The Wedding Dress

by Kimberly Cates

  Ever since Emma had followed a stormy-tempered Jared down from the tower, Veronica had acted so solicitous that every time the blonde got near her, Emma had the urge to throw up—preferably all over Veronica’s purple sandals.

  It was almost as if the witch knew….

  Knew what? About the whole media disaster? And the effect it had had on Jared? It wasn’t as if anyone with a pulse could miss the fact that things between Emma and Jared had gone from bad to worse. Even so, the last thing Emma needed to deal with was more of Veronica’s gloating.

  “Listen, Davey,” Emma said to the lad. “How about if I help you carry Simon Legree’s junk up to my prison. And in return, you can answer some historical questions I have.”

  Jared’s jaw clenched. “I thought I made it clear—”

  “Look around, Butler,” Emma said briskly. “There’s not a soul on site except your students. I’m perfectly safe. Besides—” she gestured to Veronica, the girl’s avid little ears all perked up “—I’m sure you could use a little time to explain our new sleeping arrangements to the ladies. You did such a stellar job explaining it to the guys. Meanwhile, Davey can answer some questions that have been gnawing at me the past few hours. I’m positively dying of curiosity.”

  Mistrust clouded Jared’s rugged features. “About what?”

  “Nothing you need concern yourself with,” Emma said with an airy wave. “You just…flit about doing whatever it is you do.”

  “I don’t ‘flit.’”

  Jared was right there. Anything as brawny and big and male as he was couldn’t flit if his life depended on it. Too bad he didn’t have some deep dark secret photos hanging around somewhere—blackmail-worthy ones like those her mom lorded over Jake. Deirdre still loved to taunt her husband about the Jacob shrine his grandmother kept on display in her Easter egg pink house. A teenaged Jake in tights, starring in Baryshnikov-esque roles: chick bait to keep his beloved grandmother’s dancing school in business.

  “I’ll take good care of you, Ms., I mean, Emma.” Davey’s voice startled her from her thoughts.

  The lad almost seemed to grow taller, making it clear to everyone, the girls and Jared included, that Emma was under his protection. The sweetness of the gesture touched Emma’s heart.

  “What is it you want to know?”

  “Know?” Emma asked blankly, her train of thought shattered by images of Jared Butler in a pink tutu—or kilt, as the case might be.

  “You said you were curious about something.”

  That’s right! She was, she remembered with relish. “I was just wondering about poison.”

  Davey’s brows arched up in confusion. “Poison?”

  “Didn’t someone kill Lady Aislinn’s father that way? At least, that’s what the script hints at.”

  “Legend says Sir Brannoc gave him a hawking gauntlet painted with something toxic inside,” Davey explained.

  “Would that work?”

  “You could absorb it through your pores, I suppose, but it’s probably just part of the myth. Dr. Butler doubts that part of the story is true.”

  “Does he now?” Emma tossed her curls back over her shoulder. “Well, I’m sure the genius doctor is right. Of course, it does make a person wonder…if somebody did want to poison someone else, what kind of potion would she brew?”

  “She?” Jared snorted.

  Davey didn’t even notice. The boy nibbled at a hangnail, lost in concentration. “Some mixture of herbs, I’d imagine,” Davey mused. “Nightshade or foxglove could do a lot of damage.”

  “How lovely.” Emma slanted Jared a pointed glance as she swept Davey away. “Please tell me those still grow in Scotland.”

  EMMA THUMPED JARED’S ten-ton backpack onto the stone landing outside the arched entry to her room. She frowned at Davey. The boy, who had so chivalrously insisted on going up first to make sure there were no rogue reporters running loose in the tower, was already unrolling the mattress from Jared’s cot on the stone floor. Inside her room. No way was she letting Butler intrude that deeply into her personal space.

  “Wait just a minute, there,” she protested. “Your boss is sleeping on this side of the imaginary door.” She tapped the slab of stone pointedly with her foot.

  “Emma, it’s way too narrow,” Davey explained. “If he rolled over in the middle of the night he wouldn’t stop until he hit the bottom.”

  Emma glanced over her shoulder at the steep spiral staircase, the uneven stone risers one of the more ingenious defenses Castle Craigmorrigan’s builders had devised. Damn if Davey wasn’t right. She shifted her feet, restless, irritated. The thought of Butler invading her bedroom set her nerves on edge. “Then I suppose he’d better not roll ov—” She swore as the backpack toppled under its own weight, thudding ominously downward. It disappeared around the corner of the spiral stairs, then after a moment landed at what must be the bottom with a resounding smack.

  “Listen, Emma,” Davey began.

  Emma held up her hand to stop him. “Just give me a moment to enjoy this. Imagine all kinds of breakable things in that backpack—you know, aftershave and cologne and shoe polish and God knows what else—soaking into your boss’s clothes.”

  “Cologne draws gnats that bite something awful. Dr. Butler never wears any.”

  The man smelled that good all on his own? That should be illegal.

  Davey straightened, shoved his hands in his pockets. “Listen, Emma, I don’t blame you for being…well, angry with Dr. Butler. Every time you’re around him, he starts acting like a real jerk.”

  “Not every time,” Emma admitted. Her memory flashed to images of Jared diving into the dogfight. Jared tipping the enamel flower into her hand. Jared listening as she told him about Drew’s defection—how Jared had taken her side, made her feel at least a little better.

  “If you just knew him the way I do, maybe you could cut him some slack.”

  “Davey, I know you adore Dr. Butler. I promise I won’t roll him down the stairs in the middle of the night. Fantasizing about it is good enough.”

  Davey chuckled.

  “I’ll even go fetch the backpack, though the wreckage inside it is bound to be a disappointment.”

  “Wait.”

  She paused, tipped her head in query.

  He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “I’ve been wanting to ask you…I read somewhere that you…your mom raised you alone.”

  “That’s right.” Emma tried not to show her surprise at his abrupt personal question.

  “I don’t mean pry into your private life. It’s only…it’s always been just my mom and me, too.”

  She could see how much those words cost Davey. She reached out and touched his arm. “Your mom must be a remarkable lady to have raised a son like you.”

  Davey paced to the window, shrugged, his shoulders stiff. “Mom…did the best she could. I never really knew my dad.”

  “That’s hard,” Emma said. Sometimes knowing him is even harder.

  “We moved a lot. Mom worked three jobs, cleaning people’s houses, waiting tables wherever we were. The flats got shabbier and smaller, the neighborhoods more dangerous. Lots of crime and such. And the schools…they got so bad I…it was desperate. Pure hell, you know?”

  Oh, yeah. Emma knew, all right. The knot you got in your stomach when you walked onto the playground. The sick dread when you entered a bathroom or a corner of a schoolyard out of the teacher’s sight. Where anything could happen.

  “I moved to Whitewater when I was in fifth grade. The other kids…well, let’s just say tormenting the new kid was their favorite hobby. It stunk.”

  She expected Davey to react like Jared had when she’d told him about Brandi Bates. Incredulous. Disbelieving. Davey just nodded sadly. “That’s where the dark places come from. In your eyes sometimes, when you’re acting. I wondered.”

  She hesitated, surprised. “You see dark places in my acting?”

  “Sure I do. Anybody who really watches you can tell. You’ve got so mu
ch more depth than you get credit for.”

  “Your boss would disagree. Not to mention my own studio.”

  “Well, once you play Lady Aislinn, the whole world will know how terrific you are,” Davey said, so certain it boosted Emma’s spirits. Still, his praise made her uncomfortable. Davey was a starstruck kid who liked her, not exactly an impartial judge.

  She changed the subject back to his question of moments before. “You asked me about how I channel dark places into my acting. Maybe…you had plenty of your own?”

  “My dark places were all over back then. School or holiday. It didn’t matter. I got beat up pretty much whenever I went outdoors. So when summer came, I stayed inside. Alone.”

  Emma remembered smoky clubs, feeling invisible curled up in a corner with her books until her mom was done singing. She knew how alone felt.

  “When I was fifteen, we came to the castle for a field trip just as school was letting out. Dr. Butler was so amazing. Made the middle ages seem so real. I kept asking all these questions. For once, I didn’t care that the other lads were making fun of me behind the teacher’s back.”

  “It feels good to be thinking about something that enthralls you, people or places where the other kids can’t reach you.”

  “You did that, too?”

  “My best friend was a ghost, a fact I didn’t bother to hide from the brats at school. You can imagine their reaction to my little fantasy. Bet you could sell that story to the tabloids for a bundle. I’m surprised nobody’s already done so.”

  Davey chuckled.

  “I guess that’s why that first night I was so sure I saw…well, a knight fighting with a sword out on the sea. Not such a big leap from one fantasy to another. Anyway—not that it matters. Tell me more about your first day here at the castle.”

  “We’d brought boxed lunches on the field trip. During break, I took mine off under this tree, alone. I always ate alone.”

  “Me, too,” Emma said. “Until Jessie moved to town.” And at ten years old, Emma finally learned the magic of having a real-live best friend, instead of a ghost who couldn’t talk back, couldn’t laugh out loud, couldn’t share a treasured copy of Little Women, giving Emma a glimpse into the kind of family she’d always dreamed of having.

  In hindsight Emma wouldn’t trade her family for anything in the world. But back then, the fictional Marches had seemed heartbreakingly perfect.

  And if anyone in Whitewater had told her that Jessie would steal Emma’s husband someday, Emma would have laughed in their face. Emma’s heart twisted as she remembered Jessie showing up at March Winds after she’d gotten engaged to Drew.

  Em, I didn’t mean for this to happen… Jessie’s voice echoed in her head. But you were gone so much or in the middle of some crazy schedule on some other continent, and Drew…needed someplace quiet where he could be himself.

  And you were right there waiting, weren’t you?

  We didn’t touch each other until after you were separated. Drew needs you to know that and so do I.

  Of course you wouldn’t. You’re both too damned nice even to be honest enough to— Even then Emma had known she was being absurd. Had she wanted them to commit blatant adultery so she could hate them both? Would that have made it easier somehow?

  Stay away from me, Jessie, she’d warned. I never want to see you again.

  But forever was a long time, and there were moments she missed Jessie’s generosity, her understanding, the simple way she faced life. It had been hard enough for Emma to lose her husband, but the divorce had shattered her two longest, most precious friendships as well.

  “Emma?” Davey’s voice pulled her back to the present.

  “I’m sorry,” Emma said, trying to cover up thoughts too private to share. “What were you saying?”

  “I was telling you about the first time I came to the castle,” Davey said with a thoughtfulness that reminded Emma far too sharply of the friend she’d turned away. “The popular lads had a place all set for Dr. Butler at their table. But he came over and sat by me.”

  Emma swallowed hard, imagining how much that must have meant to Davey.

  “We talked about history and archaeology and I asked him for a list of books I could read that summer. Great, huge nonfiction tomes, you know? Like the Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology and all kinds of stuff.”

  “Murder weapons,” Emma supplied.

  “I’m sorry?” Davey cocked his head, confused.

  “When Jared met me at the airport he was carrying this book thick enough to be a murder weapon.”

  “Exactly. Somehow, he got me talking about home, you know? When I never talk about home to anybody.” Secrets haunted the boy’s eyes. He looked away. “He said his personal assistant had just gotten his doctorate and had run off to supervise a dig in Colombia. He asked if I’d like the job.”

  A fifteen-year-old kid replacing someone with a doctorate in archaeology? What had Jared been thinking? Emma’s heart squeezed. She knew exactly what he’d been thinking.

  Jared’s voice echoed in her head. I used to be just like him…

  “Anyway, Dr. Butler promised I could have free rein in his library. You wondered why his rucksack was so heavy? It’s probably full of books.”

  Emma thought of her own suitcase, the books she’d hauled from L.A. She’d packed too many, as usual. But she’d never gotten over the terror she’d had as a kid, that she’d end up somewhere without anything to read.

  “About the third week I was on site, Dr. Butler caught me raiding the research books again, more books on scientific method, Scottish history, stuff like that. He asked if…I ever read poetry.”

  “Poetry?” Emma echoed, surprised. Imagining Jared Butler reading poetry was like imagining Attila the Hun drinking a piña colada with a pink paper umbrella on top.

  “Dr. Butler loaned me this book he kept on his bedside table all the time. A thin little ragged copy with pages held in by a rubber band. Told me to try it.”

  “What was it?”

  “The works of Robert Burns.”

  Butler a romantic? All right, so he’d managed to surprise her. Again. At least the man’s choice of poets made a twisted kind of sense. From what Emma had read, Burns was a hot-blooded plowman poet who’d sizzled his way across the Scottish countryside, leaving a trail of little Burnses in his wake. And that innate brand of blistering sensuality seemed to be Jared’s stock and trade. If he ever decided to make a sweep across Scotland, he’d probably have women lined up in every village, eager for a taste of what he offered.

  “Burns, huh?” Emma prodded, praying Davey wouldn’t notice how flustered she’d suddenly become.

  “Dr. Butler told me his da had carried that book with him everywhere.”

  “Jared’s father was a scholar?”

  Davey bit his hangnail and avoided her gaze. “That’s for Dr. Butler to say,” he hedged. He turned back to Emma. “At the end of the summer, when I was going home, I was miserable. The summer had been brilliant. Work I loved. And Dr. Butler—he didn’t tolerate the other lads bullying me. I can’t tell you what it felt like. All that respect and the way he trusted me. I wasn’t just that upstart scholarship kid who threw off the grading curve at school.”

  “Leaving the castle must have been awful.”

  “It was like dying. Felt like the end of the world. See, Mum had written to tell me her latest boss promised to hire me the next summer at the stable where he kept his horses. I’d make enough to help Mum with bills. And in time, I could manage the place. I wouldn’t have to waste any more time on school. I could work full-time.”

  “Oh, Davey.” Emma tried to imagine him leaving school. No more books. No more learning. After a summer with Jared’s library to devour and all of archaeology to explore.

  “The worst thing of all was my mum. She was so happy. I’d be secure for life. The night before we closed down the site, I showed Dr. Butler the letter. I couldn’t just blurt it out, tell him like a man. I was afraid I’d cry.�
�� Davey grimaced. “In the end, I bawled like a baby anyway.”

  Emma could only imagine how humiliated Davey must have felt.

  “Next afternoon, Dr. Butler drove me to the train station. Said he expected me back at the dig site the minute school was out. He’d found a scholarship that would pay me even more than my mum’s boss would and I’d get credit from his university while I worked for him. I swear, I nearly fainted.”

  “No wonder. At your age.”

  “Age had nothing to do with it. It was when he talked about university. As if there was no question I’d be going. No one in my family had even graduated from what you would call high school. Then he reached in his coat pocket and…” Davey’s voice cracked. “He handed me his copy of Burns. Said his father always told him that Burns was proof that a man didn’t have to be stuck in the rocky earth where fate had planted him. He can be a poet or a doctor or a dreamer—be anything he chooses—as long as he believes in himself.”

  Emma’s eyes burned. Oh, Jared…

  “I didn’t want to take the book. Told him he should keep it for his own kids someday. I mean, it belonged to his father. If I had the kind of father who would have given me something like that, I’d never, ever give it away. Dr. Butler just clapped his hand on my shoulder and said his father would have been proud for me to have it.”

  Emma sighed, trying to disguise how moved she was by attempting to joke. “So much for my devious plot for revenge. Maybe I won’t poison Jared after all.”

  Davey’s mouth crooked in a lopsided smile. “You and Dr. Butler are…are two of the nicest people I’ve ever known.”

  “As long as we stay on opposite sides of the dig.”

  “I just wish…if he’d watch you in the Jade movies, maybe he’d change his mind about…well…”

  “The fact that he thinks I’ll butcher the role of Lady Aislinn?” Emma offered.

  Davey winced, obviously groping for something to say. But how could he possibly deny it?

  “It’s okay, Davey. It’s no big secret.”

  “But it’s hardly a fair judgment. If he’d just watch even one of your movies, he’d—”