The Wedding Dress (26 page)

“Uh, obviously you had to have one,” she stammered. “I mean, it’s a scientific necessity. Unless you came from a sperm donor, but I hardly think he’d be able to squeeze a book of poetry into the test tube.”

“Davey.” Jared’s hands clenched.

Emma pressed her hand to her breast, obviously rattled. “Listen, this isn’t Davey’s fault,” she began. “I mean, I wasn’t supposed to tell but my family is really crappy at keeping secrets. I suppose I should have warned him.”

Jared scowled. “What did he say?”

“Nothing, really. That you gave him your dad’s book of Robert Burns. It meant the world to Davey.” Her voice disarmed Jared, suddenly so hushed, almost tender.

“Da would have loved him.”

“Loved. Past tense.” Emma’s eyes filled with empathy. “Your father…he’s dead?”

“Years ago. My whole family is dead.”

“I’m sorry. I bet he was so proud of you.”

“He didn’t know any better.” Bitterness crept past the edges in Jared’s voice. He hadn’t meant to let it.

“You don’t mean that!” Emma pressed her hand to his forearm, her touch warming places he’d kept cold far too long. He pulled away, unable to bear it. “God, Jared. Look at you. You’re brilliant! Any scholar who loved Burns that much must’ve been overjoyed with a son like you.”

“My da was a simple working man, with hands like iron, all battered and scarred. If only his heart had been half as tough. But it was far too tender. Life…hurt him. But I was too wrapped up in my own world to care.”

Why was he telling her this? Things he never spoke of to anyone. Not even Jenny. He’d tried, the night after his father’s funeral, tears streaming down his face when he’d hidden himself away by his father’s favorite trout stream. The place where Angus Butler had gone on a Sunday, his one day off from grueling, spirit-breaking work, to read poetry and dream. But Jenny had recoiled in horror, frightened by the sobs that had racked Jared’s body when he was supposed to be the strong one, the one who sheltered her from sadness, from life.

Maybe he’d known even then that their marriage was doomed. She was more child than wife, determined to shut her eyes to anything hard or painful that demanded of her a strength she didn’t have.

It’s up to you to make her happy, Jared,
Jenny’s father had said on the day they’d married.
It’s your responsibility to take care of my baby girl….

Jared had been too young to realize then that you couldn’t “make” anyone happy. And too arrogant to know there were times he’d need someone to care for him as well. A woman with a heart big enough and brave enough and strong enough to endure the dark times, the haunted times, in a life far too full of secret pain.

“Every child is self-absorbed,” Emma murmured, seeming far away, her thoughts fixed on some distant point she alone could see. “We think we’re the center of our parents’ world. It doesn’t even occur to us that they have their own wounds, their own scars. The year I turned ten, my mom left me on my uncle’s doorstep. I didn’t even know him and…well, he was about as thrilled to have a little girl dropped in his lap as you were when Captain came on the scene.”

She’d been abandoned by her mother? The knowledge jolted Jared. He crossed to the picture, picked it up. “Your mom is the dark-haired one, isn’t she?”

“Yeah.” Emma smiled tenderly.

“You don’t look much alike. But she has the same determination in her eyes.”

“Jake calls it our ‘dead stubborn’ look and thanks God she has it. Otherwise, he figures she’d have given up on him.”

Jared stared at the images as if trying to unravel something foreign, full of mystery. “Strange. Looking at this picture, it’s hard to believe your family was ever anything but happy. From the way you and your mom were smiling, I thought…”

That you’d been together always, had bedtime stories and lullabies and that soft mother smell of talcum powder and perfume swirling around you when she tucked you into bed…all the things I can’t ever remember….

“There are no perfect families, Butler,” Emma confided. “They all have their flaws, their vulnerable places. But we McDaniels figured out the hard way things have a way of healing, as long as you’ve got the courage to bring them into the light.”

“My mum left when I was a year old. I…don’t remember her at all.”

Emma reached out. Touched his cheek for just a heartbeat, then let her hand fall away. Silent understanding shone in dark eyes that didn’t look away from his.

“My da spent his whole life waiting for my mother to walk back in the door,” Jared confessed, his voice frayed on edges still sharp in spite of the fact that they were decades old. “Sometimes I despised him for it.”

“You must’ve been waiting for her as well,” Emma said. “I mean, if your father thought she’d come back, how could a little boy not keep hoping?”

Jared turned away, pressed his palm against rough stone wall, as if to scour away the pain of it, that waiting, that hoping he’d denied forever, even to himself. “Every Christmas my father would slip a present under the tree for her. Just in case. Sometimes I heard Da and Gran fighting about it.
She’s gone, Angus! And good riddance to her, flighty baggage that she was. Let her go then find that poor lad of yours a mother!
”

“God, I hate it when grown-ups yell like that, completely oblivious, as if somehow being a kid makes you deaf or stupid. When I have kids, I’ll never—” She stopped, fresh pain in her face. “
If
I have kids, I won’t ever do that.”

Jared would have wagered his life she was right. Emma would never indulge her temper in front of a child. But Jenny wouldn’t have bothered to hide her emotions from anyone, even her own children. She’d been brittle as a weather-battered Ming vase, ready to crack at the slightest pressure once her father had passed her into Jared’s care.

He remembered their last fight, her voice, on the edge of hysteria, crackling over the international telephone line.
I’m flying out to the site in the morning to talk about this….

I’ll be back in the States in two weeks, Jen. Time enough to settle this then.

You mean time enough for you to close me out! Ignore me! This is your problem, too, Jared….

For Christ’s sake, Jen! You think I don’t know that?

And it had been. The end to all of his dreams until he was too old, too tired to care. A prison where he’d be locked too deeply into a world he’d never wanted to inhabit.

Emma slid onto the bench and leaned her face toward the open window as if giving him privacy, letting him sort out memories she sensed were better handled alone. After a long moment of staring at the sea’s moon-sheened surface, she spoke. “My mom would love this place. All those crashing waves and twisted trees and stone cliffs. It’s wild, you know? So…so free. Just as long as you never took her to a pub where she’d have to listen to suicide music.”

“Suicide music?”

Emma chuckled. “My Aunt Finn is Irish. Instead of normal lullabies, she sings all these haunting ballads to her kids, you know, where everybody dies or—worse still—leaves Ireland. One particular gem always kicks my mom’s blood pressure into overdrive.
I’ll dye my petticoats, I’ll dye them red and round the world I’ll beg for bread until my parents would wish me dead…
Mom says it’s a wonder the kids don’t have nightmares.”

Jared heard strains of his own, haunting music carried on the wind. “My da always sang one of Burns’ songs,” he confided softly. “But it was more for my mum than for me.” Jared shifted into his baritone, his voice filled with his father’s longing.
“Ae fond kiss and then we sever, Ae farewell and then—forever. Deep in heart wrung tears I’ll pledge thee, Warring sighs and groans I’ll wage thee. Had we never loved so kindly, had we never loved so blindly, never met or never parted, we had ne’er been broken hearted.”
The melody drifted into silence, joining the sea’s timeless mourning.

Emma swallowed hard. Her eyes shone up at his, over-bright. “That’s beautiful.”

“I never thought so. Romantic rubbish and all that. My da said he hoped I’d fall in love someday, deep enough to understand it. Hopeless that, wasn’t it?”

Emma smiled, as if she sensed humor was safer. Too much tenderness might undo him. “You’re not in the grave yet, Butler,” she said. “Besides, I think you’ve been in love a long time.”

“Me?” He frowned, incredulous.

“Yes,
you.
But you were born six centuries too late to woo your lady fair.”

A flush burned into Jared’s cheekbones. “That’s absurd.”

But Emma brushed his protest aside. “Of course, if you ever
could
manage to surrender your grand passion for Lady Aislinn, there are plenty of real live women who’d be happy to take her place. Veronica Phillips, for example.”

Jared grimaced. “I think that might be taking Burns’ ‘loving blindly’ thing a little too far.”

Emma laughed. “I guess you’re right. Maybe that’s why fate threw us together, Butler. We’re both hopeless. You’re in love with Lady Aislinn and I’ve got it bad for some knight in shining armor who doesn’t even exist.”

Jared sucked in a breath, feeling suddenly, unutterably old, tarnished and battered beyond help. “Ah, so that’s your secret. Emma McDaniel, on a quest for the proverbial fairy-tale knight.”

“Nope.” She turned back to the window, the pale curve of her cheek fragile with dreams that could never be. “My knight looks like the dragon won. Beaten down and exhausted, as if he’d been fighting his way forever through a million seas.”

Jared stilled. “Seas?”

She glanced over her shoulder at him. “That’s where I saw him. Out there.” She gestured out the window to the rugged coast beyond. “He looked so tired, so sad. I wanted to…help him. Tell him it’s alright to lay down his sword.” She looked at Jared. She seemed so tender, bruised by life, as if kissing her might break some dire enchantment. “I know it’s silly.”

“I’m not laughing,” Jared said hoarsely, groping for the right words. “Maybe the only thing a knight knows how to do is fight. If he stopped…”
He might have to learn how to live. Might have to listen to poetry. Might know what he’s missed all those years at war. He might face the most terrifying dragon of all, without his sword to defend himself. A dragon named Loneliness….

Emma fiddled with her hair, obviously shy having confided far more than she meant to. “Well, tomorrow morning will come early enough.” A worried cast clouded her eyes. She cradled his face with her hand, her fingertips soft, sweet magic. “You look tired. You should get some sleep. Easier said than done when your mattress is on a stone floor, right?”

“We knights are used to sleeping on rocks. It keeps us from going soft.” He wanted to curl his fingers around her wrist, bury a kiss in her palm, see what power she held to break dark enchantments. Instead he crossed to his cot, knowing he’d never sleep. Only mark his time until her breath came, gentle with sweet dreams, and he could take up his sword once more.

Chapter Fourteen

E
MMA WOKE TO UNNATURAL
silence, the steady, all-too-familiar rasp of Jared’s soft snoring from across the room gone. She sat up in her bed and peered to where his mattress lay across the arched doorway. The candles kept lit for emergencies glimmered, casting weird shadows across tumbled blankets thrown back onto the stone floor. It was far too easy to imagine Jared kicking them away from his long legs in restlessness or frustration. Picture him climbing to his feet to pace, scowling darkly. But Jared gone altogether? That seemed unthinkable.

“Jared?” she called, drawing her blankets up to her chin as her gaze tried to pick out his silhouette in the shadowy recesses of the room. “Jared, are you there?”

Silence. Unease rippled through her. The man had been guarding her as fiercely as Sir Brannoc had guarded Lady Aislinn. What in the world would make Attila the Scot desert his post?

Maybe you drove him off,
a voice whispered in her head.
Flinging yourself at him like some desperate crazy woman. Really, you were every bit as bad as Veronica and the other girls. Maybe worse. You don’t have the excuse of being a kid with a crush on the teacher. You’re a grown woman who should know better….

Stupid. Emma hugged herself. Stupid, stupid, stupid to get carried away like that and worse still to let Jared know how hot she was for his body. No wonder the guy had fled the bedroom. He was probably afraid she’d jump him in his sleep.

“For heaven’s sake, Emma, get a grip,” she told herself crossly, kicking off her covers. “Talk about playing the drama queen. There are plenty of reasons Jared might have left the tower. Reasons that have nothing to do with the way you tried to pounce him. It isn’t as if you’re the first woman who put the moves on him. With a body like his, he’s probably turned avoiding unwanted passes into an Olympic sport.”

But if that was the case, then why had he left the tower? He’d been so furious the night she’d dared slip out to the loo without waking him, he’d started sleeping across the doorway.

“Emma McDaniel, girl genius,” she muttered, grateful for the distraction of cold stone on bare feet as she climbed out of bed.
That
was the solution to the Jared Butler disappearing act. He’d just slipped out to relieve himself. It was that simple!

So how come he hadn’t taken the candles with him? And, more to the point, how come he wasn’t back? Every move the man made was layered through with a restless energy, an ability to seem like he could be in three places at once. She should barely have known he was gone before he reappeared.

She cocked her head to one side for a long moment, listening for his footsteps on the stairs. Nothing. Emma caught her lip between her teeth. What on earth was the matter with her?

She should be glad he was gone. After all, it wasn’t that long ago she’d been ready to sell her soul for a few Butler-free moments. But now, well…his absence made her edgy somehow.

Stockholm syndrome,
she heard Samantha’s voice quip in her subconscious.
You remember that Patty Hearst thing? Hostages forming some psycho attachment to their captors? Next thing I know, you’ll be telling me you’ve fallen in love with the man.