“The sword wasn’t plastic. It was real. A reproduction medieval sword.” Jared chuckled. “I could barely even lift the thing.”
“A real sword, huh?” Emma nestled in closer. “That must have made you sleep a whole lot better.”
“Aye,” he whispered into her hair. “Want to hear something funny? Your turn to laugh at me if you’ve a mind to.”
“What?”
He leaned back, crooked her that bone-melting smile. “I still can’t sleep without the damned thing in my bedroom.”
She gaped up at him. “You mean the sword you brought up here? The one you fight with?”
“That’s the one. My magic sword. Elendil North, so to speak.”
Her heart ached at his honesty, the incredible sweetness of him confiding in her about a time when he’d been small and powerless and afraid. She cradled his cheek in her hand. “Your secret’s safe with me, sir knight.”
He leaned deeper into her caress. “Remember that first night you arrived here at Craigmorrigan, when you were so damned stubborn and defiant? You asked if there wasn’t something I needed, one thing I couldn’t do without?”
“I remember.”
“I thought of my sword, and…well, that’s the first time you managed to do it.”
“Do what?”
“Slip past my guard and get your blade to my throat. I would have been the worst kind of hypocrite not to let you take whatever you needed out of that suitcase. A grown man who sleeps with a sword under his bed can hardly object…”
Jared looked out the window to the sea, something sudden and heartbreaking showing in his eyes.
“Maybe you still need the sword because the dragons are never far away. I…” She stopped, understanding the expression on his face, so solemn, so still. “Oh, God, Jared. Your sword. Where is it?”
“I heard you scream. Saw you fall. I let go of it mid-swing and…”
“It’s got to be out there on the rocks where you were fighting.” She started toward the door in alarm, but Jared caught her arm. She wheeled toward him.
“I heard it hit the water, Emma,” he said, his voice roughened, low.
Emma felt as if she were about to throw up. “No! We’ll go look. It has to be…”
Green eyes caught hers, held hers. “It’s gone.”
“The sword your father gave you! No! How can I ever replace it?” She pulled away from him, pressed her hands to her churning stomach. “Oh, Jared. It’s my fault. If I hadn’t gone storming off where you told me not to…”
He stopped her words gently with his hand. “Didn’t you ever read the old legends? How the fair maiden’s life had to be bought at a price? Mountains of gold or a knight’s blood or some magical fairy treasure like Lady Aislinn’s flag? Maybe my sword was the price for saving you. Like you said, what does a scientist need with magic anyway?”
“Don’t try to make me feel better. It won’t work.”
“Emma, I lost the sword. It could have been worse. If I’d dropped you off the cliff…” His voice caught, or had she imagined it? His teasing smile looked forced. “What would I have told the studio? I not only injured the first actress, the second I lost entirely?” He ran his thumb across the curve of her lip. “I’d rather lose a hundred swords than let something happen to a woman like you.”
“Why don’t you come clean, Butler.” She gave him a tremulous smile. “Even if you did want to get rid of me, you wouldn’t want me falling off a cliff. You’d much rather have the fun of drowning me yourself. With me out of the picture they might even have waited for Angelica to heal.”
“Angelica Robards could never play Lady Aislinn with the power you will.”
Emma froze. “Wh-what did you say?”
“You heard me, woman,” Jared growled, tousling her hair. He grimaced. “I’ve a confession to make. Want to know what I did while you were decimating my poor unsuspecting students in Trivial Pursuit?”
“Polished up your chain mail and plotted new ways to torture me?”
“I watched your Jade Star movies.”
Dismay flooded through Emma. “Oh, God, no!”
“Davey coerced me into it.”
She pulled away from Jared, appalled. “I’m so sorry! I told Davey not to.”
“And he used to be such an obedient kid. Lately he doesn’t listen any better than you do. It’s just as I expected, you’re starting to rub off on him. That’s what comes of keeping bad company.”
“Jared, this isn’t funny.”
“That’s the strange thing about it. I figured he was just misguided and I’d watch the damn films to humor him. But it wasn’t a joking matter to the lad. He seemed to think I’d find the films enlightening. Maybe change my attitude toward your acting.”
She snorted in disdain. “I’m guessing your opinion went from bad to worse.”
“Hardly.” Jared caught her arm again, turned her toward him. “Davey was right, Emma. You were fantastic. Talented. Just like he said. You amazed me.”
She angled her face away. Why did Jared’s praise suddenly hurt more than his scorn had? Because it couldn’t possibly be real. “Don’t patronize me.”
He grasped her chin between his fingers, turned her face back to his. “You should know me better than that. I wanted nothing more than to prove I was right about you. One more thing we have in common. We both love to win.”
She managed a wry smile.
“I was wrong about Angelica,” Jared insisted. “And I was wrong about you. This is probably the one and only time you’ll ever get to hear me admit I’m wrong. I’d rather be stretched on the rack.”
“Me, too. Imagine that. Another way we’re alike.”
“You’re nothing like I expected, Emma. Maybe the reason I growled at you like a bear all the time wasn’t because you weren’t my ideal for the role. Maybe it was more like…sour grapes because…” He hesitated, a vulnerable light in his eyes.
“Because why?”
“Because the moment I set eyes on you I knew. A woman like you might as well be the moon, you’re so far out of reach for a plain Scottish boyo like me.”
Emma’s heart stopped, mesmerized by the naked longing in Jared’s eyes. A longing just as deep, just as fierce, just as terrifying as what she felt for him.
She’d never felt any man’s hands on her body except Drew’s. Never even been tempted by casual sex. Because she’d known from the beginning sex should mean something deep and real. It should change her.
Go to bed with Jared and you can never take it back, a voice in her head warned.
And yet…
She closed her eyes, suddenly carried back to three months after her divorce. She was lying on her stomach on the rug in front of Samantha’s fireplace, her friend’s beautiful English cocker spaniel offering Emma yet another of her eighty-seven identical stuffed yellow ducks for comfort.
“This twisted affair you’ve got going with my dog’s ducks has got to stop,” Sam insisted. “Even Chamois thinks you need a man. This isn’t the 1950s in freaking Whitewater, Illinois. You’re divorced, Em, not dead. You’re a young, talented, intelligent single woman with guys hitting on you every three seconds. What are you waiting for? Prince Charming?”
“I already had Prince Charming. It didn’t work out so well. Another shameless case of false advertising.”
“Too bad for him, losing someone as fantastic as you are. The question is what are you going to do now? Take Hamlet’s advice and get thee to a nunnery?”
“I’m just not ready, Sam.”
Sam’s eyes filled with empathy. “I know it’s hard, sweetheart. But this whole divorce thing will get easier in time. Once you get past that first time making love with some other man, you’ll be getting on with your life, you know? Drew will really be past tense. Just close your eyes and jump.”
“But I want sex to mean something. I want…”
“The glass slipper to fit, the beast to turn into a prince. The whole goddamn fairy tale?” Samantha
asked.
“Sounds silly, huh?”
“No. Although if that’s the criteria, I probably would have better luck dating one of these things.” She examined a particularly badly-chewed version of duckzilla.
“I’ll know when it’s time, Sam,” Emma had insisted. “I’ll know.”
“How?”
Warm firelight, gold travertine marble and a soulful spaniel’s gaze faded.
Emma opened her eyes, Jared’s rugged features swimming again into focus. So what is different this time? Emma asked herself. Why let down your guard with this man? In this place? You’ll not be acting here. It’s not one of Aunt Finn’s romance novels. This is real, this night. This choice.
And yet, would it be the worst thing she ever did to take what Jared Butler offered?
Yes, her common sense told her. This falls under the heading of BIG MISTAKE. To go charging into the dark, plunging over a cliff for the second time tonight. But this time there would be no Jared to pull her up.
He was going over the cliff with her.
She swallowed hard, scraping together every bit of her courage as she peered up into his eyes. “You say I’m out of your reach. But I’m not so far away now. All you have to do is stretch out your hands. See?” She twined her fingers in his. She prayed he couldn’t feel her trembling. Or was it Jared trembling? Those strong, sure hands as unsteady as her own?
“Emma, this is…probably a bad idea. You being who you are, while I…I’m no fit man for a woman like you.”
“A woman like me?” she echoed sadly. “And who is that, Jared? The Emma the rest of the world sees? The one who smiles that plastic smile for the camera even when her husband leaves her? I see her picture sometimes when I pass newsstands and, God, it’s so strange. I don’t even know her.”
Neither did he. The sudden realization hit Jared like a fist to his gut. No. The woman clinging to his hand wasn’t the actress of Jade Star fame, every man’s fantasy shag. She was Emma. Just Emma. Savior of mutts with more bite than brains. Defender of gawky teenaged boys with scars on their wrists and pasts too full of pain. Emma, who knew in her blood and bone what it meant to have your mother abandon you, that horrible thirst no one else could slake, the void no one else could fill.
Emma, the lovely young woman from Whitewater, Illinois, who carried a glitter-laden photograph of her family everywhere she traveled and refused to surrender to Jared in battle, no matter how impossible the odds.
His Emma.
No. Not his. She could never be his.
Bloody fool, Jared warned himself sharply. What do you think, man? If you take her body tonight you’ll be able to keep part of her soul? That light in her nothing could vanquish? What have you got to give her in return? Your foul temper. Your obsession with this castle, people dead six hundred years. The work that locked Jenny out, left her crying alone outside the door to your heart.
What heart? He could almost hear Jenny wail. And she’d been right after all. He didn’t have a heart. He was broken inside from watching his father all those years. Jared had killed the tenderness inside him one impulse at a time, forever haunted by the grisly reality he’d lived with as a boy—love no saving grace, no sweet, stunning glory. Love only the twisting knife in Angus Butler’s chest.
No. Jared was a scientist. A realist. Through the years he had come to know himself far too well. He was nothing but a giant intellect, so ruthless it didn’t care if it devoured anyone in its path.
And yet, he’d told Emma that, hadn’t he? The first time they’d come close to making love? She knew he hadn’t anything to give her except sex. The skill in his hands, the power of his mouth, the passion even his mighty will could no longer deny her. The first, the only time he could ever remember his body overruling his mind.
“Jared?”
He stiffened, wanting too much, needing too badly.
“Don’t…don’t think so hard. It’s easy, really. I only need one thing from you tonight.”
“What’s that?”
“See me. The real me. Don’t make love to some woman I could never be.”
Jared’s throat tightened at her courage, her honesty, the vast, terrible isolation in her that he understood far too well.
She trembled as she drew his palm to her breast. Her cheeks flooded with color as if no man had ever touched her there before, as if it were her first time.
Her sudden shyness enthralled him. Jared stared at his hand, dark, powerful, relentlessly male against the fragile swell of her breast, his touch burning through the thin fabric of her shift.
“It’ll only be you and me in this bed tonight,” she said softly. “No expectations. No masks or facades. Just us. Swear to me, Jared. On your father’s sword.”
Loss swept through him, and longing, for the missing sword or for other things forever beyond his reach. He raised his gaze to hers, carried to another time, another world where Emma belonged as much as he did.
“I swear it.”
Emma’s mouth tipped in a quavering smile. “You sure you don’t want to run the way you did last time, sir knight? There’s still time to escape.”
Jared threaded his hand back through her waves of hair, wrapping the dark tresses around his wrist. “Escape chains like these?” He smiled, his gaze intent on the strand of raven black hair, so silky around the sinewy power of his arm. “Don’t you know, lady? No knight who ever breathed could be that strong.”
Chapter Fifteen
EMMA MELTED INTO Jared’s arms, her mouth eager beneath his, her hands threading back into the unruly waves of his hair. He groaned at her response, his tongue laying siege to the crease of her lips, demanding entry. She surrendered and he thrust his way inside, invading her body, invading her soul.
In that instant, it felt so right to let him breach her last defenses—inevitable, as if this night had been their destiny as much as the fairy flag had been twined into the destiny of this castle and its lady. For a heartbeat Emma felt a frisson of foreboding, wondering if their story would end sadly as well. But she shuttered the thought away, losing herself in this moment when there was nothing but her hands in Jared’s hair, his tongue leaving fiery heat wherever it stroked her own.
He kissed her as if he were starving for the taste of her, as if part of him feared he might come to his senses at any moment, be wise instead of reckless and pull away from feelings too stormy. Emotions beyond even his power to control. She reeled under his sensual onslaught, sensation piling on sensation, harder, hotter, higher as he fumbled with the tie to her shift. The cord knotted under his fingers. With an oath, he pulled away, started to pick at the knot, meaning to untangle it, his brawny workman’s hands almost absurd matched against a task so delicate.
“Break it,” she begged in a voice she didn’t even recognize. “I need your hands on me. Now.”
Feral heat blazed in Jared’s eyes as he wound the cord around powerful fingers and snapped it with a yank. Emma gasped as the gathered neckline cascaded off its string, the shift sliding past her shoulders, down her body to pool like sea foam at her feet.
Jared’s nostrils flared as his gaze swallowed her up from the crown of her dark curls to the tips of her toes. “Jesus God, the sight of you,” he murmured, his Scottish burr rougher, low. “You’re so damned beautiful. ’Tis a miracle I can still breathe.”
“Don’t,” Emma drew away, pleading. “I don’t want to hear…”
“Hear what?”
“About…what I look like. About the other Emma. I’m not—”
“I’ll say you’re goddamned beautiful if I want to, woman,” Jared growled. “This isn’t one of your scripts where you get to revise however you choose. That painted-up woman on the covers of all those magazines—she couldn’t hold a candle to you, standing before me right now! Do you hear me?”
He surprised a laugh from her. “Oh, I hear you. In fact, the whole dig site probably hears you. Why, the students should be racing up here at any moment to make sure we haven’t killed eac
h other. Didn’t anybody ever tell you you’re not supposed to growl at somebody you’re making love to?”
“Guess I’m a bit out of practice,” he said, a hint of color staining his cheekbones.
She was stunned at how glad his admission made her.
“As for the kids intruding on us, they wouldn’t dare. They’re scared to death of me.” He flashed his highland raider’s grin. “You would be, too, if you had any sense, woman. I could eat you alive.”
“I dare you to try. I’ve been waiting forever to feel your mouth on my skin.” But suddenly she chuckled, astonished at how easy it was.
“If you’re so carried away with passion, would you mind telling me why you’ve got the devil dancing in your eyes, Ms. McDaniel?” Jared’s brow furrowed in suspicion. “You find the idea of my making love to you amusing?”
“No-o-o,” she hedged. “Well, not exactly.” It felt so good to laugh with him, to play… She’d never had any idea that the man even knew how. “It’s about your…well, I have had a bit of a joke on you and—”
“And that joke would be?”
“Do you remember when I first came to the castle? How I called you Dr. S. M.?”
He arched his brows. “You called me a lot worse than that, if I remember rightly.”
“Didn’t you ever wonder what the initials stood for?”
“I figured it was a comparison to the Marquis de Sade or something equally flattering. Being a sadomasochist or some such. Am I right?”
“That’s exactly what I wanted you to think,” she said, inordinately pleased with herself. “Truth was it stood for this.” She reached up, touched his upper lip, the right side arching a fraction higher than the left. “You have the sexiest mouth God ever put on a man, Jared Butler.”
“You’ve gone daft, woman.”
“It’s your fault if I have,” she said, tingling as she ran her finger along that hot, tempting curve. “Do you know how long I’ve been thinking about this? Your mouth on my neck, on my breasts…even lower.”