The Wedding Dress (42 page)

They’d spent a precious hour when Emma was supposed to be what she called “turning into Cinderella going to the ball” exploring possession of another kind. Emma had been totally unconcerned about putting off her preparations for the dinner but her “glamour team” was summoned to the room so late that the lot of them went into artistic hysterics as they attempted to do her hair and makeup and zip her into a designer dress the blue of a Grecian sea.

The minute the waiters carried away the last of the plates, Emma had leaned over, whispered in Jared’s ear.
“Newsflash! Emma McDaniel manages to get through the meal without spilling something down the front of her dress!”

Dinner was over, thank God. The endless stream of courses, the mysteries of multiple glasses and more silverware than Jared had ever seen, had been navigated successfully. The dinner conversation? Dogs, horses and gardens. Smiling and making small talk. Avoiding probing questions. And being damned grateful he wasn’t seated where the board members and major contributors were. Journalists from various society magazines and newspapers were sprinkled among them at two different tables.

He’d almost come unglued when Joel Feeny gave him a smug wave from one of the tables, but Emma had kicked Jared in the shin, leaned over and whispered, “The whole point of these galas is to get publicity for the charity. Be
glad
the press is here!”

“But that jerk—”

“Will write a huge spread in the
Independent Star
that will bring in even more donations. So either ignore him altogether or else
be charming,
Butler. Got it? Don’t let him bait you into saying something you’ll regret.”

He’d eyed the teensy evening purse she held in one ring-bedecked hand. “Charming, eh? I don’t suppose you’ve got a stapler in that purse of yours. Maybe if I stapled my mouth shut, I’d at least stand a chance.”

She’d laughed out loud, then. That all-the-way-to-the-bottom-of-her-belly laugh that he adored, the whole room craning their necks to see who had delighted the elegant Ms. McDaniel so deeply. Jared had actually felt his chest swell with pride. Wanted to stand up on the chair, announce to the lot of them,
That’s right, mates, it was me. The daft woman’s mad in love with me, can you believe it?

Jared glanced at his watch for about the hundredth time since the driver had dropped them off, counting the minutes until the night would be over and he could have Emma all to himself again.

But the truth was, he admired the hell out of her for what she was doing here tonight. She’d been tireless, enchanting everyone until Jared was certain that when it came time to open the checkbooks, the evening’s take would be tremendous.

Baby Steps…
He read the banners decking the walls.
A pathway to bright futures…

Around the ballroom, photographs of mothers painfully young, babies themselves with babies in their arms. Above the podium, a billboard-sized blowup of a photograph that could only be Emma at about two years old, a fairy child, perched on the lap of a girl who might have been her older sister.

Jared’s heart lurched, wondering if
his
daughter would look like that, a winsome, wee, otherworldly thing, with eyes that pierced his soul. The daughter who would never be.

His gaze shifted to Emma’s mother’s image, Deirdre McDaniel worlds different than the beaming woman in the purple glitter frame. Defiant blue eyes were framed by catlike features, a fierce protectiveness that did nothing to conceal an underlying fear. Fear Jared understood far too well—that she would fail her child. That she wasn’t good enough, wise enough, strong enough to be the mother baby Emma deserved. That she was one heartbeat away from running…her daughter better off without her.

Jared tried to shutter his thoughts away as someone approached. Feeny. Jared gritted his teeth. Hearing Emma’s warnings in his head.
I have to go be brilliant. Play nice with the other boys and girls….

Easier said than done when just the sight of Feeny made Jared want to strangle the guy with his necktie.

“Well, well, if it isn’t Dr. Butler.”

“Feeny.”

“Hard to believe you came down out of your intellectual ivory tower. But then, a few nights alone with Jade Star would be worth it.” He licked his lips, sending Emma a lust-filled stare. Feeny was trying to goad him, Jared knew. It was working. It took every atom of Jared’s willpower not to snap the asshole’s head off. “So, Butler, tell me. Is the luscious Emma McDaniel half as good in bed as she looks? Inquiring minds want to know.”

“This event is for a worthy cause, Feeny. Why don’t you cover it and get your mind out of its usual place in the gutter?”

“Right,” Feeny jeered, drawing a miniature tape recorder from his tuxedo pocket. “All these worthy people with all their worthy money playing dress-up and spending their trust funds. It’s usually so boring I want to shoot myself. But tonight—well, tonight promises to be a whole lot more interesting.”

“I’m thrilled for you, Feeny,” Jared drawled, wanting to sound bored out of his mind. But something in the bloody sod’s busy eyes set Jared’s nerves on edge.

“That’s mighty generous of you, Butler, all things considered. But then, if you’re going to be our Emma’s new boy toy, you’d better get used to life in the spotlight. Or, should I say, on the front page of the
Independent Star.
”

Jared thought of Jenny, the airplane crash, the ugliness between them that plenty of people who’d known them could expose if they chose to. He didn’t want it to become public knowledge, but if that were the price of being with Emma, he’d just have to deal with it. “I think I can handle anything you can dish out, Feeny. The lady is definitely worth it.”

“Of course she is.” The guy stared at Emma as if the recorder was a hand grenade and he couldn’t wait to pull the pin. “Just ask her ex-husband.”

Jared’s jaw clenched so hard his teeth should have cracked. “If Lawson couldn’t stand the pressure, that was his problem. Hell, you people are so deep in lies and twisting the facts around I wouldn’t believe you if you told me the sky was blue. It would be pure accident if you ever hit on the truth.”

“But it has been known to happen, once in a great, great while.” Feeny’s lips curled in a nasty smirk. “Are you willing to go on record then, that you and Ms. McDaniel are seeing each other?”

On record? Hell, that sounded official. He didn’t care. “Ms. McDaniel and I are seeing each other. On the record.”

“Brilliant.” The journalist gloated. “See, Butler? Nothing like a little persistence and a little bit of luck to make a man’s fortune. This will be a night everyone here is going to remember.”

A woman in Chanel and pearls swept up to the podium, her cultured voice rippling out of speakers as she leaned toward the microphone. “If everyone would return to their seats, I’d like to introduce our esteemed guest and spokes-woman, Ms. Emma McDaniel.”

Guests abandoned conversations midsentence, eager to hear what Emma had to say. Chairs scraped across floor, dresses rustled, conversation dropped to a low rumble of whispers. Then silence, the whole room on the edge of their seats.

Jared joined Emma at the table they’d shared for dinner. Saw her, just a little stiff, a little nervous. Her hand sought his under the table and hung on tight.

It didn’t seem possible. A talented, self-possessed actress nervous when speaking before a crowd?

“You’ll be brilliant,” Jared whispered. She bit her lower lip.

“It’s just so important. I think about my mom, how alone she was, and I want to do her story justice, you know? Make people understand how much courage she had, what a difference a program like Baby Steps could have made for her. For both of us.”

Jared thought of the tale Emma had told, the harrowing way she’d been conceived, the loneliness, the poverty, the pain. The young mothers in the pictures that decked the room stared out at the world with the same haunted eyes.

“You’ll never make your mother anything but proud,” Jared told Emma. When Emma’s name rang out, she stunned Jared by leaning over, kissing him full on the mouth in front of the whole damned world. Flashes popped, journalists crowding to get the perfect shot.

She swept to her feet, so graceful, so poised. He watched her mount the stairs to where the podium stood. Cameras closed in on her and broadcast her face onto giant screens around the ballroom for everyone to see.

But as Emma began to tell the audience what it had been like for her mother, Jared’s chest ached. It wasn’t the polished actress who held the crowd spellbound. It was
his
Emma. Baring old wounds, jarring people out of their safe worlds, making them not only see, but
feel
what it must have been like to try to build a decent future for a baby you hadn’t planned on but loved more than life.

“We can make a difference, through education, through child-care programs and mentoring these young mothers. They want to support themselves and raise their children, give their babies futures bright with possibilities and build productive, independent, fulfilling futures of their own. Look around you at these photographs featured here. Each face tells its own story. And they each have a happy ending because of Baby Steps.”

A slide show commenced, flashing photographs of graduations, the young mothers who had seemed so overwhelmed, so young and frightened, moving into a new and far more promising phase of life. Emma told of college degrees earned, teachers, doctors, solicitors now in the workplace. Mothers who managed to study and thrive. Music welled in accompaniment, jazz sung in a soulful, mellow voice that had more than one society lady dabbing at her eyes with her cloth handkerchief.

Someone to watch over me…
The singer’s haunting voice held the plaintive strains of Cole Porter’s masterpiece.

On the giant screens the image changed. Jared heard the collective gasp as the image of baby Emma and her mother flashed up in counterpoint to a far more recent photo of Deirdre Stone cradling a microphone in her hand while she sang her heart out before an audience of entranced clubgoers.

As Emma looked up at the images, she glowed with love and pride and hope enough to light the whole world. She fairly beamed, her own voice cracking with emotion as she made her final plea. In the end, this event wasn’t about Emma’s fame, what Emma had achieved. It was about her mother, who’d faced far more hideous dragons than the rest of the world would ever know.

This charity so dear to Emma’s heart was her personal tribute of love and admiration and faith in a mother who had shown the courage to face her mistakes and try to make things right. Redemption, clean and sweet. A second chance. The same gift Emma was mad enough to offer him, Jared realized.

The ballroom erupted in deafening applause, the crowd leaping to their feet. A standing ovation that rocked the whole room. Emma deserved it and so did the remarkable woman who had raised her. Jared wondered if Deirdre McDaniel had ever heard what her daughter had to say about what must have been painful years, years that had, by love alone, still managed to provide some of Emma’s most cherished memories.

He wanted to meet the woman responsible for that simple triumph.

You? Going to America? Meeting the family? Christ, boyo, you’ve got it bad. Just marry the girl and be done with it….

Shock jolted through him.
Well, why not?
a voice demanded in his head.
You love her, don’t you?
As for his wariness about having children—hell, if Deirdre McDaniel, seventeen, brutalized and so damned scared, could manage not to ruin her daughter, Jared reasoned, he must have at least a decent chance with a child of his own. Especially with Emma by his side to show him how to live…how to love…how to dare and dream.

The applause died down at last, the woman in pearls taking the microphone for a moment, opening the floor to questions.

You’d think the bloody reporters’ butts were equipped with springs. They bounced out of their chairs, arms waving, voices crying out. “Emma! Emma, over here!”

“Patience,” she said. “Patience. I’ll get to all of you, I promise. This cause is so important to me and the coverage you all will supply matters so deeply, I’ll stay here all night answering questions if I need to.”

And she meant it, Jared knew. She fielded questions brilliantly, had the reporters eating out of her hand. The woman was so skillful, so animated, by turns so amusing and heart-wrenching in her sincerity that it awed him.

But something was amiss. Something about the smirk on Joel Feeny’s sly face. At last the reporter raised his hand and Emma couldn’t avoid acknowledging him. “Mr. Feeny.”

“Let me join my colleagues and the rest of your esteemed guests in thanking you for your heartfelt words about a problem that concerns us all.”

She gave him a smile, but Jared could see a touch of suspicion in it. “I’m honored to be here.”

“Because of your mother’s tragic story.”

“My mother’s story is hardly tragic. It’s a triumph.”

Damn right it is, Jared thought. You tell the jerk.

“So you say, so you say all the time. She was an inspiration to you, your mother.”

“That’s right.”

“What about your father? I assume you know who he is? This mystery man.”

Emma’s smile turned brittle. “My father has never been a part of my life.”

“You’re certain of that? Wasn’t there one brief encounter back in Whitewater, Illinois? An incident where someone vandalized a car?”

The floor seemed to cave in beneath Emma. She saw Jared’s face turn white, prayed he wouldn’t leap out of his chair. A scene would only make things worse.

Where had Feeny gotten that information? Emma wondered, terrified. If he’d dredged up that much, the rest wasn’t far beyond his reach.

An image flashed in her head—the interior of Jared’s trailer. She’d bared the whole ugly truth there, things no one but her family knew…She felt her gorge rise. Had Davey…
No.
Davey would never have betrayed your secret.
Get a hold of yourself, Emma! How could anyone have hidden in that tiny space? Or heard…Feeny has clearly been digging around for info about your father for years. Just fight this one step at a time….