Page 91 of Auctioned to the Cruel Highlander
CHAPTER 26
The comet remainedvisible in the sky when Ava turned her head toward him.
Her hand remained in his on the coat. The air had gone colder, but she did not seem to feel it much. Wonder still sat on her face, and Ciaran could see the dampness on her lashes where tears had gathered and dried. He could see the quiet relief in her mouth.
When she spoke, her voice was low enough that the loch and the night completely blended in around it.“I am sorry I have been distant.”
Ciaran looked at her. She had every reason to hold herself apart from him. He knew that better than she did. Yet here she was, opening the door he had kept trying to close.
“The fire. Me father. Everything with us.” Her fingers tightened once around his. “I have been angry, and afraid, and tired, and some of it I didnae carry well.”
“It happens to the best of us,” he responded.
He should have let it rest there. He should have taken the grace she offered and kept his mouth shut. Instead, he listened to the part of himself that had been niggling at him for days.
Ava turned her face toward the sky again for a second, then back to him. “Ye have been very kind to me family.”
The line struck him with the same force as the others.
“I ken things are still difficult,” she continued. “I ken I havenae made them easier. But I do see that. It is important to me that ye ken that Iseethat.”
Ciaran kept his eyes on her face because looking away felt like cowardice. “Aye. I will always care for Laird MacKenna.” He heard the roughness in his own voice but did not stop. “And ye. Ye’re me wife, even for a little while.”
The silence that followed was charged.
Ava went still beside him, and he felt the change in her hand before he saw it in her face.
“What does that mean?”
There it was. The opening he had been waiting for all this time. He could lie and say it had meant nothing more than the uncertainty of life after fire and danger. He could delay again and push the truth a few days further down the road.
But he had done enough of that.
“I have been thinking,” he began. “And I think we should seek an annulment.”
The words left his mouth and broke the night cleanly.
Ava let go of his hand.
He lay where he was and stared up at the sky for one beat because he could not yet make himself face what he had done. Then he turned toward her. She had pushed herself up on one elbow. The wonder from earlier had vanished from her face so quickly it looked as if someone had taken a lamp from a room.
“Ye have been what?”
“Thinkingon it.”
She sat up fully. “Here? Now? This is when ye choose to say that to me?”
Ciaran pushed himself upright, too. The coat shifted beneath them, and the cold night rustled the grass at the edges. He felt none of it.
“I shouldnae have forced ye into this when ye were so plainly opposed to it.”
Ava stared at him in disbelief, and he knew at once he had chosen the wrong words.
“Is that still what ye think? That ye forced me?” she asked.
Ciaran exhaled. “Ava?—”
“All these days together, and ye still think I could be forced to make a decision this grand? Ye think this was all forced on me?
