ticked once. “I meant that I believed ye capable of a practical marriage.”
“Practical,” Ava scoffed, taking one step nearer despite every sensible instinct urging retreat. “’Tis quite the fancy word forloveless.”
“Call it what ye want,” Ciaran said. “But these are me terms.”
Ava exhaled as loud as she could, ignoring the stinging cold. “Yer terms, huh?”
He said nothing in response.
A bright idea came to her then. Her lips curled into a smile as she folded her arms and stared straight at him.
“If those are yer terms, then I have conditions of me own as well.”
For the first time since finding her at the fence, something like interest moved across his face. It was closer to amusement than surprise. “Aye?”
“Aye.”
He regarded her for a moment that felt longer than it should have. Then, with that same infuriating calm, he nodded. “Ye may set them tomorrow. Inside a warm castle. I willnae have me bride catch her death before the wedding.”
Ava’s heart gave a hard, ugly thud.
Before the wedding.
