The Wedding Dress (21 page)

Emma grimaced, oblivious to the thoughts racing through Jared’s mind. “I thought about asking Davey to run lines with me,” she mused, “but he takes everything so seriously. Somehow the idea of him playing the conqueror of Craigmorrigan was—well, out of character. And I’ve got such a wicked sense of humor that I was afraid I might laugh by accident and completely humiliate the poor kid.”

“I could do it.” The words fell out of Jared’s mouth before he could stop them.

Emma’s gaze sprang to his, a frozen, almost deer-in-head-lights expression on her face for a fleeting moment. “No. I couldn’t. I mean, you already have to teach me riding and swordplay and whatnot. And you made it clear the script drives you crazy. Why torture yourself?”

“Torture is pacing around this tower with nothing to do.”
Except imagining having hot sex.
“Besides, I have a completely selfish motive. If I run lines with you, I can see how badly the screenwriter has mangled things since last time I read the script. I made such a pain in the arse of myself in the early days, Robards told me to back off.”

“You? A pain in the arse? Hard to believe, Butler.” Her eyes danced. “You’ve been a regular Dragon Prince…I mean, Prince Charming since I got here.”

Jared laughed. “Sir Brannoc
is
the villain. A Dragon Prince seems to be just what’s in order here.”

“Then you should be spot-on. You’ve already got that growly look down to an art form. But the lumpy cargo pants—well, let’s just say it’s a good thing I have a brilliant imagination. I can dress you in something more appropriate in my head.”

Her gaze swept from his face down his body. He hoped like hell she wouldn’t notice the extra ridge straining the fly of his canvas pants. But her cheeks reddened. She turned her face away, obviously scrambling to find a distraction for them both.

“About the script—Robards expects me to improvise here and there. Actors do it all the time. If something feels wrong to you, we could fix it together.”

“You’d let me do that?” he queried, surprised.

“Nobody knows what LadyAislinn and Sir Brannoc would say better than you do. Or at least nobody could make a better guess.” Emma frowned. “Don’t you wish we really could know what they said to each other? How they felt inside? Where Lady Aislinn got the courage to fight him? I’m not challenging your scholarship. It’s only…” She glanced around the room, wistful, as if searching the shadows for ghosts or clues. “Sometimes I feel like there must have been so much more.”

Kinship. It sank deep in his bones, more alarming even than the pull of sensual attraction. “That feeling is what keeps me here at Craigmorrigan,” Jared confided. “What makes this dig so important to me. A puzzle with missing pieces only I can see. And once this movie is filmed, I’ll lose the chance to get it right.”

“That’s not true. Your book—”

“How many people are going to read it?” he challenged.

“Once the movie comes out—
plenty.
And they’ll be as fascinated as I was.”

“You read it?” Jared asked in surprise.

“Yeah. The moment I finished the script I raced over to the UCLA library and snapped it up. I would have ordered it on Amazon but I couldn’t wait that long, even for the speediest delivery. My stepfather says that when God was handing out patience, we McDaniels thought He said ‘pasties’ and ran screaming in the opposite direction.”

“Pasties?” Jared echoed, nonplussed.

“He spent his childhood backstage in Las Vegas with a bunch of showgirls. Sometimes things just slip out.”

“Another family trait,” Jared quipped, but he was still trying to imagine Emma racing to the library, hauling his massive book down from the shelf. He could almost hear her choking on the cloud of dust she must have unleashed.

“Reading the book must have been a jolt for you,” Jared sympathized. “Going from potential soundbytes in a movie script to dry academic fare.”

“Are you kidding? I stayed up all night, read until my eyes felt like they were going to roll out of my head. The book took my breath away. No wonder the script was driving you crazy, trying to squeeze all that action into a few hours of film. And God knows what Robards is going to leave on the cutting-room floor to bring it in at two and a half hours.”

“I doubt anybody will miss it.”

“I will. But if this movie is our one chance to reach them, help me convey as much of the story as possible through the words I say and the way I say them. I really do want to get this right, Jared. She matters to me. Lady Aislinn. That’s why I keep pestering you with so many questions, why I’m wearing her clothes.” She shrugged, her shift sliding down her shoulder another inch. “I want to be a part of this story. A part of this place. It haunts me.”

Jared’s mouth went dry as he once again lost himself in those velvety-brown eyes. Of all the words in the world he could have chosen to describe his link to this castle and its long-vanished lady,
haunted
was almost eerily apt. Haunted by a woman who had so loved her husband she’d endured captivity, outsmarting the vilest of mercenaries to protect his holdings, his people. A woman willing to stand with those she loved no matter how unbearable things got, day after day. A woman who would never have deserted her husband.

Or her son….

Jared winced inwardly at the shard of insight that buried itself in his consciousness like a sliver of glass, leaving him bleeding.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” he said, needing to get away from Emma McDaniel’s far-too-penetrating gaze. Impulsively, he snagged his rucksack and headed down the spiral stairs. He sagged for a moment against a wooden bench, wondering why he’d never thought of his bond with Lady Aislinn in that way before. Remembering his grubby child’s hand clamped in his father’s callused one as Angus Butler helped him explore the castle ruins.

And she wouldn’t leave, Da? Even when the bad knight made her fight with swords and he beat her again and again?

No, lad. For her love was more stalwart than the cliffs. As true love should always be….

Do you love me that way, Da?

Angus had rumpled Jared’s hair.
Not even Sir Brannoc’s whole army would ever chase me away.

Jared had known his father expected a laugh. But he couldn’t help himself.
Mam didn’t love me that way. Gran said no decent mother would ever just leave her boy behind like that.

Angus had knelt down, folding his big workman’s frame until he could look Jared straight in the eye.
Your mam’s coming back, Jared. I know it.

But Gran said—

Your Gran is a fine woman, but she doesn’t believe in magic like you and I do. Maybe…maybe your mother is in a secret cave guarded by a dragon, or lost in a castle’s maze. Or maybe she wandered into a fairy ring, and the sidhe carried her away on a white horse. You know, six hundred years ago, the folk hereabouts whispered that is what happened to the lady of this castle.

Jared had fidgeted, torn between Gran’s practical world and his father’s fanciful one.
That’s not what my book says. It says that Lady Aislinn hid the flag so it wouldn’t fall into evil hands and Sir Brannoc pushed her right off the cliff.

His father had seemed to consider.
No one witnessed her fall, did they? Not one person in all the records of that time.

But they think—

Nobody knows for sure what happened at Castle Craigmorrigan on that fateful day. The people who write your books just study and try to guess, but that doesn’t mean their story is true.

But Sir Brannoc was the evilest man in all Scotland, Da. And Lady Aislinn’s husband was coming back from the wars. They found her crown of flowers on a branch halfway down the cliff and a piece of her gown.

Ah, but hadn’t Lady Aislinn already proved herself clever, and the fairies, they’d sworn to protect the keeper of their magic flag. I think the fairies carried Lady Aislinn away to their world, where there is nothing but joy. Only the one who finds the fairy flag someday will know the truth. It might even bring the lady of Castle Craigmorrigan back to the world hundreds of years later. Can’t you see her, boy? In your mind? Brave Lady Aislinn stepping out of the mist in her fairy gown, a crown of gold on her head?

Jared had quavered, hardly daring to hope.
Maybe she’d bring all the people the fairies stole away to Tir Nan Og. If I found the fairy flag, do you think I’d find Mum?

You just grow into the finest lad you can be. Make sure when Mary walks back in that door you’ll be a son she can be proud of.

A thud of something heavy struck Jared’s boot. His rucksack, slipped from memory-numbed fingers. Jared bent down to retrieve it. He’d vowed to be steadfast when he became a man one day. Swore he’d never run away. How strange to realize now that in so many fights with Jenny a lifetime ago he’d been just like the mother he’d never known. Jared hadn’t hid in a fairy rath or the far reaches of the globe. Instead he’d chosen a place even more unreachable—the vastness of his own mind.

Somehow, he sensed Emma McDaniel would understand the reason why.

Shaking himself inwardly, he unfastened the rucksack and delved to the bottom of the bag, dragging out a bundle of clothing.

He unrolled the garments he wore at the medieval fair held at the end of every dig season, bringing the castle to life for the schoolchildren who swarmed Craigmorrigan to taste its former glory. He’d instituted the fair as a way to make history come alive, to inspire people and to intrigue them. Now, Emma had offered him a more far-reaching gift: the opportunity to shape the words that would come from Lady Aislinn’s mouth on screen. Did she have any idea how precious such an opportunity was to him?

Yes. Emma knew. She understood in ways the more talented Angelica Robards never could have. And she’d offered him this chance with the same generosity of spirit she’d shown Davey Harrison and her mangy stray.

Was it possible that with Jared’s help, Emma could make this movie what he had dreamed it could be the day Barry Robards had bought the rights to
Lady Valiant?

What had Emma said when Jared had returned to the tower room to find her a vision in scarlet? That it felt right to be garbed in the clothes Lady Aislinn might have worn here. She was right. The costumes were one more way to lay fingers on the soft pulse in the veins of the past that flowed beneath Castle Craigmorrigan’s surface. One more echo of voices long stilled.

Jared stripped off his shirt and hesitated, glancing at a chest across the tower hall. No. He turned his back resolutely on the trunk. The scientist in him would feel enough of a fool as it was. He shook out a forest-green tunic and pulled it over his head.

E
MMA GAPED AS
Jared filled the doorway, his dark hair tousled in silky waves around a face hard and masculine as the blade of a sword, his powerful body draped in a green tunic, the color faded just a little across the tops of his broad shoulders where sun and rain had obviously battered the coarse wool.

A leather belt ornamented in silver cinched his waist, a sword carriage dangling to his left side, the sheath of a dagger glinting in the candlelight. His eyes, unfathomable as a druid wood, burned her despite the veil shadows cast across his rugged features.

Something earthy in him called to Emma, primitive, like the moon’s pull on the tide. The last vestiges of modern civilization stripped away with the canvas pants and shirt he’d shed somewhere in the stone chamber below.

“Wh…where did you get those?”

“We keep some stray period costumes around to use with the schoolkids. Helps hold their interest, being able to see history come alive.”

“I can imagine why,” Emma murmured. Butler had certainly gotten her attention. And then some. “But you didn’t have to go to so much trouble for me. I’m, uh, pretty much a sure thing. A captive audience, you know? You’ve got me here for another…three weeks or so.”

“You wanted to run lines.”

“Yes. But dressing that way…” She waved her hand toward him, trying to remember how to breathe. “You didn’t have to…”

“You didn’t have to either.”

“I told you. I like the clothes. Uncle Cade says I only became an actress so I still had an excuse to play dress up.” She was blabbering. But then, how could she help it with Jared standing there, oozing all that testosterone and wearing an outfit any red-blooded girl raised on a diet of fairy tales couldn’t wait to get her hands on. Or
under,
as the case may be. Sensitive palms skimming that mouthwatering expanse of chest Emma had seen when she’d been stitching up Captain’s bites.

She licked her lips, remembering the contrast between Jared’s warm skin and the prickle of chest hair, the way her finger had skimmed his nipple and his breath had hissed between his teeth. Not from pain. She’d known even then it was something else entirely—an excruciating jolt of desire.

Jared crossed to her bed, picked up the script she’d left open in the middle. Not to some innocuous page. But rather, to the page where Sir Brannoc was using every power at his disposal to batter down Lady Aislinn’s reserve, to win his way into her bed.

“One more irritating touch of Hollywood romance,” he scoffed.

“I thought so, too,” Emma said. “They were enemies.”

“Right.”

“But Brannoc was a man and Lady Aislinn a woman…A beautiful one by all accounts. Wild and spirited. Maybe it’s not out of the realm of believability that Sir Brannoc would be tempted to tame her.”

“That’s a far cry from love. Sir Brannoc was nothing but a battered, forsworn mercenary, while Lady Aislinn’s husband was honorable, so fair the legends say women mourned the day he wed. There was no hint of romance. Even Hollywood couldn’t find enough evidence to support that.”

Maybe not, but Emma thought that if Sir Brannoc had looked or sounded anything like Jared Butler, even the sainted Lady Aislinn might have been at least a little bit tempted.

“Maybe running lines wasn’t such a great idea,” Emma said. “I’m a little tired.” As if a blow from a sledgehammer could make her sleep right now. Every nerve in her body was tingling.