The Wedding Dress (20 page)

“Poetry?” Emma echoed, surprised. Imagining Jared Butler reading poetry was like imagining Attila the Hun drinking a piña colada with a pink paper umbrella on top.

“Dr. Butler loaned me this book he kept on his bedside table all the time. A thin little ragged copy with pages held in by a rubber band. Told me to try it.”

“What was it?”

“The works of Robert Burns.”

Butler a romantic? All right, so he’d managed to surprise her. Again. At least the man’s choice of poets made a twisted kind of sense. From what Emma had read, Burns was a hot-blooded plowman poet who’d sizzled his way across the Scottish countryside, leaving a trail of little Burnses in his wake. And that innate brand of blistering sensuality seemed to be Jared’s stock and trade. If he ever decided to make a sweep across Scotland, he’d probably have women lined up in every village, eager for a taste of what he offered.

“Burns, huh?” Emma prodded, praying Davey wouldn’t notice how flustered she’d suddenly become.

“Dr. Butler told me his da had carried that book with him everywhere.”

“Jared’s father was a scholar?”

Davey bit his hangnail and avoided her gaze. “That’s for Dr. Butler to say,” he hedged. He turned back to Emma. “At the end of the summer, when I was going home, I was miserable. The summer had been brilliant. Work I loved. And Dr. Butler—he didn’t tolerate the other lads bullying me. I can’t tell you what it felt like. All that respect and the way he trusted me. I wasn’t just that upstart scholarship kid who threw off the grading curve at school.”

“Leaving the castle must have been awful.”

“It was like dying. Felt like the end of the world. See, Mum had written to tell me her latest boss promised to hire me the next summer at the stable where he kept his horses. I’d make enough to help Mum with bills. And in time, I could manage the place. I wouldn’t have to waste any more time on school. I could work full-time.”

“Oh, Davey.” Emma tried to imagine him leaving school. No more books. No more learning. After a summer with Jared’s library to devour and all of archaeology to explore.

“The worst thing of all was my mum. She was so happy. I’d be secure for life. The night before we closed down the site, I showed Dr. Butler the letter. I couldn’t just blurt it out, tell him like a man. I was afraid I’d cry.” Davey grimaced. “In the end, I bawled like a baby anyway.”

Emma could only imagine how humiliated Davey must have felt.

“Next afternoon, Dr. Butler drove me to the train station. Said he expected me back at the dig site the minute school was out. He’d found a scholarship that would pay me even more than my mum’s boss would
and
I’d get credit from his university while I worked for him. I swear, I nearly fainted.”

“No wonder. At your age.”

“Age had nothing to do with it. It was when he talked about university. As if there was no question I’d be going. No one in my family had even graduated from what you would call high school. Then he reached in his coat pocket and…” Davey’s voice cracked. “He handed me his copy of Burns. Said his father always told him that Burns was proof that a man didn’t have to be stuck in the rocky earth where fate had planted him. He can be a poet or a doctor or a dreamer—be anything he chooses—as long as he believes in himself.”

Emma’s eyes burned.
Oh, Jared…

“I didn’t want to take the book. Told him he should keep it for his own kids someday. I mean, it belonged to his father. If I had the kind of father who would have given me something like that, I’d never, ever give it away. Dr. Butler just clapped his hand on my shoulder and said his father would have been proud for me to have it.”

Emma sighed, trying to disguise how moved she was by attempting to joke. “So much for my devious plot for revenge. Maybe I won’t poison Jared after all.”

Davey’s mouth crooked in a lopsided smile. “You and Dr. Butler are…are two of the nicest people I’ve ever known.”

“As long as we stay on opposite sides of the dig.”

“I just wish…if he’d watch you in the Jade movies, maybe he’d change his mind about…well…”

“The fact that he thinks I’ll butcher the role of Lady Aislinn?” Emma offered.

Davey winced, obviously groping for something to say. But how could he possibly deny it?

“It’s okay, Davey. It’s no big secret.”

“But it’s hardly a fair judgment. If he’d just watch even one of your movies, he’d—”

“See that they’re techno-garbage,” Emma admitted reluctantly. “I’d hate to prove him right.”

“No way! You were fantastic in the first two movies. You played the strongest woman I’d ever seen. It was only later that the director got all caught up in special effects. That’s his failing. Not yours. Dr. Butler is a smart man. He’d see how terrific you are.”

Jared, with his murder-weapon books and his genius degree from University Of Davey’s Dream. A dream Jared had made come true. If anything, the confidences Davey had just shared about the man made Emma want to buy up every copy of Jade from here to Glasgow and bury them under the castle wall.

But Davey looked so hopeful, so earnest, Emma couldn’t very well tell the kid his taste in movies stunk. Instead, she hugged the boy.

“I’m grateful. Really, for how you keep trying to defend me,” she said. “But Jared Butler watching my movies? That’s one thing that will never happen.”

“Emma, just—”

“Dr. Butler will never watch Jade Star.” Her voice dropped low with painful honesty. “And frankly, Davey, neither willI.”

The sudden heavy thud of the outer door echoed up the staircase.

“Speak of the devil.” Emma gave herself a mental shake. “Looks like your boss is here.”

Davey fidgeted. “Listen, don’t tell him…well, that I told you about the book and all. He gets real touchy about…”

“Letting anyone know he’s a poet at heart?”

“He’s just not as hard-edged as he acts. He’s got…soft places, too.”

Not so Emma had noticed. At least not on that amazing body. But his heart…

“He’s like…did you ever read
Le Morte d’Arthur?
Remember when Morgause trapped the king behind an invisible wall?”

“I remember.”

“Sometimes I think all his life, Dr. Butler’s been waiting for someone to care enough, be stubborn enough, to knock it down.”

At that moment, Butler himself strode into view, scowling like a highland raider, his backpack slung over one broad shoulder, his sword in its scabbard balanced on the other. “What was my rucksack doing at the bottom of the stairs?”

“I dropped it,” Emma confessed, knowing she’d dropped plenty of other baggage as well since she and Davey had climbed up to the tower room. “I’m…sorry.”

Jared stared at her as if she’d lost her mind. “Are you suffering from multiple personality disorder, McDaniel? Half an hour ago you were threatening to poison me.”

“Yeah, well, I changed my mind. You can live for all I care. At least until I can kick your butt with a sword. After that…well, poison does seem a little extreme. I mean, after my training is over we’ll never have to see each other again.”

Oh, God. Maybe Jared was right. She was going crazy, babbling like the village idiot. Worse still was the sinking feeling she got, knowing her final observation was true. Once these few weeks were over, she and Jared Butler would go back to their separate worlds.

The thought should have soothed Emma’s ragged nerves. But it didn’t. Her gaze flicked to Jared’s mouth, so sexy, so compelling. Something more clung to his lips and hid within the glen-green depths of his eyes. Pain. Compassion. Sensitivity. A soul-deep loneliness that called to Emma’s heart.

She turned away, closed her eyes, but this time she saw Jared, not in his canvas cargo pants and scruffy T-shirt, but as Davey had described him.

Exhausted, trapped behind an enchanted wall, his body battered as he fought a young lad’s demons, more valiant than any knight could ever be.

Chapter Eleven

N
O WONDER
S
IR
B
RANNOC
went stark raving mad after months of guarding the most beautiful woman in Scotland a mere ten paces from her bed. Jared had only been trapped in the tower room for three hours and already he—an archaeologist, for God’s sake—was beginning to think installing a door in six-hundred-year-old castle walls wasn’t such a rash idea after all. As long as
he
got to stay on one side of all that lovely galvanized steel and Emma McDaniel remained on the other.

Even that demon dog of hers would have offered a welcome distraction. But Davey had taken the animal with him when he’d fled down the stairs as if his bum was on fire. The kid had looked almost guilty. But then, it had to be tough for Davey, torn between his loyalty to Jared and his understandable fascination with the first beautiful woman ever to lavish attention on him.

What chance did a raw lad like Davey have of resisting Emma McDaniel’s allure when the actress had shattered even Jared’s laser-like concentration?

Jared prowled Emma’s tower room like a lion in a menagerie at feeding time, the air thick with a hunger that rattled the hell out of him. Every nerve in his body strung tight as a longbow about to be fired. What the hell was wrong with him?

Lust. Pure and simple. And the woman, curled up on her bed for the past two hours, wasn’t helping defuse his predicament a damned bit.

Emma draped herself across the furs like a medieval goddess, a circlet of silver flowers gleaming in her hair, her brow furrowed with concentration as she studied her script. She’d surprised the hell out of Jared when he’d returned from walking Davey downstairs, her modern khaki capri pants and white blouse banished somewhere out of sight, her lush body once again garbed in a flowing gown LadyAislinn might have worn.

I told you that you didn’t have to wear those clothes unless we’re training,
he’d snapped, his voice harsh even to his own ears as he imagined the silky bare curves he might have seen if he’d returned to the room a little more quickly. Hell, he probably could have set an Olympic record in sprinting with that kind of motivation. If he’d allowed his baser instincts to kick in. Which he would not. Could not.

She’d smiled at him—disarmingly shy—all but driving him to his knees to beg for mercy.
It just feels right to wear these clothes here. Makes me feel closer to Lady Aislinn, you know?

Then how about if we keep this whole thing historically accurate?
Jared was tempted to say.
Tonight you sleep the way Lady Aislinn did.

Naked.

But naked might be easier for him to resist than the way she looked now. A tousled stowaway from another century, as out of place in modern times as he was. Jared ran his tongue over lips parched with a thirst all the water in the world couldn’t quench. God, she was so beautiful.

Bloodred velvet pooled along one smooth golden-brown leg, bared to the knee when she had shifted position on the furs. Her surcoat slipped low to expose one graceful white shoulder. The cloth was embroidered with an interlaced design of St. George’s dragons and Scotland’s wildcats tangled together in what should have been battle, yet kept twisting in his mind’s eye to something far more sensual.

Candlelight dipped shadowy fingers into the cleavage her shift was meant to conceal, the drawstring that should have gathered the wide neckline to a more decent height obviously tied too loosely in her haste to cover herself before he returned to the room.

Jared could’ve saved himself plenty of agony if he’d just told her to refasten the thing, but damned if he could make himself do it. Every time he tried to say something, he imagined his own fingers tracing the elegant line of her throat, the delicate ridge of her collarbone, the ripe swell of breast.

His mouth went dry as he pictured himself drawing her to her feet, snagging the end of that wayward drawstring, tugging it until the loop of the bow came free. Palms on her shoulders, he’d skim the fabric down her arms….

And then Emma McDaniel would rip his eyeballs out.

At least that would have been the outcome if he’d tried to seduce her a few hours ago when she’d been threatening to poison him.

But now…

He glanced over at her, caught her looking at him with eyes dark as midnight and twice as mysterious. That red mouth glistened, so kissable his shaft swelled against the fly of his cargo pants. He hoped like hell the pockets stuffed with the tools of his trade disguised the fact that he was once again hard as the rock on Craigmorrigan’s cliffs. But damned if he was taking any chances of her seeing how she affected him. He searched for a way to distract them both.

“You haven’t turned the page for almost an hour,” Jared accused. “If it takes you that long to memorize a part it’s a miracle you ever finished a movie at all.”

She flushed, moistened her lips with her tongue. “I…I can’t seem to concentrate.”

Neither can I. At least, on anything except getting my hands all over you.

“I usually bribe someone to run lines with me. Drew or…or since he left, Sam.”

“Sam?” Jealousy poked Jared with a pointed stick.

“My best friend back in L.A. She taught me to ride.”

Sam was a woman. Jared clenched his teeth, irritated at the relief that surged through him. First he’d been jealous of her stepfather, now this Sam person? Even if they had turned out to be her current flames, why should he care?

Hell, he hadn’t felt so much as a twinge the semester his wife had set the whole campus talking, running to one-on-one poetry critiquing sessions with the English professor who’d fancied himself a modern-day Byron. Even when the sessions had lasted half the night, Jared had been relieved she wasn’t waiting at home for him. That finally she’d found something she was passionate about. That delusion shattered when she’d finally thrown her sheaf of poetry in the garbage, admitting she hadn’t cared about anything besides getting Jared’s attention.

If there was one thing Emma McDaniel had proven in her three weeks at the castle—the woman was passionate about her work. One more driving force Jared couldn’t help but admire.