Lord, she’d missed the entire conversation. “Excuse me,” she said, “I’m afraid I didn’t sleep well.” Or at all. “Could you repeat that?”
“Could you give us a minute, please?” Sitric asked, rising and offering his hand to Cara. “We’ll be back before you miss us,” he told the others with an easy smile.
They stepped out of the hall into a blistering eastern wind, a harbinger of the coming storm. Cara considered asking if she could return for a cloak when Sitric stepped into one of the smaller halls further back on the property. Built in the same style as the two larger ones, but a quarter of their size and with only one door.
“These are for various purposes,” Sitric explained, holding the door for her and closing it tightly behind them. “When we have guests like Brian, especially if he travels with his wife, we offer these cottages for their use. Or, as we are doing, I use them for private meetings when I don’t want anyone in the hall listening in.”
“Is something the matter?” Cara asked, unable to decipher Sitric’s unusual behavior. Granted, she found a good deal of his behavior unusual, but pulling her from such an important meeting and taking leisure time to speak in a cottage felt especially odd.
Sitric moved about the room, lighting the four braziers that stood, one in each corner. “You tell me.”
“Do you mean my misstep at the meeting?” she asked. “I really did get very little sleep. I’m terribly sorry that I wasn’t paying attention.”
“Don’t be,” he replied, his manner so easy she could forget he was a king. “It was so tedious it nearly putmeto sleep,” he teased. “Why did you get so little sleep?”
Cara rolled her lips, considering whether or not to tell him the truth. “I was reading,” she admitted sheepishly.
“The book Diarmid brought you?”
She nodded.
“Did you enjoy it?”
“Very much,” she replied honestly. “If you don’t mind my asking, why are we here? I’m certain it’s not to talk about my irresponsible reading habits.”
Sitric chuckled, taking a seat on the bed—a near duplicate of the one in her room. “In an odd sort of way, it is, actually.”
What in the world did that mean? Cara inclined her head questioningly.
“When was the last time you stayed up all night reading a book?”
Cara thought a moment. “Honestly, I can’t recall. It must have been while I was still a child, having just learned my letters.”
“Precisely,” Sitric told her. “You are responsible to a fault, to my thinking. I could sense it when we met, and it was one of the things that made me believe we would not be a good match.”
“Are you saying that you like me more now because I stayed up too late?” Cara couldn’t scrape together a direction from any of his random questions.
“Hear me out,” he pleaded, his voice quiet, insistent. “If you never do this, why now? Why last night? What kept you reading?”
“I was enjoying the story,” Cara answered, feeling that much was obvious.
“You’ve read it a hundred times. It couldn’t only be that.”
Cara hesitated. “And, it kept me from worrying about…everything else.”
“Aha!” Sitric stood, now pacing the small room with his hands behind his back, as though solving the world’s greatest mystery. “My final question,” he promised. “What thoughts were distracting you so at the discussion just now? Your honest answer, Cara.”
The way he said it, Cara could tell he already had his suspicions. So she gave him her honest answer. “Diarmid,” she whispered, her chest filling with guilt.
“Don’t worry yourself over injuring my feelings. I like you,” he said, his deep voice filled with kindness, “but I never loved you. I simply thought that one day I could.”
“Did Diarmid put you up to this?”
“No,” Sitric chuckled. “He wished me well in my marriage and apologized for the four hundredth time for romancing my future wife. If he tries to apologize again, I may actually punch him, but not for the transgression. Just to end the interminable apologizing.”
“I appreciate your understanding and kindness through this mess that we’ve made,” Cara told him, “but I’m certain I’ve made the right choice.”
“You stay up all night reading the book he brought you to keep yourself from thinking about him. Then, when you’re forced to do anything else, you can’t stop thinking about him long enough to have a conversation that will determine your future. I’m not so certain you did make the right choice, and I felt obligated to point it out before this went too far.”
