The Wedding Dress (29 page)

“Break it,” she begged in a voice she didn’t even recognize. “I need your hands on me. Now.”

Feral heat blazed in Jared’s eyes as he wound the cord around powerful fingers and snapped it with a yank. Emma gasped as the gathered neckline cascaded off its string, the shift sliding past her shoulders, down her body to pool like sea foam at her feet.

Jared’s nostrils flared as his gaze swallowed her up from the crown of her dark curls to the tips of her toes. “Jesus God, the sight of you,” he murmured, his Scottish burr rougher, low. “You’re so damned beautiful. ’Tis a miracle I can still breathe.”

“Don’t,” Emma drew away, pleading. “I don’t want to hear…”

“Hear what?”

“About…what I look like. About the other Emma. I’m not—”

“I’ll say you’re goddamned beautiful if I want to, woman,” Jared growled. “This isn’t one of your scripts where you get to revise however you choose. That painted-up woman on the covers of all those magazines—she couldn’t hold a candle to you, standing before me right now! Do you hear me?”

He surprised a laugh from her. “Oh, I hear you. In fact, the whole dig site probably hears you. Why, the students should be racing up here at any moment to make sure we haven’t killed each other. Didn’t anybody ever tell you you’re not supposed to growl at somebody you’re making love to?”

“Guess I’m a bit out of practice,” he said, a hint of color staining his cheekbones.

She was stunned at how glad his admission made her.

“As for the kids intruding on us, they wouldn’t dare. They’re scared to death of me.” He flashed his highland raider’s grin. “You would be, too, if you had any sense, woman. I could eat you alive.”

“I dare you to try. I’ve been waiting forever to feel your mouth on my skin.” But suddenly she chuckled, astonished at how easy it was.

“If you’re so carried away with passion, would you mind telling me why you’ve got the devil dancing in your eyes, Ms. McDaniel?” Jared’s brow furrowed in suspicion. “You find the idea of my making love to you amusing?”

“No-o-o,” she hedged. “Well, not exactly.” It felt so good to laugh with him, to
play…
She’d never had any idea that the man even knew how. “It’s about your…well, I
have
had a bit of a joke on you and—”

“And that joke would be?”

“Do you remember when I first came to the castle? How I called you Dr. S. M.?”

He arched his brows. “You called me a lot worse than that, if I remember rightly.”

“Didn’t you ever wonder what the initials stood for?”

“I figured it was a comparison to the Marquis de Sade or something equally flattering. Being a sadomasochist or some such. Am I right?”

“That’s exactly what I wanted you to think,” she said, inordinately pleased with herself. “Truth was it stood for
this.
” She reached up, touched his upper lip, the right side arching a fraction higher than the left. “You have the sexiest mouth God ever put on a man, Jared Butler.”

“You’ve gone daft, woman.”

“It’s your fault if I have,” she said, tingling as she ran her finger along that hot, tempting curve. “Do you know how long I’ve been thinking about this? Your mouth on my neck, on my breasts…even lower.”

Was she insane, saying that aloud? Breaking through her “no sex” barrier was one thing. But making a complete idiot of herself?

Still, she couldn’t seem to stop the truth from spilling out. The man burned with a raw sexual tension that took her breath away. The upper lip she’d found so damned alluring curled in blatant male arousal.

He caught her fingertip between his teeth, worried it for a moment, then when her knees were threatening to buckle, released her finger and buried his mouth in the sensitive hollow of her throat, nibbling that fragile skin. Pleasure speared through her nerves, setting her nipples burning and starting a hot, hungry melting between her thighs.

“I’ve imagined my mouth on you, too,” he confessed. “But I never imagined it would be anything but a dream.”

She shivered, feeling naked down to her soul.

He pulled back, cupped her cheek ever so gently in his broad palm. “What is it?”

For a moment she thought about brushing the question away, distracting him somehow. But then she looked into his eyes and knew. The truth. She needed to tell him the truth. Maybe this wasn’t true love, but honesty mattered to her.
He
mattered.

“I’m just…I guess I’m afraid, that’s all.”

“You? Afraid?” Jared asked in tender disbelief. “You’re the bravest woman I’ve ever known. What are you afraid of?”

I’m afraid of wanting more than you could ever give. Afraid of feeling the way I felt the day Drew walked out the door, the loneliness, the pain. Only worse, because this time I knew it wouldn’t last before it began and I jumped anyway….

Most of all, I’m afraid this night won’t be enough.

Saying that aloud would be insanity. Emma hid her bittersweet thoughts away and forced herself to meet Jared’s searching eyes.

“I’m afraid you’re never going to get naked,” she tried to joke, and thanked heaven when her subterfuge worked, swirling them both back into currents of raw heat. “Let me see you, Jared,” she urged. “All of you. I’ve been wanting you for so long.”

He shifted away, just far enough to shed the leather jerkin he’d worn beneath his chain mail, leaving his broad chest layered with only the linen undergarment beneath. He took her hands and put them on the laces.

“You do it, Emma. Take it off.”

Emma slid the fabric off his tanned body and knelt to free him of leather boots and rough linen hose, her unbound hair burying his bare feet in silken curls. Her heart pounding with a desire fiercer than any she’d ever known, she kissed the inside of his knee, the corded strength of his hair-roughened thigh. Jared’s breath hissed between his teeth as she rose higher, her cheek brushing his arousal, his shaft heavy and hard with need for her.

Her breath feathered against its length as she drank in the beauty of him, the power, breathing in the scent of salt spray and pine and musky male.

She reveled in the sight of him, such deliciously uncharted territory, so different from Drew. Every sinew of Jared’s body had been hewn by the hard physical labor of wresting the past from beneath the stone-strewn ground. The callused hands, roughened by work and weather, only accented the untamed aura that defined the Scotsman’s powerful body, awakening an answering, primitive beat in Emma’s own.

Drew’s sleek runner’s muscles, polished by daily workouts at the gym, seemed delicate in comparison. Drew’s constant self-control never breaking like the waves on Craigmorrigan’s cliff, transforming into that over-the-edge dragon-fierce hunger Jared radiated now.

“Emma?” Jared’s voice, deep with concern, jarred her.

She looked up the length of his body to his eyes peering down at her, suddenly solemn, still.

“You seem a million miles away, lady. What is it?”

“Nothing.” Emma lowered her head to hide her face. Jared’s powerful thighs blurred before her gaze as she shoved her ex-husband determinedly out of her mind. “I’m just glad you’re…”

Strong enough to know what you want…reckless enough to take it.

She moistened her lips and leaned forward, kissed velvety smooth skin, the skeins of her hair brushing his belly, his thighs.

Jared’s whole body jerked in response. He growled an oath, grabbing her under her arms, dragging her up his body. “Much more of that and it’ll be over before I’ve begun. I’m not made of steel, woman.”

His gruff honesty drove the last of her ghosts away.

“Not steel, eh?” Emma teased. “You could have fooled me. You’re so hard all over. So…hot. Let me look at you.”

His green eyes lured her off a lifetime’s safer paths into wildernesses only he could explore. His mouth whispered of enchantments so filled with forbidden pleasure, no woman snared in such dark magic would ever wish to be free.

Golden specks of candlelight caught in the fine net of dark hair spanning the steely muscles of his chest and arrowing down in a narrow ribbon past his navel. Emma splayed her hands against his narrow waist and slid her fingers up through his feathering of chest hair, traversing the swells of his pecs to the hard points of his flat nipples.

He made a ragged sound, low in his throat as Emma kissed him, soft, wet kisses on the scars Captain had left what seemed a lifetime ago. The first time Jared had let her glimpse the man who lay hidden beneath the armor he showed to the rest of the world.

He caught her around the waist with one powerful arm, urging her up on tiptoe as he crushed her against him, skin to skin. His mouth sought hers, ravenous, as if he could never get his fill of her.

Scooping her up in his arms, he carried her to the bed and laid her back on luxurious furs. The tower room spun above her like every fantasy she’d dreamed since she’d first read of the lady who once dwelled in this place.

A love so fierce, even time and terror couldn’t quell it. Yearning flowed through her, a sorrow that she and Jared didn’t have that kind of love. And yet, hadn’t Lady Aislinn’s love ended in tears? Heartbreak that echoed through centuries to come?

Emma wouldn’t have to endure that. Only an ache she alone would feel. Or might Jared feel it, too? A soft echo of regret?

No. No regrets. Not now. Not yet. She’d stay in the moment, drink in every sensation, every touch tonight had to offer.

He followed her down onto the bed, covering her with his big body, crushing her deep into the straw ticking with his weight. She felt delicate, feminine and strangely more powerful than she’d ever been in her life.

Jared tangled his fingers in her hair and angled her face to meet his kiss. Emma snapped the last thread of caution, opened herself to him, soaking in every swell of muscle, the delicious contrast his mat of chest hair made to the silky smoothness of her breasts, the way his hard shaft burned its shape into her inner thigh.

She arched against him, delighting in the pressure, wanting more, wanting it all. Jared, hot and hard inside her. All that passion, all that fierceness driving her wild. She let her thighs fall open and Jared kissed her harder, deeper, arching against her center, teasing her, making her whimper in need.

Oh. Had that sound come from her? Emma’s face burned. But the noise only made Jared’s hands rougher, more insistent.

He pulled her head back, baring her throat to his lips, his teeth, claiming the delicate arch of her collarbone, the faint rasp of his whiskers sensitizing the place where her breast began.

He edged his long body down, breaking the maddening contact between her slick center and his shaft, leaving her bereft until suddenly his mouth closed on the straining bud of her nipple, suckling it deep into the cavern of his mouth.

Fire seared through Emma, stunning in its intensity, driving her to knot her fingers in the lengths of his hair, holding him to her, arching her back so he could draw her deeper, spiral her higher than she’d ever imagined possible.

She looped her leg around Jared’s thigh, holding him even tighter against her the only way she could as he kissed his way to her other breast, licking it with his rough tongue.

She was burning, melting. The man reducing her to ash with his sensual skill. He shifted slightly, his callused fingers hungry as they searched the soft swell of her belly, circling her navel, then spearing lower, through downy curls to find the place fairly screaming for his touch.

Emma’s body bucked against him as the rough pad of his finger claimed the nubbin of flesh between her damp folds. She cried out, feeling as if she would shatter if he slid his touch away. The sound seemed to reverberate through the room, too loud, too wild.

“Oh…oh, J…Jared,” she stammered, horrified. “I…don’t think…I can’t…”

“Can’t what, angel?”

“Can’t stop…I’m not usually this…this…”

“This hot?” he asked, his finger stirring that burning ember. “This wet? This sexy? I don’t believe it.”

“This…noisy,” she confessed, closing her eyes in embarrassment. “Out of…control.”

She expected him to laugh. Expected him to tease her. Instead he gave her a rough shake.

“Look at me!” he demanded. “Now, Emma. Open your eyes!”

Stunned at the fierceness in his command, she let her lashes flutter open, unable to deny him anything, even it seemed her complete humiliation.

“I
love
it that you’re out of control. You were made for this, Emma. For a man’s hands, a man’s mouth. Made to drive a man out of his mind. Drive
me
insane,” he added darkly.

“No. You don’t know.”

“I know, all right,” he challenged roughly. “Don’t tell me
he
didn’t like it. Your bloody fool of an ex-husband. Did he want you quiet, Emma? Tame?”

Emma bit her lower lip, too hurt inside to answer.

“Drew Lawson was a fool! You’re a wild thing in my arms. You hear me, Emma? Wild and beautiful and so bloody strong no man could ever conquer you. Nay, no more than any man ever conquered the Lady Aislinn.”

Tears trickled down Emma’s temples into her hair, a strange mixture of gratitude toward Jared and the first real stab of anger at Drew. That in all the years they’d been together Drew had never known her even half as well as the man strewing kisses down her body.

It touched her to the heart, scared her to her soul, Jared comparing her to his medieval lady. A woman he idolized. Loved. A woman who would always be perfect because she didn’t exist, except in his imagination.

“All those noises you make?” Jared murmured against her stomach. “Bloody hell, they turn me on! Trust yourself to me, Emma. Give me all that passion I see when you fight me with your sword. Let me make you scream.”

“I couldn’t…hold back if…I…wanted to. Not with you. Oh, Jared…”

He leaned to one side groping under the edge of the mattress, confusing the life out of her until he emerged with a foil packet in his hand.

Grateful, she took it from him, sheathed him inside it.

Jared bracketed her hips with his big hands, settled his weight between her legs. She felt him there, blunt and hot, every muscle in his body rigid with need for her. His eyes captured her gaze, held it.