The Wedding Dress (25 page)

“You can’t really blame her.”

Ouch. That stung. Jared looked up at the lad who’d regarded him as hero for far too long. That was the problem when you put someone up on a pedestal, Jared thought as a sunburned, white-bearded face flashed through his memory. It hurt like hell when they did the inevitable and tumbled off. Trouble was, Jared had never experienced that tumble from the hero’s perspective, hadn’t known how much it hurt the fallen idol as well.

“Davey,” Jared began, running his fingers back through his hair. “Emma and I…well, it’s complicated. I know I’m being an ass, but this castle…my work…it’s everything to me.”

“I know. It’s the same way for me.” Hurt faded from Davey’s face. The lad smiled, that terrifyingly innocent old soul smile that had moved Jared from the first moment he’d seen it. “It’s like…wandering in a dream where the world outside can’t…hurt you. But at the end of the summer, we still have to go home. And all the stuff we hate is still out there, waiting.”

What could Jared say? How could he describe the panic that had jolted through him when he’d realized his funding was being yanked? Davey’s face had haunted him, filling him with stone-cold terror.

“Remember the first summer I came here?”

Jared’s chest squeezed. He glanced at Davey’s thin wrist. A two-inch scar marred the lad’s pale skin.

I didn’t even have the guts to finish.
Davey’s small voice echoed in Jared’s mind.
But I wanted to….

“It was a long summer.” Jared tried to keep a tremor from his voice. “Want to be more specific?”

“The books.”

Jared warmed. “I remember.” How could he forget? The kid had gobbled up books as if he expected them to be sucked into a black hole once summer was over. He’d soaked up knowledge, asking so many questions, transforming right before Jared’s eyes from the pallid, shy ghost of a kid who had almost given up on life to the finest student Jared had ever taught. “By the end of that first summer you could have tested into a master’s program in archaeology.”

“Right. But you said there’s more to life than archaeology. Remember?”

“You were fifteen years old. There was a rich world out there for you to discover. I didn’t want you to limit yourself. Hell, you’d never seen an original painting by Van Gogh or studied Homer’s
Iliad.
You’d never read Yeats or Robert Burns.”

Davey fingered whatever he clutched, hidden in his hands. “I told you poetry was a waste of time. There was no point to reading it. You told me to try it before I threw it in the rubbish bin.”

“I was right, wasn’t I?” Jared said with satisfaction. “You and the immortal Rabbie became fast friends, as I remember.”

Davey’s eyes held his. “The poetry was brilliant and I almost missed it because I’d closed my mind to it before I’d even tried it.”

Jared’s heart sank. “Oh, Lord. This is going somewhere, isn’t it, lad?”

A guilty flush flooded up from the collar of Davey’s shirt.

Jared sighed. “If my skull wasn’t pounding I’d let you get to whatever you’re trying to say in a roundabout way. But I’m begging for mercy. Just come to the point before my brain explodes.”

Davey unfurled his fingers from a stack of plastic DVD cases and thumped them down on the site map. Emma, heart-stoppingly beautiful, adorned the cover, while scenes of space battles wreathed around her.

“Oh, no,” Jared said, shoving the discs back toward the lad. “The woman’s already in my head all the…I mean, in my way all the time. I’m not about to put her on a television screen as well. Besides, she’s supposed to spend the night immersing herself in the fourteenth century and I’m supposed to be watching her.”

Watching her…every move, every expression, every agonizing moment of sexual frustration…

“You don’t have to worry about her tonight. She was asking me about some castle stuff and I promised I’d help her research,” Davey said. “Then the kids invited her to play Trivial Pursuit.”

“Grand.” Jared rubbed his hands together, eager for the distraction. “What time should I be there?” Not that he’d be any use to anybody, his usually sharp brain reduced to mush.

Davey regarded him solemnly. “You’re not invited.”

“What?”

“We only let you play because we need someone to even out the teams, and you, you’re so smart it isn’t fair. Might as well save ourselves the trouble and not play the game at all since your team always wins.”

Jared couldn’t deny the surprising sting he felt at that. “Why didn’t somebody mention it before?”

Davey shrugged. “Because we like you. I mean, we really admire you. And…well, there is the problem of evening out the teams.” Davey paused. “Dr. Butler, do you ever wonder why kids like me love working with you so much?”

“Because you get to play in the dirt?”

“Because you don’t talk down to us. You don’t tell us to do one thing while you’re off doing the complete opposite. You walk the walk, you know? Show us…how to be.”

“Why do I think this isn’t going to play to my advantage at the moment? I really hate it when a student hoists me on my own petard.”

Davey grinned at the archaic expression, but his eyes darkened with pleading. “Just watch the movies and I promise I’ll never do it again. I know you think it’s worthless fluff. Truth is, Emma thinks the same thing. But there’s more to Jade Star than meets the eye.” Davey’s voice softened. “There’s more to Emma McDaniel, too.”

L
ONG AFTER SUNSET
, Jared sat alone in the pitch-dark trailer, the screen of the small television set casting its spell. Or maybe it wasn’t the set at all, but rather the enchanting young woman frolicking in the outtakes, bloopers and director’s cuts.

Emma, fresh-faced and painfully young, doing her own stunts, her good-humored endurance as some kind of contraption flung her out of swampy water, seaweed clinging to her hair. Her courage as she did stunts that would have terrified any sane woman—or man, if the truth be told.

She plunged headfirst off a cliff, snowboarded through glaciers on some frozen planet, came within chomping distance of a very real-looking shark. She practiced intricate fight scenes with the same tenacity she’d shown while training with the sword.

But most painful of all were the extra clips from the first movie, where she played with the pack of kids who costarred as children marooned on an obscure planet, waiting for their parents to come and reclaim them after the war against evil forces was won.

One clip showed Emma twirling a tiny dark-haired girl in the harness Jade used to fly, then setting the deliciously dizzy mite down in soft grass to stumble about. Emma caught the girl just as her wobbly legs gave out, cushioning the fall by plopping the little girl’s bottom on her own lap as the child giggled madly.

Jared couldn’t stop replaying the clip, imbedding it in his memory where he could press on it, like a wound, if he were ever foolish enough to believe there was a place for him in Emma McDaniel’s life.

Hell, whenever he was around anyone under the age of twelve, the kids looked at him as if he were a dragon in disguise. He scared them on purpose, subtly bullying them into keeping their distance. Because every so often, when he looked into a soft, vulnerable child’s face, the guilt still seared him.

But Emma…she was a natural with kids. So…free. Had her ex-husband ever bothered to watch that cut? The man from the purple-framed picture. Mr. Father of the Year, if the tabloids could be believed.

Jared seethed inside. How could anyone watching Emma with those kids ever think she didn’t want children of her own?

Or that she was some kind of shallow Hollywood sexpot who just fell into bed with whatever man she happened to be with at the time….

She’d only been divorced two years. And this Drew Lawson guy…they’d been married since she was in drama school. That’s what Emma had said, wasn’t it?

Jared hit the remote, selected a scene from the middle of the last installment of Jade Star. “God, look at her,” he whispered to himself. “She’s still acting her heart out, but it doesn’t matter. The director’s sold his soul to the special effects department instead of banking on Emma’s talent.”

And she
was
talented. Gifted in ways Jared had never imagined. Because he’d never given her a chance to show him what she could do.

A knock on the door made him hit the power button, turning the telly off as guiltily as if he’d been watching porn. He grimaced, knowing he must look ridiculous, sitting here in the dark. He groped his way to the door of the trailer, banging his elbow on something in the process.

He opened the door.

Emma. She stood there, flushed with pleasure, her hair tousled, a smile on her face. A far sadder, far wiser smile than the young actress in those outtakes should ever have owned.

Jared’s voice felt tight in his throat. “Guess I don’t have to ask whose team won.”

“That’s right, Butler. We creamed ’em. God, I love to win.”

But she’d lost where it mattered most, hadn’t she? Been left with her career instead of her husband’s love, nasty lies instead of the truth. People believing the worst about her, thinking they knew her when they didn’t have a clue who the woman really was beneath all that glitter.

Maybe it was time Jared tried to find out.

“Davey was helping Beth put the game stuff away,” Emma explained. “I figured I could walk the twenty yards to your trailer by myself.” She flipped Jared a teasing salute. “Prisoner McDaniel reporting for lockup, sir.”

Jared searched her face, wondering if that might be the most honest thing she’d ever said to him. It made him ache thinking of that free-spirited young woman on the DVD, now unable to walk through an airport without being recognized, being stalked by the press even here in the wilds of Scotland.

He locked the trailer door and they walked to the castle in silence, Emma’s face turned up to the stars.

When they reached the tower room, he lit the branch of candles on the table, his gaze straying toward the purple frame. He picked it up, turned toward her.

“Nice picture.”

Her mouth softened, wistful. “Yes, it is.”

“It’s the last thing I expected you to choose the night I told you that you could keep one thing from your suitcase.”

She wiped the softness from her face, pulling down a brittle, devil-may-care mask. Her armor against him during the days since he’d all but called her an easy lay. “Yeah, well,” Emma said. “I’m just full of surprises. Of course, the folks back home don’t know my black leather bondage side. You know, that whole Hollywood swingers scene. You should see what I can do with a riding crop.”

“Don’t.”

She stopped, peered at him, off-balance. “What do you mean,
don’t?
”

“Act. I know I’m the one who cast you in that role, but…it doesn’t fit you at all, does it? While this…” He trailed his fingers over the glass, touching her face, frozen forever, happy. “This seems to suit you a whole lot better. You want to tell me why it’s so special? I mean, besides this…er, positively elegant, exorbitantly expensive designer frame?”

He smiled, displaying the purple glitter clinging to his fingers.

Still wary, Emma approached him, sliding the frame from his grasp as if it were too precious to let careless hands touch. “This Christmas was the last time I truly felt at peace,” she said with an honesty that seared his heart. “Everybody was so happy. All of the family, together. Drew and I had just gotten engaged.”

Ouch. Jared tried to keep the sharp jab from showing on his face. Why the hell should that hurt? Because the son of a bitch had broken her heart? And
Drew
hadn’t exactly been ringing up the reporters to set things straight when that whole “Ice Queen Freezes Out Husband, Denying Him Children” story had broken.

I’m sure Drew will be a wonderful father….

Emma’s quote burned through Jared’s head. The lady showed more class than her
GQ
cover model of an ex-husband deserved.

“My sister Hope was scared I was going to forget her when I got famous. She gave me this and made me promise it would be the first thing I put out whenever I got to a new movie set. It’s been all over the world. I keep a paper in the back of the frame where I write down all the countries it’s been to. I figure I’ll give it to her when it’s her turn to wear the wedding dress.”

“The wedding dress?”

“The Civil War era one we found in a trunk in March Winds’ attic.”

The preservationist inside him kicked in, hard. Jared choked, horrified. “You’d actually wear an artifact?”

“My Aunt Finn wore it. My mom—well, dresses aren’t her style, antique or otherwise. But ever since I was a little girl, I dreamed someday…well, you know. When Aunt Finn packed it away in that trunk in the attic, she promised she’d keep it for me.”

“Did you? Wear it?” Why the hell did he want to know? Wedding dresses—real or imaginary—made a better signal than a bloody plague cross on the door to send him running in the opposite direction.

Emma made a wry face. “I grew to roughly the height of a Los Angeles Laker. You ever see period clothes, Butler? They’re so small, they look like they should barely fit on dolls.”

“Too bad.”
Yeah, boyo. The fact that she hadn’t worn the dress she’d cherished for Drew the Asshole just breaks your heart.

Emma seemed to shake herself, as if suddenly aware she’d let her guard slip just a little. “One of the producers at my studio showed me a great picture of Emma Thompson’s wedding here in Scotland. Her groom was wearing quite a lovely dress of his own.”

“A kilt,” Jared corrected.

“If you say so. Apparently the bugs had a real good time biting his bare…assets.” Her eyes twinkled and he wondered if she was really amused or resorting to acting for self-protection. “You know, Butler, this is the last subject I thought you’d be interested in. Wedding dresses and my family and such. What about yours?”

“My what?”

“You’d look pretty silly in a wedding dress. What about your family? Your father and…oops.” She looked like she’d swallowed a raw egg.

“My father?”