As if she needed the reminder.
He spared her no time to recover from it before he spoke again.“It will be next week.”
The words closed round her like a metal fist, and she stood very still.
The wedding was in a week.
CHAPTER 5
The next morning,Ava walked down the garden path between her father and Isobel with the sting of the night before still fresh.
Her father had arrived late last night after her attempted escape, and now, she wondered if she needed to tell him about it.
The sky was pale and clear above the walls, and the morning mist still clung to the grass beyond the gravel paths. The air also smelled of damp leaves, wet soil, and the faint sweetness of late flowers. Somewhere further down the slope, she could hear a gardener call to another in a low voice.
The way everything felt so casual helped more than she would have expected.
She had not slept much. What little sleep came had been broken and thin, and she still felt rubbed raw by memory.
The loch.
The fence.
Ciaran’s hand on her waist.
His voice, steady as a rock, telling her he wanted neither fear nor love.
Her own foolish hope each time she asked a question that might have freed her, and the way each answer tightened the trap a little further.
Yet here, in the gardens, something in her could breathe again.
Her father did not press her at once. That was part of why she loved him so fiercely. Rory Fraser, Laird MacKenna, could be loud when he chose to, and protective enough to flatten other men with words alone. Yet with her, he often knew when gentleness would do more. He only kept pace beside her with one hand tucked behind his back and the other occasionally brushing her arm as if to make certain she was truly there.
Isobel, for her part, had been quieter than usual all morning.
Ava noticed everything, especially the guilt in Isobel’s voice anytime she spoke and the fact that she seemed to be waiting for her to grow even angrier than she already was.
At last, Rory exhaled lightly enough to leave her room to refuse. “If ye look any paler, I might start to worry ye are a ghost.”
Ava let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “I should have preferred being a ghost. They are at least nae in the habit of arranging weddings.”
His mouth twitched. “A fair point.”
Isobel looked pained. “Again, Ava, I deeply apologize.”
Ava turned to her friend. “I am nae saying it to wound ye.”
“I ken.” Isobel wrung her hands for a moment, then let them fall again. “But I would mend it if I could.”
That softened something in Ava despite herself. “I ken that too.”
Her father glanced between them and wisely did not step into the middle of it. He only nodded before he spoke again. “Then perhaps we can manageamodicum of decorum before breakfast?”
Ava smiled properly at that, small though it was.
They walked on.
The path curved through a stand of green shrubs and opened onto a lower stretch where the morning light lay warm across the soil.
