The Wedding Dress

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.