The Wedding Dress (22 page)

“I see. Well.” Jared glanced down at the printed page with another kind of longing. Emma wondered if this brilliant, proud man had any idea he’d let her glimpse just how vulnerable he was when it came to this story. How much he wanted to be a part of things that were now so far beyond his control.

“I suppose we could try a scene or two,” Emma caught herself saying. “I really would like your input.”

“No one else has wanted it.” His eyes held hers. “Not since the first time I told them…”

“Told them what?” she asked.

“That the sword fight was impossible.”

Emma groaned. “Not
that
same old story again. I’m not finished with you yet.” She tossed her curls, teasing. “Know what my family motto is, Butler?
Never surrender.
”

But damned if she wasn’t seriously under siege. One corner of Jared’s mouth crooked in a smile more devastating to a female heart than a trebuchet to a castle keep. Emma’s mind flashed to an image of the catapult’s stones battering barriers that had kept her safe since Drew walked away. A dizzying mixture of elation and fear shot through her as walls tumbled down, leaving her wide open for Jared Butler to charge in.

“N
O MAN IN
S
COTLAND
would dare to defy me!” Sir Brannoc’s words rolled off Jared’s lips, emotions far too real surging through him, possessing him as if the knight’s black soul had seeped into his own sometime during the past half hour. “Not your husband! Not your own clan! Yet you, a woman barren through ten years of marriage, believe that you can stand against my will?”

“Perhaps my father is dead and I know not if my husband lives.” Emma’s face swam before him, otherworldly in the candle-shine, her hair a wild tangle, the silver coronet gleaming above eyes that blazed with courage. “Perhaps my womb is cursed, cold and dead as you claim. But still I will stand against you. These people are my people now. Craigmorrigan will never be yours.”

“Take down the fairy flag. ’Tis simple enough—give me that treasure and I’ll not harm a soul in this accursed place.”

“If ’tis so simple to steal the fairy magic, then why don’t you take the flag down yourself?”

“You know that a man cannot.”

“Or his shaft will shrivel and his seed die. He’ll never mount a woman again.”

Jared felt the torment Sir Brannoc must have endured, the dread of losing his manhood when a woman like no other stood before him, seeing what he stood to lose.

And Emma
was
rare, fiery, more convincing as Lady Aislinn than he’d ever have guessed she could be.

“So you believe in the legend the fairy flag carries?” she mocked him. “You, the most vile and dastardly knight in all of Scotland, who swears he doesn’t fear eternal damnation?”

“Not that. Never that.”

“Nay, for I’d wager your soul has belonged to the devil these many years past. But the hell the monks whisper of, ’tis mere child’s play in comparison to a fairy curse. You should be afraid, Sir Brannoc. Be very afraid.”

“Do you know what I could do to you? Right here. Right now. Fling you back onto this bed and ravish you.” Jared’s hand flashed out, clasped her throat.

Emma froze, her pulse racing, her very life force terrifyingly fragile beneath fingers that could snap her neck with a mere twist of his arm. Jared could feel her desperation to tear free of his grasp, could sense Lady Aislinn’s realization that escape was impossible. No, not Aislinn’s. Emma’s.

Even so, Jared drowned in warring emotions, torn between his physical power over the woman in his grasp and his own strange helplessness when matched against her indomitable spirit. He hung on tenterhooks of indecision, mesmerized by feelings Sir Brannoc must have felt, opposing needs battling in his chest. The primitive instinct to possess clambered through his veins. He had the strength to take from her what he wanted and yet he knew in his darkest depths that unless she came to him willingly he’d lose far more.

His one chance at redemption….

What the hell? Jared tore his hand away as if Emma had burned him, his mind a jumble of confusion, the story of Lady Aislinn’s courageous stand seeming more real to him than ever before. As if he really had stood for a moment in Sir Brannoc’s skin, felt vulnerabilities, the hellish flaws in the mercenary knight’s heart. A heart filled with cynicism, bitterness, secret despair. A heart suddenly far too similar to Jared’s own.

Emma seemed to fight for balance a moment, her voice breathless. “So why didn’t he?”

“Why didn’t he what?” Jared snapped.

“Rape her.”

“I don’t know.”

“That was standard operating procedure after you overran a castle from what I read, along with pillaging and such. Maybe Sir Brannoc had a war wound or something and he couldn’t—”

“If his man parts were already shriveled he could bloody well have marched up and taken the flag down himself, remember? But no. The man had to suffer the tortures of the damned, wanting…”

“Wanting what?”

“What any man wants when he’s been locked in a room with a beautiful woman this long.” Bloody hell! Heat burned into Jared’s face, his own man parts doing the opposite of shriveling. And since he’d pointed the dilemma out, Emma could hardly escape noticing.

She bounced up from the bench, putting a safe distance between them. “Want to fight?” she asked.

Jared shook his head in an effort to clear it, his imagination still filled with the scene they’d just altered, the sizzling undercurrents that had spurred Jared to reach for Emma’s throat the way he’d suddenly known Sir Brannoc would. The dark knight threatening her, adoring her.

Strange, Lady Aislinn had always been the character who fascinated Jared. He’d found himself in her head—her heart—far deeper than he’d ever been in Sir Brannoc’s. But as he and Emma had revised the lines, honing them to biting sharpness, something astounding had happened. Jared empathized more than he would have believed possible with the villain who had guarded another bold lady centuries ago in this chamber.

All of that glorious defiant woman just within Sir Brannoc’s reach and yet totally beyond his touch. All that passion just a kiss away, and yet knowing that even if he did what his body clambered to do, ground his mouth down on those ripe red lips, he’d still never touch her, really touch her, inside where her soul lived. The way Jared could never touch Emma….

Not that he wanted to, Jared warned himself. He’d found out long ago the problem with secrets: Once you possessed a person’s deepest secrets, you had no choice. You had to keep them forever.

“Jared, are you listening?” Emma demanded even more sharply, her breath catching just a little. He gritted his teeth, trying not to stare at her breasts welling above the neckline of her shift, the damned garment clinging ever more precariously to the curves glowing white against the scarlet surcoat. “You’ve spent five minutes staring at me as if you were the big bad wolf and I was…well, the medieval version of Red Riding Hood,” she complained. “It’s making me nervous.”

“I was just trying to figure out what Sir Brannoc would have said next.”

Said
next? Brannoc would’ve been on the brink of
doing
something. Not talking about it. And yet, the fairy flag had to be surrendered willingly. It couldn’t be taken. And woe to the man who attempted to take by force either the flag or the virtue of the lady it protected. If Lady Aislinn was anywhere near as alluring as Emma McDaniel, it was no wonder Sir Brannoc had lost his mind in the end.

“I guess I didn’t hear you,” Jared added, suddenly wary. “What did you say?”

“Do you want to fight?”

“Fight?”

“You know. To, uh, break things up a bit.”

Like the sexual tension that held them both in an iron-fisted grip.

Jared brightened. Yes, that’s what he needed. A nice sharp battle to remind him of all the reasons he couldn’t let Emma McDaniel burrow any deeper under his skin.

“I mean…you, um, brought your sword,” Emma insisted, “so…you must’ve intended to practice.”

Of course that’s what she’d think. He glanced at her purple-framed picture, then quickly looked away. Swordplay was a damned fine excuse to get his mind out of Emma McDaniel’s bed. “We’ll practice. Grand.”

She unfolded her long legs, tantalizing him with glimpses of pale ankles, slender calves as she stood up and shook her skirts into place. She went to fetch her own weapon, the reproduction sword leaning in a corner. A week ago she’d graduated from wooden wasters to a sword forged of far heavier metal.

Still, Jared hadn’t supplied one of the lightweight props she would use in the choreographed fight scenes in Lady Valiant. The aluminum swords might be a practical necessity so she could endure take after take of the grueling sword match when Barry Robards wanted to film all day. But Emma had clung with such dogged determination to the notion she’d prove Lady Aislinn could have gotten a medieval blade to her enemy’s throat that Jared had provided her with one from his own collection. A sword balanced and weighted as authentically as possible to test theories about battle he’d experimented with for years.

He’d known damned well the added burden exhausted her the first few days but she hadn’t complained once. She’d just bulldozed through each practice with a tenacity that made him feel like a beast, and each time he’d been the one to call a halt.

And tonight? If Jared was lucky he’d exhaust himself as well, until his own arms ached so badly he could hardly lift them, until his mind blurred and he could close his eyes, find nothing but a blank, blessed oblivion when he finally fell asleep.

Emma’s hand closed about the hilt with an easy familiarity that might have impressed him if he could have stopped staring at the top curve of her breast like a cadgy lad. How could she help but notice?

Her breath tripped, her left hand hastening to her shoulder, easing the neckline back into place. He should have been glad.

“I’ve been practicing the moves a lot,” she said, hefting the sword, shifting the hilt until it settled into her hand. “And yet, no matter what I do, I can’t seem to break through your guard. I keep trying to think what Lady Aislinn might have done, you know, to even the odds. Maybe if I dressed like a boy as the heroines in Aunt Finn’s romance novels sometimes do…”

“In medieval times a woman could be put to death for that.”

Emma’s jaw dropped. “Just for wearing pants?”

“They weren’t pants,” he corrected automatically. “They were called hose.”

“And men might as well have been wearing dresses during that time, according to the pictures I’ve seen,” Emma huffed, outraged. “That’s male chauvinism at its finest. It’s hardly fair.”

“Is that what you think medieval swordplay was? Fair?”

“Sure,” she countered. “King Arthur and the round table, Lancelot and all those guys—I thought nobility and honor and fair play were what the whole knight-in-shining-armor bit was supposed to be about. At least that was the story in the musical version.”

He must’ve looked glazed. She chuckled.

“
Camelot,
Butler. You know. Vanessa Redgrave. Richard Harris.” She launched into a few bars of song.

Jared couldn’t help but smile. “You sing, too?”

“Sometimes with the most nefarious motives. My mom’s the one who really has a kick-ass voice. I sing off-key around her on purpose. Drives her absolutely raving mad.”

“Nice to know I’m not the only one you have that effect on.” The words slipped out before Jared could stop them. Emma laughed, obviously as relieved as he was at the break in the tension between them—sun breaking through a raft of lowering storm clouds.

She flounced to the open space in the tower room. “So, if dressing like a boy means you get to eat my liver in the marketplace, what other options should I consider? Even you have to admit this whole sword fight business is stacked in your favor.”

“Playing fair is where your problem lies,” Jared explained. “You want to be a female version of Sir Galahad? Get used to losing. Sword fighting in the middle ages meant life or death. Even in practice or during tournaments, knights died. Warriors who survived stayed alive any way they were able. By fighting dirty.”

“You sound like my grandfather.” She made a stern face, her voice a low growl. “‘Don’t diddle daddle around, Emma. A girl can’t afford to fight like a fluffy. If you’re going to fight, fight to win.’” Imps danced in her eyes. “I don’t suppose you’d mind if I gouged your eyes or kneed you in the groin, would you, Butler?”

The corner of his mouth ticked up. “You can try.”

“Aw, Butler, bad move. There’s a cardinal rule in Whitewater. Never dare a McDaniel. We never say die.” She slid into fighting stance so naturally he couldn’t help but admire her. “At least my arms don’t feel like they’re going to fall off when I go to bed anymore.”

Bed. Not that word again. Heat surged through him. He clenched his jaw, fighting arousal.
Damn,
he thought, his cheeks warming,
don’t let her see….

But her gaze was locked on his face, not the place far lower where he was burning.

“Fight dirty, fight dirty.” She repeated the words like a mantra as she raised her blade. “All right, Butler. Bring it on.”

Steel clashed as their swords slammed together in a dance becoming far too familiar. Jared tried time and again to catch her off guard, knock the sword from her grasp, but she changed mid-battle, clutching the heavy blunted blade in a two-handed grip far harder for him to break through.

Quicksilver fast, she dodged and parried, ranging about the tower chamber, aware of every piece of furniture, every wall, never distracted by them, but always mindful of the terrain, just as he’d taught her.

Blast if she wasn’t good at this, Jared thought with a surge of pride as she scrambled backward over the bed, putting a barrier between them and earning herself a moment to catch her breath, to ready herself for his next onslaught. She pressed the fingers of one hand against her chest, and Jared wondered if her heart was pounding like his was, a primitive rhythm that surged white-hot through his veins. No, she was yanking at that troublesome drawstring, trying to keep her shift from slipping.