Page 52 of Hard-Hearted Highlander
This was brilliant. Avaline could scarcely believe she’d thought of it all on her own! But she didn’t have very long—she would be standing at the altar with the wrong Mackenzie brother if she didn’t act quickly.
She lowered herself down onto her pillow and tried to sleep, but it was useless. Her thoughts danced with the image of Aulay Mackenzie ruining her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SOMEWHEREINTHElast several days, Bernadette had abandoned all morals and decency and had given in to the raw desires of her flesh.
She was distraught about it. Not because the kiss had happened—because she had been quite moved by it and yearned for more.She wanted more. But she wasnotthat sort of woman,she wasnot.
Why, then, had her fall been so easy?
Bernadette donned a cloak and her boots, desperate to be out on her morning walk, to be out from under the same roof as Avaline, whom she’d betrayed more than once since they’d arrived in Scotland. She needed to breathe. Tothink.
Avaline had not yet come down for her breakfast, for which Bernadette was grateful. She had noticed that Avaline had been very quiet last night when they’d journeyed home, her gaze on a window too dark through which to see. While his lordship and his brother had drunkenly reviewed how vastly superior they were to their hosts in their thoughts and actions, or anyone for that matter, Bernadette fretted that Avaline somehow suspected what she and Mackenzie had done in that darkened hall. Was it even possible? Bernadette herself had stumbled into that hall in search of a retiring room. No, no, it was impossible Avaline could know—there’d been no one in that darkened corridor, no one but her and Mackenzie.
But Bernadette also knew that women had a strange intuition when it came to these things. Though Avaline had rarely revealed any intuition at all, it was entirely possible that in this, she might.
No matter what Avaline did or did not know, Bernadette was frantic to be away, to straighten her thoughts, to determine what she did from here. She was walking—nearly sprinting, really—to the door of Killeaven when she heard a sound above her and made the mistake of looking up.
“Good morning, Bernadette,” Avaline said, and yawned. She stood at the top of the stairs in her dressing gown, and then glided down the stairs like a princess, her hand trailing the railing as she went. She looked ethereal, almost as if she was walking in a dream.
“Good morning,” Bernadette said. God help her—did she sound as nervous as she felt?
“What are you about?” Avaline asked, eying her cloak.
“I, ah, I meant to have my morning walk.”
“You and all thatwalking,” Avaline said, sighing. “You’ll have legs the size of a man’s if you keep at it.”
Bernadette smiled tightly. “I’ll be along shortly to attend you—”
“Before you go,” Avaline said casually, “I should like a word.”
Bernadette’s gut twisted. She felt a little fuzzy, as if she was about to sink to the ground. “Now?”
“Yes,” Avaline said and continued her glide down the stairs to the ground floor. “Has Renard left any breakfast for me?” she asked as she carried on, past the pockmarked walls that had yet to repaired, down the hall to the dining room.
“Yes,” Bernadette said, and suppressed a sigh as she followed Avaline. She desperately thought how she might explain herself, how to make Avaline understand that sometimes, forces beyond our control could compel a person to act out of character. She would use the moment to convince Avaline to cry off this engagement, to see the folly in it.
In the dining room, Avaline went to the sideboard and helped herself to some toast and fish. She yanked on the bell pull before heading to the table to sit.
Bernadette removed her cloak, but she didn’t sit.
“The fish is cold,” Avaline complained. “I prefer it warmed.”
Renard appeared, carrying a tea service. “Good morning, Miss Kent,” he said cheerfully. “Shall I pour?”
“Yes, please. Bernadette, would you care for tea?”
“No. Thank you,” she said.
“I don’t care for cold fish, Renard,” Avaline said as the butler arranged the tea service around her.
“Yes, miss.”
Avaline lazily buttered her toast as Renard removed the offending piece of fish and carried it away on the tray.
“What did you wish to speak to me about?” Bernadette asked after he’d gone.
