Chapter 18
The music reached Ava before she started to question what it was and where it came from.
At first, she thought some servant had left a door open and sound was drifting oddly through the stone. Then she sat up in bed and listened again. It was too clear for that.
A piano.
This was real playing. Low at first, then fuller, the notes carrying through the sleeping castle with a steadiness that made her whole body go still.
Ciaran. No other person would dare play the piano in the castle this late at night. It had to be him. And if it was him, from the way the music carried, she knew exactly where it was coming from.
She pushed back the sheets. There could not be many people in the castle who would sit at a piano this late and play like that, and only one of them had a tower.
Ava rose before she could stop herself. She wrapped a cloak around her nightgown, thrust her feet into her slippers, and opened her chamber door with care.
The passageway beyond lay dim and quiet, one lamp burning low at one corner. Farther off, the castle had settled into the silence that came only when the fires burned down.
The music went on.
She followed it.
With every step upward, the sound grew clearer. Something about how private it felt pushed her forward for some reason. A part of her wondered if she would have even heard it if she’d fallen asleep early.
Ciaran did not exactly strike her as a man who made a habit of putting his mind into art. She knew, as she climbed, that she should perhaps leave it alone. Whatever was in the tower had likely been sought for solitude, not company.
Still, she kept going.
By the time she climbed the last step, her pulse had picked up in a way that had little to do with the stairs. The music filled the narrow passage now. She slowed at the open door and looked inside.
Ciaran sat alone at the piano. The room was lit only by a few candles and the weak sliver of moonlight that slid through the open window. Her eyes moved to the large object beside the wall, and her lips quirked up.
The telescope.
Everything about the room was familiar enough from what she had imagined after his mention of the tower, but the sight of him there unsettled her more than she had expected.
He was not cold in this room. He was not the feared Laird from the auction, nor the distant husband from days ago, nor even the controlled man who had kept pulling back whenever they came too near one another.
He was simply there, bent over the piano, absorbed in the way his hands moved across the keys. His face looked different in that concentration.
He looked unguarded.
Ava lingered at the threshold for one breath, then another. She could still leave. She could step back, let him keep the room to himself, and carry the knowledge of what she had seen in silence.
But for some reason, her feet remained rooted to the spot. Something in her rejected the idea of retreating from him yet again.
He had spent too many days hiding behind distance. She had spent too many hours wondering what he was hiding. Now she was here, and he was here, and the most honest version of him she had yet seen was a few steps away, sitting at a piano in the middle of the night.
Deciding to throw caution to the wind, she took a deep breath and pushed the door open. The creak was low enough so as not to break the music, and she was grateful enough. Eventually, she closed the door behind her and crossed the room.
He did not jump in surprise, and that told her he had known she was there before she reached him. Still, he did not stop playing until she came close enough to the bench that her nightgown brushed lightly against the wood.
The music faded away. The silence after it felt charged.
Ava sat beside him, close enough that she could feel the warmth of his body in the cold room and smell the faint clean scent of soap and wool in the night air.
For a few seconds, neither of them spoke.
She looked at his hands still resting on the keys and the line of his shoulders.
Then her eyes flicked to the window beyond him, the night stretched black and wide outside of it.
The room seemed smaller now that she was inside it with him, though there was more open space here than in half the rooms below.
Eventually, he cleared his throat and looked at her. “Why did ye come?”
The way he said the words struck her at once. As if her being there had encroached on his comfort.
Ava looked at him and gave a proper answer anyway. “I heard the music.”
It was true. She had heard it. She had followed it because she could not do anything else once it found her. Yet even as she said it, she knew it was not enough. His question had carried too much weight for that answer to settle it.
He narrowed his eyes at her.
The intensity of his gaze made her breath catch. There was no anger in it. That would have been easier. What she saw instead was strain, like she used to see whenever he was about to withdraw.
“Ye ken that’s nae what I meant.”
“Do I?”
Ciaran exhaled. “Ye need to stop doing that.”
“Nae when I see how much it annoys ye.”
A smirk curved his lips.
It was all Ava needed to know that he found this amusing.
She kept her eyes on him and understood it all at once with enough force to leave her still. He had not been pushing her away because he felt nothing. He had been doing it because he felt too much and did not know how to bear her nearness without wanting more.
That had to be it.
Ava drew a deep breath. “Ye play quite nicely.”
“Thank ye. I have always wanted someone to refer to me playing as quite nice.”
“Take the compliment, me Laird. Ye daenae usually do well with them.”
“Why? Have ye tried complimenting me before?”
She swallowed. He was staring squarely at her now, his eyes practically mirroring the motion of hers.
“I complimented yer horse.”
“Me horse.”
“When ye think about it, it was a compliment to ye as well.”
“Was it?”
“Aye.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “Was it?”
All right, the repetition thing was annoying now that she was on the receiving end of it. If he noticed her contention, he said nothing about it.
Her voice sounded thinner than she liked when she spoke next. “Isobel is worried about ye, ye ken?”
That was true enough, but Ciaran did not look away.
“She isnae the only one,” he responded, his low voice carried by the gentle breeze in the tower. “I am worried about me as well.”
The words landed with such force that Ava had to catch her breath for a moment. Something in her chest did a hard, painful twist.
So that was it.
She turned toward him fully. “That is a cruel thing to say.”
His brow furrowed slightly. “Cruel?”
“Aye.” Her hands tightened in her lap. “If that is the truth of it, then the rest of this week has been even crueler than I thought.”
Something shifted across his face then, sharpening his gaze.
“Ye avoided me,” she said. “Ye left me to wonder whether I had imagined half of what has happened between us. Ye let me think…” She paused, her breath hitching. “Ye let me think ye wanted distance because I had become tiresome to ye.”
His jaw tightened. “Ye were never tiresome.”
“Nay?” Ava scoffed, and now the hurt had found its voice properly. “Then what was I meant to think when ye walked away whenever we grew close? When ye could kiss me one hour and vanish the next?”
His eyes held hers, and what she saw there made her pulse jump again, because there was no hollowness in them now. Only a hard honesty he had plainly tried not to give her.
“All ye were meant to think was that I was protecting ye,” he said. “I was trying nae to make a worse mess of things.”
Ava let out a short breath that was too sharp to be laughter and too startled to be anything else. “That is a very poor explanation.”
“It is the only honest one I have.”
A wave of anger and relief tangled together inside her in a way that made sitting still impossible. She rose from the bench and turned away a pace, not because she wanted distance, but because she needed room to think without his shoulder nearly touching hers.
Behind her, he did not move.
“Do ye ken what is hateful about that?” she asked.
“I expect ye mean to tell me.”
“That I might almost prefer simple coldness. It would at least have spared me the humiliation of guessing wrongly.”
“Ava.”
“Nay,” she hissed, rounding on him. “Ye daenae get to say me name in that voice and think it answers everything. If ye felt this, if ye kent I affected ye, then why leave me to stand there like a fool, wondering whether I had been the problem all along?”
His expression changed at that. It did not soften. It tightened.
“Ye have never and will never be the problem, Ava.”
The room went very quiet.
Ava could not look away from him now, even if she wanted to. She had asked him for the truth and was now getting it in a form that made her almost sorry she had demanded so much of it.
Almost.
His hands no longer rested on the keys as she took her seat beside him. One lay flat on the bench, and the other hung loose at his side, but nothing in him looked easy. He seemed held together by decision alone.
“Ye ask why I kept me distance,” he said. “It’s because when I daenae, I want more.”
The words hit her so swiftly that she felt them in her body before she could sort them into thought.
More.
More of her. More of her closeness. More of her touch. More of whatever had begun the moment she sat beside him and refused to leave his hidden room untouched.
Ava swallowed. “Ye make it sound as though I ought to apologize for it.”
The corner of his mouth curved, though there was no humor in it. “Should ye?”
The answer came out before she had time to consider it. “Nay.”
His eyes fixed on her mouth, then lifted again, and that one glance made the whole room shrink. She could hear his breathing now. She could feel his pull.
Neither of them spoke or moved, but Ava knew with absolute certainty that they had reached the point where one more word said wrongly would destroy what little restraint remained between them. They just needed to take that one step.
And from the look in his eyes, something told her he would not need much convincing.