Page 8 of Auctioned to the Cruel Highlander
“Couldnae?”
“It would have been rude.”
Ava blinked. “Rude?”
“Andunkind,” Isobel added, more quietly now. “I thought that saying such a thing outright would mean admitting too much. It would mean telling him the gathering needed help. That women were appearing because I pushed and persuaded and wrote letters and begged for favors, nae because his prospects improved on their own.”
Ava could only look at her. The flaw in the plan, already visible, widened like a crack through ice.
“Please, he is a feared warrior. I am certain his pride would have taken it,” she said.
Isobel winced a little. “I spared him the humiliation.”
“At the expense of mine?”
“Ava—”
“I daenae like this, Isobel. I daenae like this at all.”
Isobel opened her mouth, then shut it again. Her silence answered better than words.
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.”
