The Wedding Dress (45 page)

“I know you trusted me, Davey,” Emma said, picking up the fallen frame and pressing it against her chest. “I’d give anything to stop this. But the story about your father became big news since Feeny tied it to me.”

“What do you mean, tied it to you?”

“Veronica told him that I was…trying to comfort you when I told you about my mom. They’ll make it something ugly.”

“How do you make it any uglier than it is?”

“They’ll say I told you my story out of pity. That I…felt sorry for you. They’ll make it seem like…”

“Like you’re some kind of freaking saint, scraping the pathetic spawn of Satan out of the sewer? I’m a charity case?”

“You know that’s not true.” Emma laid the frame down on the table with trembling hands.

“Well, nobody else will!”

“Easy, lad!” Jared warned, trying to temper Davey’s panic. “Don’t forget, they’ll be blasting Emma’s story over the airwaves, too. She’s a victim here.”

“A victim?” Davey cried wildly. “She’s the star! The great famous Emma McDaniel who…who made some poor sod like me actually believe I was…worth something. Could crawl out of my father’s shadow. But I can’t. Not now. Not ever!”

“Davey, that’s not true!” Emma protested, but Jared felt the boy’s words strike her like a dagger to her chest. “I know it doesn’t seem possible that things will ever be all right again,” she said, “but we’ll get through this somehow. We don’t have any other choice.”

Davey braced himself against the table. The sun broke out, its sudden rays piercing the window and ruthlessly baring the torment in the boy’s thin face. As if Feeny’s betrayal had peeled back any scar tissue Davey had managed to grow over the wounds the murders had left in him. Every shard of agony and guilt and horror naked again, and new.

“Davey, this doesn’t change the truth—that your father’s crimes weren’t your fault.”

“Right, Emma.” Davey gave a wild laugh. “Tell yourself that if you need to!”

Emma approached him. Jared could feel how badly she wanted to hold the boy, comfort him. “Jared and I love you.”

“No one else ever will!” Davey cried. “I can’t live like this! I told you…”

Davey didn’t say the words. He didn’t have to. They thundered in Jared’s mind and Emma’s heart, filling the room with terrifying possibilities.

I can’t live like this….

A white scar gleamed in Jared’s memory.

Emma tried to enfold Davey in an embrace. He shoved her away, racing blindly toward the door. Emma lost her balance, careening against the table. Jared swore, diving toward her, but she fell, cracking her head against the corner. Davey was too distraught to notice as he fled down the stairs.

Jared caught her in his arms, a thin trickle of blood crimson against her white brow. He grabbed his damp T-shirt, put pressure on the inch-long wound, crooning words to her, his heart breaking—torn between Emma’s pain and the boy’s.

Head wounds always bled a lot, he tried to assure himself. But they healed quickly. Far more so than the kind of wound Davey had carved into his wrist in despair.

Fear surged, ice-cold, through Jared, Davey’s voice echoing from that night in the trailer.

I’d rather die than have anyone know who my father is.

No. Jared wouldn’t believe the boy could be made that hopeless again. Davey had grown stronger under Jared’s watch. He loved his work. He had a future Jared would make damned well sure was bright.

“G-go after him,” Emma tried to struggle dizzily to her feet. “We have to stop him before he…he hurts himself.”

Jared heard the car engine fire up below. Hell, had he left the keys in the ignition? No, but he’d always entrusted Davey with his spare set.

The worst of the storm had stopped, but the roads would still be slick, the curves far too dangerous for a boy half out of his mind with grieving. For the love he thought he’d lose, for the life he’d thought he built, for the mother he knew would suffer.

Jared tried to dab at Emma’s cut, torn by indecision. But Emma had clamped her hand over the cloth and was already heading for the stairs, oblivious to the lump forming on her forehead. “We have to stop him before it’s too late.”

It took too damned long to slog through the mud to the camp at the other end of the curtain wall. Then they had to find another car and rummage a set of keys from the Peg-Board in Jared’s office.

A cluster of students with worried faces spilled around them, Veronica conspicuously missing from the group as they begged to know what was wrong. Beth’s plea more heart-wrenching than any other. “Where’s Davey? Sean said something’s wrong.”

“Do you love him?” Emma demanded as she made her way around the car.

Beth gaped at her, stunned.

“Do you love him?” Emma repeated fiercely.

“Yes!”

“Now’s your chance to prove it.”

The girl stumbled back a step, her face pale with alarm as Emma slid into the seat. Jared jumped behind the wheel.

“Buckle up,” he said, doing the same one-handed as he gunned the engine. He saw Emma fumbling with the seat belt as they sped to the main road. Tires squealed. The car started to slide sideways on the pavement. He felt Emma brace herself. Jared’s muscles went rigid as he eased the steering wheel the other way to compensate, slowing down just a little as the car gradually pulled out of the slide.

Jared let a breath out. Emma didn’t even seem to care that they’d almost rolled the car.

“Which way would he go?” she prodded. “North or south?”

“I don’t know.” Jared repositioned his hands on the wheel. “He’s spent his whole life trying to get back
to
the castle. Not running away
from
it.”

But gut instinct made him turn south, toward town. Maybe Davey would go to the pub. Some whiskey—hell, Jared could use a dram or two himself. The three of them could sit at Flora’s bar and figure out some way to fight through this. He and Davey and Emma.

He sped down the road, the standing stones a blur on the rain-drenched hill, Snib’s cottage hidden in the valley below. The countryside whizzed past them, no sign of the car or boy in sight. He was questioning himself, almost ready to turn around when the road banked left.

Emma screamed as a cloud of panicked sheep flashed up before them in the middle of the road, bleating hysterically.

Jared slammed on the brakes, the car weaving madly, slamming to a halt just before he struck the animals. He laid on the horn, trying to scare the lot of them off the road, all the while cursing Snib and his bloodthirsty collies. Why the devil wasn’t he keeping his gates locked and the flock under control?

“Oh, God! The fence!” Emma’s cry jolted Jared. He looked in the direction she pointed, his gaze finding the scattered stones. Frightened sheep fled, revealing the break in the centuries-old fence, deep tire ruts dug in the turf, smoke billowing from a ditch beyond.

“Davey!” Emma screamed, and Jared knew her gaze found the wreck almost concealed by the lip of the ravine at the same second his did. Jared slammed the car into Park and flew out to the crash site, Emma in his wake.

“Stay back!” he shouted, wanting to spare her if Davey—bright, shy, earnest young Davey—lay dead.

No. Jared wouldn’t think that. He couldn’t or he’d be no use to the boy or Emma. But he’d seen wreckage like this the day Jenny died. Her plane had crashed barely a mile from the airstrip where he’d been waiting to pick her up. His gut clenched, nightmarish images pouring through him. His feet pounding as he ran toward the crash site, his lungs filling with smoke, twisted metal splashed with flame and death he couldn’t hold back….

Jared found the shattered window, peered into the car’s interior. Davey slumped against the wheel, his skin gray, drenched with blood.

Emma caught up to him just as Jared pressed his fingertips to Davey’s throat, searching desperately for some faint flutter of life.

His voice tore on a sob.

“Oh, God, no,” Emma cried. “Don’t let him be—”

“He’s alive!” Jared grabbed the handle, he and Emma struggling to wrench the door open. It gave with a teeth-grating screech, sending them both tumbling backward. Jared smacked his elbow on a stone, heard Emma’s breath whoosh out as she hit the wet earth as well. But in a heartbeat they were scrambling back to their feet.

Jared poked his head into the car, heard Emma’s gasp of horror as she saw it, too. On the side farthest away from them, Davey’s left arm twisted at a gut-churning angle, bone piercing skin. Blood flowed from the wound in a deadly stream.

“We need something to make a tourniquet,” Jared said.

“Your shirt,” Emma said, taking over putting pressure on the wound.

Jared wrestled off the garment, tore a strip from it. They worked together to tie it, thrusting a thick branch through the knot to help twist it tight as they could, praying they could exert enough force to stop the bleeding. The stream slowed but didn’t stop.

“We need help,” Jared said. “I don’t know how much blood he’s lost.” He patted his pockets, searching. “Damn it, where’s my mobile phone?”

“You tossed it on the dashboard after you offered it to me to call my mom. Even if we could find it, the thing has to be crushed to bits from the accident.”

“One of us has to go—”

“I’ll go!” Emma cut in, backing away from the wreck. “I’ll take the car back to the castle.”

“No! The MacMurray place is closer. But your head—are you—”

“I can do this. Stay with him. If he wakes up he’ll need you.”

Need you.
The words pierced him. Had anyone ever needed him this way? Needed his strength, his love the way Davey and Emma did? It made him feel humble, afraid and so damned grateful. He searched her face. She was strong, his Emma, the cut on her forehead no longer bleeding, her eyes almost clear.

“Ring up the medics.” Jared eased his body close to Davey’s in the car seat, holding the tourniquet tight. “Tell them to hurry.”

Emma nodded, then climbed back up to the street, her feet slipping on the wet turf. She leapt into the car, wheeled it in a U-turn and headed back up the road, searching for the entrance to Snib’s farm, praying she wouldn’t be too late.

Her mind filled with Davey’s wound, the bright red blood on the seat. Jared’s tortured face.

This is my fault.
The truth hammered in her head as she glimpsed a mailbox with
S. B. MacMurray
painted on it in awkward letters and wheeled down the lane.
If it weren’t for me, Davey wouldn’t be lying there bleeding, maybe dying. He’d be safe. And Jared wouldn’t face the possibility of losing him….

Jared would never forgive her, Emma thought, hopeless. And how could she blame him? She would never forgive herself.

The dilapidated farmhouse reared up before her, Snib’s collies racing around the corner, barking as if bent on murder. Emma didn’t care. She climbed out of the car and ran to the front porch with the dogs snapping at her heels. She pounded on the peeling paint of the door with both fists.

The door flew open. Snib was savage as his dogs. “What the devil are ye thinkin’? Runnin’ from me dogs like that! Yer lucky they didn’t tear out yer throat!”

“Thank God you’re here!” Emma sobbed, clutching the front of the old man’s shirt. “I didn’t have to break through the window…” Snib grabbed her wrists but not to thrust her away.

His scowl turned to alarm as he felt the stickiness of Davey’s blood on her hands, saw the dark red stains.

“Did those beasts hurt you? By God, lass!”

“No! There’s been an accident!”

“Butler?”

“One of the students. Davey Harrison. We have to call for help.”

Snib guided her through the dim house to his kitchen and pulled out one of his mismatched chairs.

“Sit ye down, I’ll be ringing Fergus Campbell’s lads up. They’ll be there in no time. Where’s the wreck?”

“Just a few miles south of here. There’s a ravine. He shot off the road and…broke through the fence.”

“By the standing stones, then,” Snib said. “They’ll see the hole where he went through.”

She expected him to start swearing about his sheep, about his fence, about the plague of reckless drivers among the students Jared had brought to the castle.

Instead, while telephoning in the alarm, Snib filled a dented copper kettle and set it on the Aga in the corner. By the time he was off the phone, he’d spooned tea leaves out of a tin container into a fat brown ceramic pot. He poured in the boiling water, covered it with a stained tea cozy and rummaged for a mug on one of the chock-full shelves.

“Damned Butlers—left the whole place stuffed with crockery. Couldn’t take it with ’em to the smaller place. But at least I’ve got something fit to serve a lady.” He finally settled on a cup old enough for her aunt Finn to love, with pink and yellow carnations on it and a chip out of the rim.

“This’ll put the heart back in yer chest,” he said, straining her a cupful of tea and adding a generous slug of whiskey from a dusty bottle on the countertop.

Emma surprised herself, smiling at him as he pressed the cup in her hand. “Thank you,” she said, her whole body shaking. “But I have to—to go back to help. Jared—”

“Butler will be making enough trouble all by himself for the medics up there. You’ll be nothin’ but in the way.”

“No! He—he needs me.”

“Sure and he will. Soon as ye’ve got yer feet back under ye, I’ll take you to the hospital. Ye’ll be waiting when they come. Drink up, now. That’s a good lassie. Every drop of it.”

Emma started to argue, then realized he was right. She drank, the tea and whiskey scalding her throat.

“There now.” He actually patted her shoulder. “That’s the magic brew we used when we were taking France back from the Nazis.”

“You were a soldier?”

“A long time ago.” His eyelids dipped down, hiding thoughts too grim, memories too bloody. Emma could see him driving back the demons, just like the Captain sometimes did.

“Mr. Snib, before we leave…may I make a phone call? To my mother. There’s something I have to tell her.”

“Call America?” Snib’s eyes widened in surprise. “Does yer mum know this boy somehow?”

“No. It’s…the press. They found out something awful. I have to warn her. I’ll pay for the call.”