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 thenarrow 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 lookedunguarded.
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 beyondhim, 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 felttoo muchand did not know how to bear her nearness without wanting more.
