The Wedding Dress (8 page)

“I’m keeping the question at a five-year-old’s level since I’m still not convinced you can read.” Butler kicked the metal sign with the toe of his boot. “Can you ride? Yes or no?”

“What do you think?” Emma challenged, hands on hips.

“I think I’m in hell.” Butler stepped over the chain with his long legs. “But by nightfall I’m going to make bloody sure you’re right there with me.”

Chapter Four

T
HE BARN WAS DESERTED
. The rest of the horses boarded at the nearby stable dozed in the morning sun as Jared tacked up Falcon, the black Andalusian stallion he borrowed to ride in mock tournaments and the dainty gray mare the studio had leased to play Lady Aislinn’s beloved Morgan le Fay.

Jared regarded Emma with a mixture of smugness and irritation. Wary, she hung back just a little, struggling to mask her trepidation, acting nonchalant, but betraying her nervousness in tiny ways. Fidgeting with the end of her girdle, swallowing hard when she thought he wasn’t looking, nibbling at her rosy bottom lip as she thrust out a hand for the mare to sniff.

“Don’t let her bite you,” Jared said. “She’ll think you’ve brought her a carrot.”

“Why?”

“Because I…Because horses are forever hopeful and I can’t have her nipping off your fingers. The studio wouldn’t like it.”

“I wouldn’t like it either.” Emma curled her fingers back into her palm. “I faint at the sight of blood.”

“We’ll try not to spill any then.” He glanced over toward the long canvas-wrapped bundle he’d brought with him, then figured he’d deal with it once he got the duchess up on her horse. Emma would undoubtedly need a few minutes once she was up top to remember how to breathe. “Mount up,” Jared ordered.

“M-mount up. Right. I just put my foot in that metal thing and…”

“It’s called a stirrup. I’ve already got it set to about the right length for your legs.”

Emma sucked in a deep breath and then edged toward the mare.

“I’m playing the role of groom,” Jared said. “He’d help you get up on the horse.”

“I can—can do it myself.”

“Sure you can. But we’re going to pretend we’re in the fourteenth century.” He closed the space between them, too close for comfort. Her hair smelled delicious, like cinnamon. He linked his hands and crouched so she could put her foot into the cup his palms formed.

“Now just let me boost you up.”

Obviously uneasy, she did as she was told, gripping his shoulder in a fingers-of-death hold. Her breast was inches from his face, her hair brushing in silken strands across his stubbled cheek.

Damn good thing they hated each other. Because if they hadn’t, they might never leave the barn. “Ready?” he asked.

She nodded.

“One, two, three.” He straightened, half suffocating in the folds of her gown as she tried to scramble onto the horse’s back.

She gave a nervous squeak as she fought for balance, the mare sidestepping as Emma’s arms and legs flailed like a snarl of Slinky toys, limp and useless, her body listing perilously. She seemed ready to slide off the opposite side as she grabbed the leather reins—completely by accident, Jared figured.

Smug as a cat with a mouse in its teeth, Jared started toward her to keep her from breaking her neck. But a split second before he could reach her arm, she nabbed the stirrups with her feet, leaned over the mare’s neck and took off at a dead run.

Flashing him a diabolical smile over one shoulder, she left him eating her dirt. Literally. That was the major problem with gaping like an eejit when a horse’s hooves were flinging bits of dirt and grass back at you.

Spitting out the grit and swiping the back of his hand across his mouth, Jared grabbed the long bundle, swiftly fastening it on the back of the suddenly restive Andalusian’s saddle. He swung up onto the black and gave chase, but Emma had won herself a fine head start.

Reluctant admiration sparked inside him. Emma McDaniel sat on the horse as if she’d been born on one. Her silvery laughter echoed back to him as she splashed through puddles, mud spattering her gown, her hair a wild tangle as she lifted her face to the wind.

She used the mare’s delicate legs to her advantage, flying above the ground like a fluff of dandelion seeds carried on the wind before a storm. Falcon thundered after her, the power that made him the terror of the recreated lists where Jared practiced with his lance doing little to close the last dozen meters between the two horses.

But maybe Falcon didn’t want to catch them any more than Jared did at the moment. Maybe he wanted to enjoy the sight of two breathtaking female creatures running free. Far enough to the right side to see Emma and her mount in profile, Jared surprised himself, drinking in the sight. For with each stretch of countryside the mare flew across, Emma’s smile glowed more luminous, the elegant curve of her cheek a deeper wind-stung pink.

When she’d bolted out of the barn fifteen minutes ago, she’d been showing off—elated to leave him in her dust and shatter his cynical doubt that she knew one end of a horse from the other. But the farther away from the stables they got, the more Emma and the mare seemed to bond, until they both looked as wild and ethereal as the magical creatures Jared’s father had told him about when he’d still been young enough to believe in them. Women made of mist and imagination, so exquisite a man only had to look at them to fall deathly in love and pine the rest of his life for the fairy queen far beyond a mortal’s reach.

Is that what happened to my mum?
Jared remembered the night he’d finally dared to ask.
Did she wander into the mist and vanish to Tir Nan Og just like the fairy queen?

Tears filled his father’s eyes, his callused fingertips tracing Jared’s cheek, scratching tender little-boy skin.
She might have done just that, lad. So far above this hard world of mine she was.

Having a fairy queen for a mum was a lot easier on the heart than the truth his father had never been strong enough to face. But then, by the time Jared had been able to fathom the cold reality of his mother’s desertion, Mary Calloway Butler was easier for Jared to understand than any fairy ever could be. After all, hadn’t Jared proved that he was just like her?

Jared slammed his mind shut against the memories, drawing on his power to focus so intently on the task before him that his own past disappeared.

Within moments, he’d blocked out everything but the vast sweep of sky overhead and the green, boulder-strewn land below. And Emma McDaniel riding. In the distance he glimpsed an unruly burn, its winding length tumbling over one waterfall and then curving in an exquisite arc to dance down yet another.

The stream marked the end of the land they had permission to ride on.

Snib MacMurray, the farmer whose land abutted the opposite side of the burn, had told the studio to take the money they’d offered him to use his property as part of the set and cram it up their arse. He wasn’t about to have a pack of foreigners tramping around, upsetting his sheep and making the cows’ milk dry up.

But then, Snib had been surly for as long as Jared had known him.
Don’t be taking Snib’s insults to heart,
Angus Butler had soothed Jared as a boy.
Snib’s the kind of man who took the defeat at Culloden Moor so personal he’s determined to make everyone he meets suffer for it two hundred and fifty-odd years later.

A roguish part of Jared would’ve loved to have seen Emma McDaniel meet the glen’s most cantankerous resident. But the sooner Jared got through the day’s training, the sooner he could get back to the dig. If he couldn’t wear Emma out on horseback, he’d just use another method.

Jared called out, but if she could hear him, she pretended not to. She and her mare only flew faster, as if the woman was trying to keep her mount as far from his as possible. He got the distinct feeling she was doing her best to pretend he was a tree. Or a rock. Or more likely still, something that had just crawled out from
under
one, he thought with a wry smile.

Not that he blamed her. If he’d behaved so badly Davey felt obliged to make excuses for him, he must have exuded all the charm of a moray eel. Most women he knew would have been appalled by his temper already, but Emma McDaniel gave as good as she got. He remembered how she’d refused to back down behind the castle that morning, challenging him with dark eyes, leaning into his space as if daring him to…to…what? Kill her?

Or kiss her?

Whoa, man. Where had that thought come from? Too many months without a woman beneath him—that’s where. A man could wall off his emotions, but defying biology was a tougher matter entirely. Any scientist knew that. The survival of the species depended on the male’s urge to mate. And mating was all about the chase.

He squeezed his heels into the big stallion’s sides, the animal surging in an effort to close the space between him and Emma’s mare. But of her own volition, Emma reined in at the stream. She dismounted and, reins in hand, peered up at the waterfalls, her creamy skin and lovely profile making Jared’s chest feel too small.

He drew rein beside her, the mare giving a whicker filled with satisfaction, the equine equivalent of “took you long enough to catch us.” But from the mare’s come-hither eyes, Jared wondered if the two females had let themselves be caught. One more part of the mating ritual, just to keep things interesting—tempting the male to a knife’s edge of desire and then retreating.

But the theoretical analysis that usually took the edge off Jared’s sex drive wasn’t working nearly as well as it always had before. Not with the way Emma’s full breasts curved beneath her surcoat, her slim waist accented by the narrow gold-filigreed girdle. Long nights alone he’d dreamed of a woman’s body garbed like that, his hands stripping the layers away as if they were petals, with velvety feminine skin at the center. The only fantasies he’d let himself have since Jenny….

Don’t think about her now. Don’t think about anything except the job you’re supposed to do here.

“So you decided to join us after all, Dr. S. M.,” Emma said, her eyes dancing.

Jared knew she was itching to have him ask what she meant by the nickname, but he wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction. He swung down from the stallion. Taking both sets of reins, he tied the horses to a low-hanging branch. “Angelica told me it was common among actors to say they ride when they really haven’t had much experience. I underestimated you. I won’t make the same mistake again.”

Emma raked wayward black curls away from her face. One strand stuck to the corner of her bottom lip. Jared couldn’t help staring at it.

“Before I read the script for
Lady Valiant,
my all-time favorite horses were the kind with candy-striped poles through their middles so they couldn’t go anyplace but around in circles. I’d taken a trail ride once with my stepfather and then there was the pony ride at the county fair back in Illinois.”

Jared tried to tear his gaze from the rebellious curl, fought an inexplicable urge to take his own finger and smooth it away just so he could have an excuse to touch that impossibly perfect lip. He reined in the impulse as ruthlessly as he would have reined in a stallion scenting a mare in heat.

“You learned to ride less than a year ago?”

“My best friend back in L.A. is a brilliant equestrian. She gave me a crash course on her Dutch warmblood, Arlie. I think he’s the love of my life.”

“Davey will be so disappointed.”

“Yeah, well, Arlie and I suffered through a lot together during horse boot camp. I figure if Sam ever gets tired of the writing gig, she can be a gunnery sergeant. By the end of the month, my legs were so cramped up I walked like Festus in the
Gunsmoke
reruns my grandfather used to watch.”

She demonstrated a bowlegged strut so foreign to her natural grace and elegance Jared was amazed. Never would he have guessed a polished woman like the actress before him would make fun of herself so freely.

Jared found himself smiling back at her. “So why didn’t you call ‘hold, enough’ when Angelica was awarded the part? That was over a year ago. It’s obvious you kept riding.”

She flushed, impossibly thick black lashes drifting down to hide her eyes. “Know the funny thing?” she asked in a voice he’d not heard before. She laid her cheek against her horse’s withers and slid her hand into the silky cove between the mare’s mane and neck. “I never expected I would love riding so much. The freedom of it, the feel of the wind. It’s not like motorcycles, you know? All noisy and spitting fumes in your face. On a horse, it’s just you and the quiet, the peace, of being out in the hills alone.” Her voice changed, a little wistful. “You’ll never know how much I needed that.”

Midnight eyes peered almost shyly into his. He could feel her waiting for him to make some wiseass remark.

Instead, he felt a strange kind of connection, a link he hadn’t expected. He spoke to her for the first time without anger or acid wit. “I think I can guess.”

How many hours had he spent on horseback with no one but the wind and the sky and his thoughts?

How strange that this exquisitely beautiful woman with her twenty-million-dollar paychecks and the world at her feet should feel the same thirst to escape as he did.

And yet, how hard must it be for her to get that time alone? With the press stalking her and her fans eager to devour any news about her private life. As if she owed it to them to expose her very soul.

Careful, man.
Jared’s cynical side nudged him.
Remember the lass chose this life. Fame is what she wanted.

Why did that slick Hollywood existence seem so incongruous with the woman before him, silhouetted against the rugged Scottish landscape, banks of heather and clumps of crab apple trees?

Her eyes drifted closed and she breathed in deep against the mare’s sleek coat. A pleased smile tipped the corner of lips more kissable than Jared had imagined a woman’s ever could be. Damn if Emma McDaniel wasn’t smelling the horse! That comforting combination of hay and leather and sweat that soothed Jared’s ragged nerves so often.