The Wedding Dress (6 page)

But how else could she know for sure? Emma’s subconscious asserted stubbornly. See if
he
was really there? This warrior trying to fight his way back to the lady he loved even though a chasm of centuries now yawned between them?

And why did it matter so much to her? To prove this phantom was real? A man fighting for love instead of giving up, the way she and Drew had two years ago?

Damn Butler and damn her own good sense! She was going to find out the truth, no matter what….

But she’d barely taken a step away from the window when the warrior made a final wild swing with his sword. She saw the bright blade waver, fall. The knight crumpled to his knees, wind ripping at his silvery hauberk. He yanked a helm from his head, dark hair tumbling about a face she couldn’t see. The sea raged in triumph around him, sucked him down under the waves until he vanished, far beyond her reach.

It was over. Emma sank back down onto the bench, her heart a raw wound in her chest. No question who had won both battles tonight. The knight lost to his ghosts from the past, Emma to demons so old she’d thought she’d forgotten them.

But wasn’t that the hard truth they forgot to tell you in fairy tales? Emma thought sadly.

Sometimes the dragon got to win.

J
ET LAG COULD BE
a beautiful thing—at least if your goal was to make someone as miserable as possible come morning. And that was exactly what Jared Butler had in mind as he tugged on his Barbour coat to head up to the castle. By his calculations, it must be the middle of the night in Los Angeles. Between the grueling twelve-hour flight with its half-dozen delays and spending her first night in medieval luxury, he figured the pampered Ms. Emma McDaniel must already be running on empty.

Of course, he’d be able to enjoy a whole lot more the prospect of her starting their first day of historical consulting with a bad case of sleep deprivation if it weren’t for one minor hitch: he’d barely slept a wink himself.

He ran one hand over the rough stubble on his jaw and glared at his reflection in the shaving mirror nailed to one of his tent posts. He looked like he’d spent the night wrestling a wildcat. His eyes were bloodshot, the lines in his brow carved deep.

And damn if he didn’t have a bruise on his arm where Emma McDaniel had whacked him at the airport. Only because she’d surprised him, masculine pride nudged him to add. He wouldn’t give her the chance to do it again.

His mouth hardened with what his father had called the
pure perishing for a fight
look he’d inherited from the mother he’d barely known.

Emma McDaniel might be a third-rate actress, but she’d demonstrated one talent he could attest to. He couldn’t remember the last time a woman had made him so mad.

Hell, he couldn’t remember the last time a woman had made him feel anything at all. For a heartbeat he remembered how warm feminine fingertips could be, how soft tracing the planes and angles of his body, how delicate the piercing pleasure as they feathered across his skin.

Damn Davey and the rest of the crew for putting thoughts of Emma McDaniel in his mind.
Drops the goddess into the lap of the one man who hasn’t fantasized about what he’d do with her…

Oh, he’d fantasized plenty since he’d gotten word McDaniel was invading Castle Craigmorrigan. Throwing her off the cliff. Hanging her from a tower. Packing her back on an airplane bound for America. But hearing Davey and Nigel extolling the woman’s beauty had unsettled him in a new way.

Not that he’d ever been tempted by the nipped and tucked, painted and polished type of woman who spent hours perfecting herself in the mirror. Case in point: Angelica Robards. A woman who was not only drop-dead gorgeous but one of the most talented actresses of her generation. If she hadn’t gotten under his skin sexually, then Emma McDaniel never would.

The Jade Star actress and everything she stood for made Jared furious. It wasn’t thoughts of steamy, mindless sex that had wrecked Jared’s sleep. What kept him up all night was knowing McDaniel would be making a nuisance of herself around the dig site, distracting his crew of students. The thought made him resolve to exhaust the woman so badly this morning she’d crawl up those tower steps begging for mercy, too tired to turn the heads of kids like Davey Harrison.

Entering the castle, Jared blinked, trying to accustom his eyes to the dimness, the dawn’s haze that filtered through the arrow loops doing little to relieve the shadows. But he knew this site as well as he knew the rough lines and angles of his own face. By instinct, he crossed to the spiral stairs, taking fiendish delight in the dead silence as he strode up the stone risers. Perfect. His prey must be sound asleep.

As he neared the landing to Emma’s tower room, his eyes narrowed in anticipation. No point in knocking. There was no door. One more realistic tidbit from the time of LadyAislinn that Jade Star would have to get used to. A complete lack of privacy.

An unexpected image stung Jared: the tabloid headlines he’d seen in the airport. And he wondered for an instant what it would be like to have his most personal failures splashed across a gossip rag. When his marriage had crumbled he’d been able to bury himself in his work, lose himself in a past far less agonizing than losing Jenny had been. But the press could’ve had a field day with what he’d done if anyone besides Jenny’s father and friends had cared enough to read about it.

Don’t be an eejit.
Butler crushed any sympathy he felt. Emma McDaniel had chosen the attention, the fame, the money, the fans clambering around her. What had Davey said? Every men’s dorm room had posters of the woman plastered on the wall? Probably poses of her half-naked. What else could Emma McDaniel expect besides this feeding frenzy in the press?

Well, she was about to find out some men weren’t impressed by a centerfold-worthy body or a lush red mouth or big brown eyes. The castle history claimed Lady Aislinn was distraught when Sir Brannoc and his mercenaries arrived? By the time Jared was through with Emma McDaniel, she’d welcome an invading army catapulting stones at her tower wall!

Jared crossed the threshold, the larger windows cut in the more defensible top of the tower spilling rose-tinged rays of dawn across the chamber. “Time to get up.” Jared let his voice boom against the stone walls. “Can’t waste daylight when candles are so expensive.” Not to mention the cresset lights, rush lights and candles gave a far fainter light than audiences conned by costume dramas on the movie screen would ever have guessed.

What, not so much as a groan from Her Royal Highness? Jared strode to the bed, gave it a sharp kick to shake it. “This is your wake-up call—” he began, then froze. The piles of furs had barely been touched, the pillow still fluffed, no hollow formed by a sleeping head. The bed hadn’t been slept in.

What the hell? Was it possible the prima donna had already taken off for greener pastures? No. He couldn’t be that lucky. He hadn’t heard a car start and God knew he would have. He’d heard every other damn sound around camp last night. She could hardly have walked all the way to the main road hauling that heavy suitcase.

His brow furrowed with a niggling of worry. Of course, somebody who came from L.A. wouldn’t be stupid enough to hitchhike. It would be dangerous for any lone woman and downright suicidal for a celebrity.

There was no way McDaniel had gone that far, he reassured himself. More likely she went for a walk. But he hadn’t seen a soul on his way to the castle. And over the years he’d loved this place, worked on it, he’d developed a sixth sense about anyone prowling around the space. He would have noticed. Unless she’d gone wandering around the cliffs in the dark and fallen. Impossible, he told himself sharply. He would have heard her scream.

His father-in-law’s white-bearded face swam in his memory, the man who had once been Jared’s mentor, so cold, so fragile, aged a hundred years since the last time they’d seen each other.
Don’t pretend you even noticed what was happening to my daughter until it was too late. You always were a selfish man, Jared, lost in your own world…

Last night Jared had been lost in his own world again. Just like he’d been with Jenny.

He rushed toward the window to look outside, but halted at the tabletop that had been empty the last time he’d seen it.

The rough wood now held a cluster of things carefully arranged. The ink and quills he’d packed in the chest, two sheets of parchment filled with writing and one object he’d never seen before, completely out of place with the medieval decor. A cheap purple, glitter-encrusted frame so dinged-up it might have gone a few rounds in the barrel of a clothes dryer. A thin crack snaked across the glass, dividing the photograph the frame held in two.

Jared picked up the frame, held it to the light. Christmas lights glowed against a backdrop of Norfolk pine so fresh he could almost smell the needles. What was obviously a family clustered before it. Two sets of parents wrangled a herd of sugar-overdosed children who were flashing sticky smiles at the camera. A sweet-faced redhead with dreamy eyes nestled close to a tall dark-haired man who looked about the right age to be Emma’s father. Another man cradled a toddler in his arms, while a woman with restless blue eyes and a crop of Emma’s wild dark hair laughed up at him.

Enthroned in a leather chair, a man of about eighty leveled a hawkish gaze at the camera. Emma, at least twenty in the picture, curled up on the old man’s lap, her face so fresh and blooming it shoved hard at even Jared’s cynical heart.

Leaning over Emma’s shoulder, a young man with features more perfectly sculpted than Orlando Bloom’s beamed as he held up her left hand and pointed to the flash of a diamond ring.

This picture with its ugly frame was the thing Emma had fought like a wildcat to keep from her suitcase? A family photograph with her ex-husband front and center? It was the last thing Jared would have expected someone like her to value.

And how had she spent last night? Obviously writing something. Two letters from the look of it. Jared glanced down at the pieces of parchment. Despite a dozen ink blots and painfully cramped script, he could see Emma had worked damned hard with the period materials at her disposal.
Dear Mom,
one page read. The other:
Hey Jake…

Jake?

Jared hastened to put the frame back down. Hell, he’d almost started feeling sorry for her. But she already had some other man writhing on her hook—besides green college kids like Davey.

He almost walked away. Could hear the grandmother who’d helped raise him scolding from the grave.
Jared Robert Butler, for shame. Don’t you even think of reading that lady’s mail. Your father and I taught you better manners than that.

Tried
to teach him would be more accurate, Jared amended. He’d been the despair of both of them more often than he cared to remember.

In the end, his insatiable curiosity won out as it always had. But what better way to obliterate any shreds of empathy he might be tempted to feel toward the actress than reading her tale of woe? Line after line of how Jared had abused her. What a bastard he’d been. He’d been generous on that count anyway, given her plenty to bitch about.

Jared picked up the sheets of parchment, scanning Emma’s letters. He frowned. Who the devil had written this thing? Because it sure as hell couldn’t have been the pampered Emma McDaniel. She’d made her miserable flight sound like an adventure, her arrival at the castle so cheerful and full of enthusiasm Jared had to shake his head to try to clear his confusion. She’d warned this Jake to be on the lookout for a box she’d sent—a surprise for her mom—and promised to bring him back a kilt.

Anybody reading these letters would think the woman was having the time of her life, if one tiny detail hadn’t betrayed her. Two watery splotches blurred the ink where she’d scrawled something about “hugs and kisses.” Teardrops. Jared stared down at the marks, suddenly damned uncomfortable.

“So the lady cried,” he growled aloud. “Why should you care?”

Good question. But somehow, deep down in his gut, he did.

Had he made her so miserable? So desperate that he’d driven a woman to risk…Jared’s jaw hardened. Why should that be so hard to believe? His abominable temper had done plenty of damage before.

Guilt a decade old ground like a fist into his stomach. He pushed open the window frame, half-afraid he’d find Emma McDaniel lying like a broken doll on the rocks below.

Nothing. The cliffs were empty. He breathed in a sigh of relief. But he’d barely taken a step out of the alcove when voices drifted up.

He leaned out the window, pain vanishing in cold, clean anger as he took in the scene below him. Emma McDaniel, resplendent in medieval garb, strolled beyond chains that marked places as dangerous and out of bounds, while Davey Harrison stumbled along the precipice after her, his eyes so glazed with adoration Jared doubted he would even know he was dead until he hit the rocks below.

Maybe not, chief, but what a way to go,
Jared could almost hear him say. Brash words and yet nothing Davey said could mask the almost invisible cracks Jared knew were inside the kid. Fissures akin to the ones in the medieval clay pitcher Jared and Davey had pieced together with painstaking care on the boy’s first stay at the site.

Damned if Jared was going to let someone like Emma McDaniel breeze into the lad’s life and carelessly dash it to pieces again.

Hands knotted in fists, Jared charged down the tower stairs, ready for battle.

E
MMA BREATHED IN
the sweet scent of her first Scottish morning, her thin leather shoes growing damp from the dew clinging to the tussocks of grass and springy moss around her. The cluster of tents at the far end of the broken curtain wall stood dead silent.

Thank God no one was stirring. Especially Jared Butler. Her cheeks burned. She didn’t even want to think what the genius archaeologist would say if she told him she’d come out this morning to search for a ghost.

Especially since she’d already broken one of Mussolini the Scot’s cardinal rules.
Don’t be wandering around where you don’t belong,
he’d roared at her in his sardine can of a car.
I won’t have you contaminating
my
dig site.