The Wedding Dress (34 page)

“This doesn’t change anything,” he warned, his face darkening.

“I know.”

“Still and all, I’m glad of it. I can’t help myself.”

A sharp whistle pierced the air. Jared let her hand fall free. She felt the loss of his touch to her soul.

“Snib,” he said, suddenly alert. “We’ll take the back way down. The road is a hundred meters to the north. We should be able to reach it before he sees us.” Jared rounded the stone, grabbed her around the waist and flung her up onto her horse’s back. Something sharp jabbed her in the middle, where Captain’s teeth still clung with the tenacity of his namesake to whatever he’d found.

The terrier scrabbled against Emma’s thigh with his back paws for a moment, as if to launch himself to the ground, but a sudden menacing woof that must be MacMurray’s collies made him prick his ears to listen. Emma could almost feel the confusion in her little dog, Captain trying to decide which was more important: struggling free to fight with his sworn enemies or hanging on to his recently found treasure. The treasure won.

Jared swung astride his own horse, reined it down the hill with Emma’s mount close on his heels, the mist and magic fading behind them.

It wasn’t until they reached the stables and Emma handed the dog down to him that Jared noticed the terrier had something clamped in his mouth. “What the hell?” Jared exclaimed. He fastened the dog’s makeshift leash to a board in the stable, then carefully pried the object free of Captain’s sharp white teeth.

Emma slid down from her own mount on trembling legs. “Don’t tell me, he stole part of the collies’ secret stash of bones—they’ll be out for blood for sure the next time they see him.”

“Emma, this is no bone.” Jared thrust it into the light from the stable window, where dust motes swirled around it like will-o’-the-wisps.

“A stick then or an old slipper—” She stopped, struck by the intensity in Jared’s face.

“Damn it, I
knew
there was something under there,” he muttered. “I felt it.”

“Felt what?”

Those green eyes flashed to hers. “This is a piece of a knight’s gauntlet.”

Emma froze. “What?”

“A gaunt—”

“I heard you the first time!” she interrupted, crowding him in her eagerness to see. She reached out to take the segment of metal from him, then snatched her fingers back guiltily. “Shit!” she said. “I mean, shoot. I probably shouldn’t touch it, right?”

“It’s been chewed on and drooled all over by your dog.” Jared laughed, placing it in her hand. “You’re not going to hurt anything.” Captain’s drool had washed away some of the dirt. Jared wiped the worst of the muck away with his thumb then blew softly against the corroded metal surface, obviously hoping to get a better look.

“There’s some sort of…of engraving on the edge, here. See?” he said, pointing it out. “We’ll have to clean the piece up before we can see clearly.”

We.
The partnership implied by the word touched Emma deeply. She looked at the treasure cupped in her hand. “You’re telling me that my dog stole a valuable archaeological artifact from that terrible man’s farm?”

“Right out from under Snib MacMurray’s nose. Truth is, that mutt of yours may have uncovered the best find we’ve made in years.” Jared hustled Emma toward his lab, barely pausing to order Veronica to call off the search for Captain and get the troops back to work at the dig. The blonde stomped off, expression sour with envy.

At the lab, Emma and Jared huddled together over the find, his big hands impossibly deft as he cleaned away centuries of grime. “This seems to be from the fourteenth century,” he judged. “I’d guess within a hundred or so years of the siege.”

“Do you think some knight lost it fighting by the lover’s stone?”

“I doubt it. It was probably a token of the heart, buried so close to the stone. I’d have to completely excavate the area to tell.”

“So let’s buy it, rent it!” Emma exclaimed. “I’m not exactly hurting for money. We could pay Snib oodles of money to let us—”

“Money wouldn’t matter a damn to that old bastard. He hates me, in case you haven’t noticed. Never forgave me for the traffic mucking up his own private kingdom.”

“Traffic? This is in the middle of nowhere.”

“School buses clogging up the roads, college students taking over his neighborhood pub. When word got out hereabouts that I’d lost my funding, the old miser got so excited he bought rounds of whiskey for half the village and danced on the bar at the pub.”

Emma tried to imagine the crusty old man dancing anywhere at all. “He’ll have to retire sometime, won’t he?” she inquired hopefully. “He looks like he’s a jillion years old!”

“Five jillion, at least.” Jared grimaced, plying his softest brush to clear the metal of the last few crumbs of dirt. “But I figure Snib is going to live forever just to spite me. There.” He frowned at the find in satisfaction. “I think we’re ready to stick this under the magnifier.”

He scooped up the tool, held the piece of gauntlet under a glaring bright light. “It seems to be from the right time period. From what I can tell.”

“Right time period for what? Tell me! Is it linked to Lady Aislinn somehow?” Emma prodded, unable to wait another second. “Did it belong to her husband?”

“Impossible,” Jared muttered, examining it again. “This makes no sense.”

“What? Tell me!”

He thrust it practically under her nose. “Read the engraving.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Emma skimmed the etched letters. “It’s Latin, isn’t it?”

“Right.” Jared flashed her a bemused glance. “I forgot you can’t read it. You fit so perfectly here. It seems as if you should be able to…”

Emma jabbed him with her elbow. “Just translate, boy genius! Before I lose what little patience I have left!”

He turned toward her, his rugged features clouded with confusion. “It’s the knight’s family motto.
I conquer all.
”

“But that’s not Craigmorrigan’s motto. It was something long and flowery, wasn’t it? All full of death-before-dishonor garbage. Took up half of the family crest. So if it’s not Lady Aislinn’s husband’s, then whose motto is it? Was some other chick off leaving love tokens in Lady Aislinn’s secret place?”

“The stone circle wasn’t secret, remember. The legend had to be known all over this area. And yet a knight’s armor was valuable. Meant survival in the medieval world. They’d hardly have scattered pieces of it about.”

“You mean sir what’s-his-name couldn’t pick another gauntlet up at the medieval version of a convenience store?”

“That’s right.” His grin flashed white. “We’ll have to date the metal properly to be certain. Do some more tests.”

“Don’t go all scientific on me! I can tell you know more than you’re saying! If the gauntlet isn’t from Craigmorrigan, then who did it belong to?”

Jared ran the pad of his thumb wonderingly along the edge of the artifact. He looked up at Emma, the thrill of discovery still burning in his eyes. “If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say this gauntlet belonged to Sir Brannoc.”

“That creep’s stuff in Lady Aislinn’s magic place?” Emma sputtered, outraged. “No way! His motto said something like…Sir dirty bird the ruthless.”

“That’s right.” Respect flared in Jared’s eyes. “Nice job on the research.” Emma felt a warm glow of pride in her chest.

“After Lady Aislinn and the fairy flag vanished, Sir Brannoc was so hated that people all across Scotland added a postscript of their own.” Jared’s gaze caught Emma’s, held.

The nape of her neck prickled as if touched by a ghostly hand from another age. “What was it?” she breathed.

“I conquer all…without mercy.”

Chapter Seventeen

J
ARED LOOKED UP
from his site notes as his office door swung open, the whole trailer jiggling as Beth Murphy and Davey Harrison jostled their way inside, all but dropping the mounds of packages weighing down their arms.

“Post just came,” Davey said, jamming his chin down on his topmost parcel to keep it from falling. “The man apologized all over the place. That big storm that came in from the east the other day held things up over the Atlantic.”

“A storm?” Jared shook his head, trying to clear it of all too vivid images of Emma laughing as she wrestled him down in one of her grandfather’s famous self-defense holds the night before. “What are you talking about?”

“Whoa, chief. You’ve been out of it all week, ever since you and Emma found the gauntlet. The phones have been out for two days.” The kid was talking to him as if Jared’s brain had gone missing. Maybe it had.

“Right,” he said. “The phones.”

“What Davey’s trying to tell you is that these were supposed to be delivered yesterday,” Beth explained.

“It’s hardly a crisis,” Jared said, in a downright sunny mood. “I don’t even remember ordering anything.”

“These aren’t for you.” Beth slid her load onto his desk. “They’re for Emma.”

“Emma?” Jared echoed, brow furrowing. “Don’t tell me Robards has revised the script again? Or God knows what this time.”

Instead of relaxing as Jared had hoped, the director had become more difficult than ever since Jared had begun to praise Emma. Robards kept firing off terse questions about Emma’s abilities, something about the man’s attitude making him edgy.

“No, it’s not from the studio,” Davey said. Strange, Jared thought. Then what could it be? Had Emma conned Davey into helping her order more research materials from some obscure book site on the Internet? She’d been more obsessed than Jared since they’d found the section of gauntlet two weeks ago.

The woman had been reading everything she could get her hands on, including copies of actual medieval texts written in Middle English. Not exactly fare for an intellectual lightweight. Another assumption he’d made about Emma that she’d proved dead wrong.

Beth helped Davey shift his batch of packages onto the desk. The girl touched his hand a little too long, setting Jared’s nerves on edge.

“We figured Emma would be in here with you,” she explained when she finally drew away. “You two have been joined at the hip the past two weeks. If we kids in the dorm tents didn’t know better, we’d think something was up.”

Beth laughed breezily, but a slow flush burned its way up Davey’s throat. No matter what the rest of the students knew or didn’t know, the lad was far too intuitive to miss changes all too visible between his two favorite people on site—next to Beth Murphy, that was.

Emma had even urged Jared to give Davey a few tips to help the lad make his move on the girl. After all, Emma insisted, summer wouldn’t last forever and Davey would spend the dreary schoolyear kicking himself for missing his chance to kiss Beth.

Jared had all but snapped Emma’s head off, fearing the fragility in the boy, what rejection might do to him. But Emma hadn’t backed down an inch. She’d just pinched Jared’s thigh and asked how he would be feeling right now if he’d stayed all by his lonesome on the other side of Lady Aislinn’s tower room.

That would be easy enough to answer,
Jared thought wryly.
I’d be so frustrated every student on site would probably be diving for cover any time I walked by.

Unfortunately, realizing that didn’t change his opinion. Jared was a grown man. He could take it when the breakup came. Hell, he
expected
it. He’d just bury the inevitable pain in his work and get on with his life. He wasn’t looking for some fairy-tale ending, didn’t believe such a thing even existed in real life.

But Davey Harrison brimmed with such desperate hope, such dangerous innocence that every time Jared saw it, it struck him through with a cold, biting terror, a foreboding he just couldn’t shake.

Jared lifted the topmost bundle and squeezed it: small, soft, definitely not the familiar heavy weight or shape of a book. “Why don’t you two see if you can wrestle Emma away from her research. Tell her these just came from…” He scanned the address label, felt like he’d taken a punch to the solar plexus.

To: Ms. Emma McDaniel…From: Andrew Lawson…Whitewater, Illinois, USA.

“Hey, Dr. Butler?” Davey’s voice sounded a long way off. “You okay?”

“What the hell is her jerk of an ex-husband doing sending her…” Jared bit off the rest of the sentence, not wanting to betray Emma’s vulnerability. But his outrage rushed on. What was in the package, anyway? Some baby picture Drew the asshole hadn’t had the chance to rub Emma’s nose in yet?

Hell, if it were up to Jared, he’d burn the thing. He nosed through the rest of the pile. The bottom package, wrapped with enough duct tape to reach from the castle to Edinburgh, was upside down. He flipped it over and its sparkly surface all but blinded him. Scrawled all over the brown wrapping paper with some kind of glittery marker were childish block letters that read: HAPPY BIRTHDAY. DO NOT OPEN TIL…

“Son of a bitch,” Jared growled.

“Dr. Butler?” Beth took a step backward, as if he were one of Snib’s collies ready to bite.

“Yesterday was the blasted woman’s birthday!” he snapped, stung.

“You’re kidding!” Davey exclaimed, Beth gasping in unison.

“Why the devil didn’t she say anything?” Jared demanded as if the two stunned kids actually knew the answer.

“She seemed a little, well…pensive yesterday,” Davey said. “When she thought no one was watching.” Jared winced. Trust Davey to use an adjective that shouldn’t roll easily off a teenager’s tongue. A word that described exactly how Emma had behaved the day before.

But then, Jared hadn’t been feeling so terrific himself yesterday morning. Veronica had been flashing some glossy fan magazine around the breakfast tables picturing Emma, a veritable goddess on some red carpet three years ago. Veronica jabbering on to the other girls about how shallow a life was when defined by designer dresses and caviar.

Not that Jared had heard much of the conversation. He’d been trying too hard to get the magazine image out of his head. Emma, swathed in scarlet satin, her curls smoothed into sleek waves, rubies flashing at her throat, her ex-husband smiling beside her, as smooth and polished as a pair of million-dollar shoes.

Jared had wanted to tear the page in half, ball up ol’ Drew the asshole and toss him in the nearest wastepaper bin.
And then what?
a voice in Jared’s head jeered.
Paste your own picture there beside her? That would be a hell of a sight. You and Emma McDaniel on the red carpet. Your hands dusty from digging, your ratty cargo pants bulging at the pockets with tools, your attitude surly as Snib on a rampage?