“Then I will comfort you,” Conall promised, and he folded her into his arms as she took a fistful of his silk shirt and sobbed into his chest, all the tension in her body releasing.
Chapter 53
“Is this my fault?” Gizelle had to ask quietly, her chest tight and her hands shaking too hard to unwind from each other.
Wrench was picking up Aideen’s matching bags, and he gave her a sharp look. “He can’t hear you,” the tattooed man reminded her before he disappeared with all of the luggage.
Indeed, Conall was looking away from her, at Aideen coming out of her bedroom with her hair perfectly done and her chin high.
“There’s no reason to be this melodramatic,” she said with a sniff. “It’s incredibly selfish of you to throw me off the island just a few days before Christmas, and so unnecessary.”
“I find it necessary,” Conall growled.
“I’m sure this isn’t your choice,” Aideen said to Conall, with a look like thorns at Gizelle.
Gizelle kept herself from stepping behind Conall’s comforting form mostly by being too afraid and sad to move. She had thought that Aideen liked her, that she and Conall and his mother could be a real family. She’d never had a family and it had sounded so pleasant.
But nothing about Aideen’s a
nger and disgust was pleasant.
“You should have just run,” Aideen said coldly to Gizelle. “You’ll be sorry when you break his heart.”
Gizelle’s heart quailed in her chest. What if Aideen was right? What if Conall regretted her? Or worse, resented her?
Conall stepped between them. “She gave me my heart,” he snarled. “And I trust her with it.”
Gizelle rallied at his words and the undeniable truth behind them. “I’m very sorry you couldn’t like me,” she said, peering around Conall. “I had hoped you could be my mother, too.”
Aideen stared at her, clearly expecting some other kind of response, and her surprise gave Gizelle the rest of the courage she needed to step from behind Conall and extend her hand as steadily as she could. He put a firm hand on her shoulder but didn’t hold her back.
“I enjoyed meeting you,” Gizelle said as formally as she knew how. “And you were nice to me even though you thought I was too weird and I’m glad for that much. I can’t be sorry for choosing Conall over listening to you, and I’m not really sad to see you go, but I feel badly for Conall because he is so angry with you.”
Aideen took her offered hand as if she could not figure out a way around it, and her elk’s distressed voice came clearly into Gizelle’s head.
...shame! Bow our head to the alpha female of the herd! Instead we lose everything! Remorse! Run!
“You don’t have to run,” Gizelle said in sudden sympathy. “I don’t blame you. It is a hard thing when you are afraid of being alone, or of feeling trapped. Sometimes we don’t make the right choices and we’re afraid of facing truths.”
Aideen and her elk were both stunned into silence, and sky blue eyes like Conall’s but so very different gazed back at her in consternation.
“You don’t want to miss your plane,” Conall growled, clearly not ready to forgive anything.
Aideen licked her lips and drew back her hand from Gizelle. “No,” she said, dazed. “I don’t suppose that I do.”
But she paused in the doorway. “Perhaps I can come back and visit, some day?”
Whatever gentleness she had hoped to find was not apparent in Conall’s stony face, but after a moment, he nodded. “Perhaps,” he conceded.
Then Aideen lifted her chin and walked away with the kind of graceful dignity that Gizelle could only aspire to.
When her footsteps had finally crunched away on the gravel to be drowned in the unending sound of the ocean, Gizelle turned to Conall.
This time she was touching him when she asked, “Was this my fault?”
Conall’s look was no less intense than his mother’s had been, but it felt much better than hers had. “This wasn’t your fault,” he said fiercely.
“If I had been more normal,” Gizelle sighed. “If I had worn my clothing more....”