The Wedding Dress (31 page)

“Boarding schools.” Emma knew some of her dislike had leaked into her voice.

Jared bristled. “I know you Yanks think it’s terrible to send your kids away from home most of the year, but plenty of people in Britain do it.”

“Yeah, I read
Harry Potter,
” Emma said. “No offense, Butler, but unless I’m going to Hogwarts, it doesn’t sound like such a great idea to me.”

An old yearning shadowed Jared’s face. “I would have killed for a chance to get away from home like that as a boy. Nothing but books and classes and learning.”

“No watching your father’s heart break every Christmas when your mother didn’t come home,” Emma probed gently.

“Perhaps,” he confessed. “In the end, I learned to bury myself so deep inside my mind I might as well have been two hundred miles away in some ivy-walled school. And as a man, I fully intended to do the same thing. But as long as I had what I needed to survive—the work like a shield to keep the painful bits from showing—I figured I could make an adequate father a few months a year.”

Emma listened, aching for him, this man, so sure he didn’t know how to love.

He shrugged. “First time I met Jenny I was on a dig with her father. He was a world-renowned expert in medieval history. Had made discoveries that—it doesn’t matter.” Jared paused, shrugged his shoulders. “Hell, he was my hero, you know? Everything I wanted to be. If I was ever going to make a go of this family thing, I figured it would be by marrying his daughter, seeing his example before me all the days of my marriage. Sounds naive, doesn’t it? Planning life out that way. But then, I was only twenty-four.”

Emma didn’t want to think of Jared, young and full of enthusiasm, his face softer, far less careworn than it was today. She didn’t want to think of another woman smiling up at him, didn’t want to picture his hands on this Jenny’s body, didn’t want to imagine his rough Scottish burr repeating wedding vows, promising to love, honor and cherish this Jenny forever and meaning it.

She imagined that lost, lonely boy Jared had been, wanting the kind of family his friends had, with a mother at the table, smiling and pouring tea. Had he hoped to recapture a bit of his own childhood by marrying Jenny? Or had he feared it?

“It wasn’t until after we were married that Jenny came clean,” Jared said, old bitterness tingeing his voice. “She told me she hated spending her time in the field with her father. She always had. She was willing to endure it for a time, because she loved me so much. And she knew I’d be fair, because I loved her. She’d be perfectly happy in the field as long as I gave her my solemn word that once we had children I’d take a job at her dad’s university.”

Emma tried to imagine Jared confined in a classroom year after year, no excavation sites, no fresh air, no dirt from the past under his fingernails. She might as well have imagined a dragon at the chalkboard, giving students exams. That kind of life was Jared Butler’s definition of hell.

“It was the first time she’d mentioned having kids at all. But once it was on her mind, she was obsessed by the idea. Imagining what our life would be like. Jenny wanted our kids to have stability, she insisted, not be dragged from one malaria-infested site to the next.”

“Don’t they have vaccines to prevent malaria? Most strains, anyway. When I was filming in…Oh, never mind.” She stopped herself. It was ridiculous to argue the point, as if she were reasoning with the dead woman. She settled for the obvious, cutting straight to the point. “Sometimes compromise sucks.”

Emma didn’t add what she’d learned from Drew. That sometimes no matter how hard you tried, compromise wasn’t enough.

Jared’s face darkened. “I’d be a bastard if I didn’t agree to her plan, right? I mean, she was my wife. I’d made a commitment.”

“From your tone it sounds more like a jail sentence.”

“She was so…young. She acted like it was a game, getting me to write my promise down. I felt like an idiot, but I did it just to please her. After we sealed our little agreement, Jenny was…” Jared made a rough sound, low in his throat. “The sex…”

“Don’t want to know, Butler,” Emma cut him off, holding up one splayed hand. “
Really
don’t want to know.”

“No,” Jared agreed grudgingly. “I suppose I wouldn’t want to know either if I were you. But it is…well, pertinent to the story.”

Emma pursed her lips. “Go on.”

“Later that month I was chosen for an internship with another world-renowned scientist on this amazing dig site in Kenya. It just blew me away. The man said he had no intention of taking on someone so inexperienced, but something about my application got his attention, made him think I had the potential to be…” Jared broke off, looking uncomfortable.

“I already know you’re brilliant. And I’m not a world-renowned scientist. It’s not bragging for you to say the guy figured it out, too. Jenny must’ve been so proud of you.” Emma would have been. Bursting with pride.

“That’s the strange thing. I expected her to be upset. She was usually resigned at best when something like this happened for me. I was going to Kenya for six months and she hated Africa. This may sound petty, but I expected to pay.”

Irritation jabbed Emma, this woman she’d never met annoying the blazes out of her. Sounded like Jenny had tried to suck all the joy out of Jared’s achievement. “Well, she did promise she’d buck up and deal until you had kids, didn’t she?”

“She didn’t want to come with me.” He still sounded amazed. “Said she’d stay with her father, visit friends. This time she packed me off without a single tear. I hoped that maybe we were finally growing up.”

Emma sighed. “Call me psychic. You were doomed to be disappointed, weren’t you?”

“She called me from the States three weeks later. She was pregnant.”

“Oh, God.” Emma’s stomach fell, imagining how Jared must have felt, hearing that news over the phone. “But there hadn’t been that much time! I mean, she couldn’t have expected you to just quit. How did it…Scratch that question. I know how it happened. The biology and all. But still…”

Jared kneaded his brow with his fingers. Emma could almost feel his head throbbing. “I don’t know how the hell it happened. She was on the pill. Just to be sure, I was using condoms as backup.”

“This isn’t…any of my business, Jared,” Emma faltered. “Your private arrangements with your wife.”

“I just want you to know I wasn’t leaving the whole birth control thing up to Jenny. Abdicating responsibility.”

“No. I’m sure you wouldn’t.” If there was one thing she’d learned about Dr. Jared Butler in her time in Scotland, it was that he had an incredible sense of responsibility. How many men would have bothered to be so careful if they’d known their wife was on the pill?

“It just…” Jared rammed his fingers back through his hair. “It wasn’t supposed to happen, you know? I felt…”

“Stunned?”

“Trapped.”

Trapped.
The word hung between them. Hard. Ugly.

“You think she did it on purpose?” Emma asked in a small voice.

“Went off the pill? Tampered with the condoms? I’ll never know for sure. But I’m a scientist. I know the odds of both methods failing at the same time. They’re slim to none. Hell, when she called to tell me she was pregnant it was like being kicked in the stomach. She insisted on holding me to my promise, saying her father was overjoyed at the thought of a grandchild. He had already arranged a position for me at the university and they’d picked out the baby’s crib.”

“Ouch.” Emma imagined just how that must have cut him. “Her father knew before you did? That must have been hard.”

“She wouldn’t even give me any time to process it, you know? She insisted on flying out to the site to get things settled between us, even though I promised to come back to the States in two weeks. I asked her to stay away. Hoped to buy myself a little time to…I don’t know. Sort out my feelings. She was my wife. That was my baby she was carrying. I didn’t want to resent it. But, selfish bastard that I was, all I could do was think how much I was going to miss the smell of dirt on my hands. Never knowing what the next moment might bring.”

“It must’ve hurt so bad, thinking of losing the work you loved. Work she knew you loved before she married you.” Realization struck Emma, the memory of Jared’s face the night he’d soothed her grief about Drew. “That’s why you said what you did the night I told you I offered to give up my career for Drew. You said a person couldn’t turn their back on work they adore even for love. You can’t change who you are. Because you had already tried.”

“No.” Self-loathing and bitterness twisted his beautiful mouth. “I never had to make that sacrifice. Fate stepped in and swept my slate clean. A nice, convenient sandstorm blasted Jenny’s plane out of the sky. She died and so did my baby.”

Emma wanted to slide her arms around him. Knew she didn’t dare. He seemed so brittle, as if one touch might crack something inside him she could never repair, something even more irreplaceable than the sword her recklessness had cost him.

“I’m so sorry.” It sounded so lame, her sympathy so useless.

Jared’s throat convulsed. “Know what’s hardest of all for me to live with?”

“What?”

“I’m still not sure if
I
am.
Sorry.
Deep down, underneath, where I felt so damned hurt and angry and trapped.” He turned away from her, paced into the shadows. “What if…if somewhere in my subconscious I was glad that crash took the whole mess out of my hands?”

“I don’t believe that.”

A ragged laugh tore from his throat. “No offense, but you believe in knights fighting on the sea and fairy flags and little girl ghosts that live in deserted mansions.”

“I believe in you.”

“Don’t!” He wheeled on her, fierce, but she didn’t back down.

“In time you would have come to terms with the baby. You would have loved your little boy or girl, the way you do Davey and the other kids. Even if you didn’t want to.”

“Or maybe I would have walked away, like my mother did,” Jared countered, despair in his eyes. “Maybe I simply would have turned my back on my child and—God, what a nightmare. My worst fear, being like
her.
But I’ll never know for certain what I would have done in the end, will I? And neither will you.”

“Maybe I can’t prove it, but…”

His fierce gaze raked her. “When I buried Jenny I swore to myself that there’d be no more mistakes. No wife. No child. Not ever.”

Tears burned Emma’s eyes, her heart breaking with love for this wounded, wary man. “Time heals, Jared. People grow. It’s not betraying Jenny’s memory to change your mind.”

“I won’t be changing my mind, dammit! There won’t be any little boy waiting for me, putting a present under a goddamned Christmas tree for someone who’s never coming home. I won’t risk being a parent who wishes he could wave a magic wand or cause a plane crash and make my own kid disappear.”

Tears brimmed over her lashes, fell down her cheeks. He grabbed her by the arms, gave her a gentle shake.

“Emma, do you understand what I’m telling you?”

She caught her lip between her teeth and nodded.

“There’s no place for us. Do you hear me? No future.”

She nodded again, touching his face, his jaw, his mouth.

He swore, groaned, running his palms up her arms. “I just wish to hell I could stop…stop wanting you so damned bad. We just made love and all I can think about is how to get you back into that bed.”

She didn’t think twice. She let the shift bunched at her breasts go. It cascaded down her body to form a snowy ring on the floor.

“This is madness,” Jared groaned.

“Mad as a fairy flag and a knight on the sea,” she said softly. “Mad as believing in dragons and magic swords.”

“Emma, it’s doomed before it starts. We both know it. Better to get the ending over with before it hurts…hurts too much. Forever is…beyond our reach.”

She wanted forever. She wanted so much more. The kind of love Lady Aislinn knew, that would live on in legend for six hundred years.

“Maybe we can’t have forever.” God, it hurt to admit that, down in the very center of her soul. “But our part of the story won’t be over until the music swells, until the closing credits roll. Wouldn’t it be wrong to waste…”

“Waste what? Heartbreak? Loss? I don’t want to hurt you.”

Her chin bumped up a notch, the fierce determination of generations of McDaniels reflected in her eyes. “I’m stronger than you know.”

“You’re sure as hell stronger than I am if you’re ready to charge into this without armor, without any defense, knowing it will end in tears.”

“Then trust me, sir knight. Give me just one more gift.”

“The holy grail? A fairy flag?”

“Something far more precious than that,” she said, drowning in his eyes. “Let’s make the most of whatever time we have left.”

Chapter Sixteen

E
MMA SHOULD HAVE GUESSED
Jared Butler would hog her bed. From the moment she’d met him he’d taken up too much space—in the car, in her head, in the room. The man’s big body sprawled across the mattress until she was forced to balance on the edge where one little nudge from his hip would send her tumbling to the floor. He’d kicked off blankets and furs, leaving them both naked to the chill night air. Emma should have been cold. Would have been, if Jared hadn’t been so deliciously warm, heat radiating off him long after they’d finally sated each other.

Taking care to keep her balance, Emma propped herself up on her elbow, chin in hand as she watched Jared sleep, sooty lashes curled on his cheeks, one arm flung up over his head. He snored ever so softly, lips parted, his slightly crooked teeth delighting Emma to an absurd degree. Everything about him was rougher, more natural, somehow more real than any man she’d ever known.

Shadows and light from the rising sun painted the landscape of his naked chest in gold. He should have appeared exhausted after the night they had just shared. Instead he looked like a Roman gladiator who had finally reached the Elysian Fields. Peaceful, after a life of battle. A little bewildered as if he couldn’t believe his good fortune, even through the haze of unconsciousness.