The Wedding Dress
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Having her here is the price you agreed to pay, he reminded himself grimly. He hoped he wouldn’t discover that cost was too high. Bracing himself, he stepped out into the night. A hunter’s moon sailed the sky, limning the world in silver.
Biting wind, still fresh from the afternoon’s storm, tangled invisible fingers through his hair as he removed the battered brown canvas hat he’d hung by its leather cords on the outer doorknob. The wide-brimmed hat dangling there was a signal every bit as dreaded by the students and staff alike as a skull and crossbones would be on the high sea.
Only someone with a death wish would disturb Jared those rare times the hat appeared on the door. But he’d bet that several of his students had considered braving his wrath tonight. Thankfully, nineteen-year-old Davey Harrison, Jared’s personal assistant and longest-running team member, had managed to dissuade them.
But damn if Jared was going to waste any more time trying to sort through the feelings Emma McDaniel stirred in him. The anger, the outrage, the sensation of being trapped. Between Angelica Robards’ training and accident and Emma’s arrival, he’d surrendered too many precious days already. With every hour that passed, the end of summer crept closer. And the end of summer meant the dig had to close.
At least not permanently, Jared reminded himself with grim satisfaction. The university that had sponsored the study for students from around the world might withdraw its funding, move its program on to some site in Greece—just for variety’s sake, to give the kids a different kind of experience. And the grant funds he’d hoped for might be promised elsewhere. But Jared had found his own way to keep the dig afloat. By selling the rights to his book to Hollywood, making a pact with the devil. It seemed even Jared’s soul had its price. The hard part was forcing his pride to pay it.
He’d imagined celebrity mania would poison the kids when they heard of Jade Star’s imminent arrival. The reality was even worse.
From the most insecure undergraduate to his most trusted assistant, they all but stampeded him as he entered the mess tent, the kids barely giving lip service to his questions about any finds that had been made in his absence.
“What’s she like?” a breathless kid on foreign study from Northwestern University pleaded.
Too brave. A little wild. Trying to protect that air-brained girl in the airport the only way she could.
“She’s a pain in the arse,” Jared said.
“Is she really as beautiful as she looks in the movies?” Nigel Sutherland asked.
Jared didn’t bother to hide a smug grin as he recalled Emma McDaniel’s rain-soaked million-dollar face, with ropes of wet black hair straggling across it. That picture made him feel better. The poor wee bairn, going to bed with sodden hair and not a blow-dryer in sight.
“With all those movie tricks they use, Hollywood could make me look like Prince Will i am,” Jared growled.
“That would be a crying shame,” a coed named Gemma whispered to Veronica Phillips, a fresh-talking doctoral candidate from St. Andrews who had made it obvious that the body she hoped to uncover this summer still had plenty of life in it and belonged in her bed, not some museum.
“Why tamper with perfection?” Veronica teased, flashing Jared a sultry grin.
Jared was man enough to be tempted on a purely physical level. It had been a long time since he’d let himself take what a woman offered, but he knew firsthand that the price was too high. The danger too great. That part of him was dead. He’d killed it, as surely as he’d killed Jenny.
Where had that thought come from? He’d buried Jenny, the way Vikings buried their treasure hordes, then tried to forget where he’d left all the memories, all the self-blame.
He’d become an expert at seeming oblivious to women’s flirtations, ignoring Veronica’s comment as he had all the other glances filled with soulful feminine longing that had been thrown his way over the past ten years. Damn, if they knew how much he hated it, that adoring light that told him what they were thinking—that they fancied him a modern-day Lancelot come to save his fair lady from the stake.
If only they knew that was one quest he’d already failed.
“Emma McDaniel’s coming here is quantitative proof that life is not fair,” Davey Harrison said at the edge of the crowd. The favorite student Jared wasn’t supposed to have shook his head wistfully, then plopped a canvas hat identical to Jared’s down on his flyaway dark blond hair.
“Exactly what do you base your conclusion on, Mr. Harrison?” Jared asked.
The kid actually smiled. “In the men’s dorms back home, every other room had a poster of Jade Star on the wall and the ones that didn’t only took ’em down because their girlfriends made ’em. And what does God do? Dumps the goddess herself into the lap of the one man on earth who hasn’t fantasized a hundred times what he’d do if he could get his hands on her.”
“Hey, Einstein’s right!” Sean Murphy jabbed his nearest cohort with an elbow. “That’s what I call a crying shame.”
Jared shot both kids a quelling glare. “What’s a shame is wasting time on this nonsense when we only have three months before this dig closes for the year,” he growled. “Fall term will start faster than you know and then it’ll be back to school for the lot of you. Of course, you can read about my brilliant discoveries in National Geographic.”
Davey grinned, worlds different from the anguished fifteen-year-old who’d first come to the castle on a field trip four years ago. “Internet’s faster, chief.”
“So you keep telling me.” Jared grimaced. Davey was right. The information superhighway put a wealth of research at people’s fingertips. And as a scientist, Jared had to learn to access it. But somehow all those flashy graphics never felt as right to him as the solid weight of a book. Computer-generated illusions, everything from dinosaurs to heroines like Jade Star, airbrushed so her body was centerfold perfect the way a real woman could never be. It was one more way to con people into believing the impossible existed.
And yet, there had been a moment when Jared had been struck by Emma McDaniel’s charisma just as hard as a green kid like Davey. That stomach-spinning, world-falling-away, dropkick-to-the-solar-plexus awareness that made him cadgy as hell when he’d felt the softness of her breast yielding against his arm.
When she’d defied him, those dark eyes spitting fire, her mouth ripe and passionate and real, without so much as a smear of lipstick. She’d faced him down with the fierce beauty of the wildcats that roamed Scotland’s hills. Confronted him with the dauntless courage he’d imagined in Lady Aislinn.
Don’t be a fool, man, he warned himself. She’s a spoiled brat with the depth of a rain puddle and she’s surly because you didn’t hit your knees the moment you first saw her so you could worship at her shrine. There’s nothing of Lady Aislinn in this pampered, no-talent excuse for an actress.
“Chief?” Davey’s concerned voice cut through Jared’s dark thoughts, reminding him of just how much the boy had had to worry about when he’d first set foot on the site years ago. How lonely Davey had been, isolated, outcast. A kid, troubled about grown-up things in a capricious world he had no control over. Worries that had faded to the back of Davey’s mind the deeper the kid was drawn into the history and artifacts, the research and legends that wove like mist about the ruins of Castle Craigmorrigan.
And now, enter Emma McDaniel stage right, to drag the healing boy back to a real world full of things he couldn’t have, security he’d never know, a present tense that could only suck him back to barren places. She’d shove Davey aside the way the pretty girls on the site did, giving the gawky kid a dismissive once-over, complete with that scathingly superior plastic smile. And from that moment on, she’d look right through him.
Just the thought made Jared’s blood boil.
“Chief?” Davey repeated. “Are you all right?”
He’d be a lot better once Emma McDaniel took her shapely backside across the ocean to Hollywood, where it belonged. “Aye. And since you’re all so curious about our new visitor, maybe you’d like to shake out of your tents at five in the morning instead of seven. Make up for the time you’re all wasting jabbering about her.”
A couple of the girls’ faces paled. Others beat a hasty retreat toward the tent flap door.
“Veronica, take Miss McDaniel some food,” Jared ordered.
Veronica pouted for a moment. “But I’ve got some work to catch up on.”
“Taking a tray up to the tower will take you all of twenty minutes,” Jared snapped. “You can spare that much time.”
“Hey, chief,” Davey interjected, eager as a puppy. “I’d be happy to do it.”
No kidding, Jared thought sourly. Davey would probably be so dazzled by the woman he’d trip on the uneven stone stairs and break his neck.
“I need you to go over the finds you made while I was stuck at the airport. We need to enter them on the site grid.”
“Oh. Uh, sure.”
“Veronica,” Jared said. “After you drop off her dinner, be sure you confiscate that suitcase of hers.”
Davey gave Jared the big eyes. “Isn’t that kind of heavy for a lady to…”
“As a matter of fact, it was heavy as a rock. Veronica, take one of the lads with you to handle lugging that monstrosity down the stairs. Not you, Davey,” Jared added sternly. “You I need. To do the job we’re here for.”
Even as he herded Davey back toward the trailer, Jared knew he was only postponing the inevitable. The kid would have to meet Emma sometime. Jared would put it off for as long as he could.
It was well past midnight when Davey headed to his own cot, still nattering on about Emma McDaniel. By then Jared’s very last nerve felt ready to snap. His blood seethed with edginess as he retired to his own roomy tent, dread banishing any hope of sleep.
Emma McDaniel’s heart-shaped face swam before him, that pugnacious chin, those flashing eyes. She’d challenged him, fighting to keep God knew what from that elephantine suitcase. Isn’t there anything that you need?
In the beam of a lantern, Jared went to the battered footlocker where he kept his few, most treasured things. Never weigh yourself down with more than you can carry… The thought whispered through him, a familiar refrain.
Jenny had claimed he’d never been the same after studying the excavations in Pompeii. Maybe she was right. The citizens of the doomed city, who couldn’t leave their precious things behind when the volcano erupted, had lost the only thing that mattered.
Jared lifted the trunk lid, his fingers running reverently over a flannel-wrapped bundle. Yes, there was something he needed. He’d just have to make damned sure Emma McDaniel never discovered what it was.
Chapter Three
THE WIND SANG its night song to the sea, a centuries-old lamentation of lovers who would never come home. Emma perched on one of the stone benches that flanked an alcove big enough to hold Butler’s car. Leaning her elbows on the crude table filling the rest of the space, she peered out the tower window, a view of the rugged Scottish coast that formed the castle’s rear defense spilling out beneath her.
Everything about Castle Craigmorrigan seemed ready for war. The soaring walls, the cramped stone stairways in which only a defender would be able to swing his sword. Even the costume she’d wrestled herself into hours ago came complete with a small sharp knife in a scabbard which swung from the filigreed belt slung low about her hips. It’s called a girdle, not a belt, she could almost hear Butler correcting her in disgust. And he would be right. She remembered the name from a class on costuming she’d taken at drama school.
“Yeah, well, for a genius you’re not so smart yourself, arming me with a sharp object the minute I get to my room,” Emma muttered as if the jerk could hear her. “Next time you tick me off I might be tempted to hand you your family jewels on a platter.”
But instead of bracing her, Emma’s outburst echoed hollowly in the tower room, leaving it even more melancholy than before. Curling her feet under the yards of saffron-colored linen shift and green wool skirts, she reached across the table.
Emma pulled the cast-iron candlestick closer to the piece of parchment she’d rescued from the trunk, the circle of light spilling over the letter she’d labored over for the past hour. Her fingers were ink stained, her words blotted and awkward at the beginning, but her writing had smoothed out some by the end.
She’d coaxed the crude quill pen all the way to “give hugs and kisses to everyone” before she’d surrendered to the lump in her throat, grateful at least that none but the shadows of Craigmorrigan would know of her tears. And this castle had seen plenty of heartache.
Her eyes burned and she swiped the back of her hand across them, determinedly forcing her gaze out the window to the moonlit night beyond. How strange that for years Emma had yearned for just this sort of quiet time to sort out her thoughts. But she’d barely been sequestered in Lady Aislinn’s chamber an hour before she realized being alone wasn’t such a great idea after all.
Tempted by silence, her memory spiraled back through years more happy than sad. The incredible sweetness of her first kiss, she and Drew both trying to pretend it was only practice for their parts in the senior play—his Romeo to her Juliet. Before the curtain closed, they’d promised each other their love story would have a happier ending.
She could see Drew’s face streaked with tears in the courtroom where they’d eloped. Could picture the garden at March Winds, the guests at the thriving bed-and-breakfast her family ran joining in the impromptu reception her mom and Aunt Finn had thrown when she and Drew came home and surprised the family with the news.
She heard laughter echoing through the cramped NewYork loft where she and Drew had made their first home. Where they made love on a mattress on the floor, so sure they had forever.
Emma peered out the tower window at the solitary moon adrift on silvery clouds. Butler worried she wouldn’t be able to get into character? Emma understood Lady Aislinn far better than she cared to admit.
Lady Aislinn had felt her heart rip as the husband she loved tore away from her to go warring for his king. The medieval lady trapped, pitted against a nemesis she hated.
Both women knew how it felt to be utterly vulnerable, exposed to a world that fed on any weakness.
Emma had come to the wilds of Scotland hoping to find haven from the battering of her defenses, her most private pain stripped bare. But it was already obvious that in coming to Castle Craigmorrigan she’d only leapt from the frying pan into the fire. Jared Butler would like nothing better than to discover the chinks in her armor. And Emma had already proved far too easy a mark for the Scotsman’s dirty tricks.
Grimacing, she glanced down at the furs she’d used to cushion the stone bench beneath her. She touched a stray tag the archaeologist had forgotten to snip off. The furs and doubtless the bugs he’d threatened her with “Made In China.”
Of course, if she’d been thinking more clearly, she’d never have fallen prey to Butler’s attempt to bait her. She’d known from the beginning that the bed across the room wasn’t six hundred years old, that the tower chamber was stocked by Butler with replicas of old things. The clothing she’d put on and the parchment, ink and quills she’d laid out on the table were nothing more than props, like the polished metal mirror and the comb she’d abandoned after getting it hopelessly tangled in her masses of dark hair. And yet…
Perhaps the furniture and the accoutrements were merely illusions Jared Butler had created to evoke the fourteenth century. But some things in this chamber were real. Loneliness pooled in the shadows. Isolation bled from the stones. Sorrow ages old plucked with spectral fingers at the hem of Emma’s gown.
She couldn’t remember a time when she didn’t sense things most people were oblivious to. Faint whispers through the veil of time, as if lost souls wanted someone to know they’d once lived, imprinting their emotions into walls and wood, china cups and cloth they’d touched generations before.
Here, in this ancient Scottish castle, those sensations felt as real to her as the treasure she’d placed on the table: her talisman on movie locations all over the globe, her way of bringing home with her no matter how far she wandered.
But even in the jungles of Malaysia or while filming in the desert, Emma had never been as miserable as she was tonight. Cold to her marrow, her ridiculously thick hair still damp, she felt more alone than she’d ever been in her life.
That’s not true, a child’s voice argued in her mind. You felt exactly like this one other time. Remember? Ten years old, waking up in a stranger’s room, your mother gone, leaving nothing but a note…
Where had that thought come from? Emma shivered as decades-old emotions washed through her again. Terror, anguish, desperation as her uncle Cade raged, furious that his sister had abandoned Emma and vanished, leaving the traumatized child in his care.
Now Emma understood that her beloved uncle had been just as scared as she was that terrible morning. But her first taste of the famous McDaniel temper had shaken her badly.
Between her uncle, her much-adored grandfather and her cousins who’d inherited the family temper, she’d learned how to fight back in the ensuing years. And she’d done her best to bury the pain of her mother’s desertion, focusing instead on the fact that Deirdre McDaniel Stone had come back for her.
Emma might be alone tonight in this tower room, but she was worlds different from the outcast child who’d once believed her only friend was March Winds’ ghost.
She smiled wistfully, remembering how fiercely she’d clung to that kindred spirit from another century, another girl’s hopes and dreams captured within a Civil War era journal. Addy March would have been as fascinated by this castle as Emma was. For if ever there was a place perfect for ghosts, it was this rugged fortress with its soft curls of mist, moonlight on the water and the raging battle of waves upon shore.
Emma scooted closer to the window, the drafts chilling her as she peered out toward the sea, imagining home so far away. But all thoughts of her mother’s laughter, her cousins’ antics vanished as she glimpsed a quicksilver flash of something on the water. Her heart tripped. No. It couldn’t be. She rubbed her tired eyes, struggling to focus, but the figure remained, dancing with death, no foothold beneath him except the churning waves.
A knight, Emma marveled, his armor gleaming in the moonshine, his sword flashing as he battled demons he alone could see.
Emma flattened her palm on the window, trying to remember to breathe as she watched the warrior battle with the sea, swinging his weapon with terrible grace, leaping and dodging, thrusting and parrying, the weight of his unseen world crushing down on broad, phantom shoulders.
A ghost? Emma’s subconscious queried. How could it be anyone else, out there on the waves? Emma of all people knew about ghosts. But whose spirit could it be? Lady Aislinn’s husband, Lord Magnus, returned at last from King Edward I’s French wars? Trying to fight his way back to her side to rescue her even centuries too late from the foe who had held her prisoner?
As if in answer, a gust of wind rattled the windowpanes. The draft that whooshed through the chamber catching the candle. Its flame leaped wildly, blew out.
Suffocating darkness rolled across the chamber like a sorcerer’s spell, the moonstruck window glowing with new life of its own. She could see the warrior far more clearly now.
The phantom knight was tiring. Emma could feel it as if he were inside her, his battles her own. Pain wracked his muscles, exhaustion slowing the swings of his sword as if he were slashing it through air thick as water. He stumbled and Emma wanted to race down the stairs in spite of the darkness, find some way to steady him, urge him not to give up.
Just what are you planning to do? Butler’s sneering voice demanded in her head. Grope your way through the castle in the dark? Even if you didn’t break your neck on the stairs, you’d fall off the sea cliffs and drown.
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.
JET 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.