She folded her arms across her chest. “I don’t expect anything of you.”
“Maybe not. But I can see the wanting in you. You’re supposed to be an actress, for God’s sake. But I always saw it. So why the hell didn’t I stop myself before…”
“It was my right to choose.”
“And you’re thinking so clearly, aren’t you? You were vulnerable after the divorce and I took advantage—”
“Don’t you dare pull that chivalry bullshit on me!” Emma scrambled out of bed, her fist knotting even tighter in the folds of her shift. “Don’t you cast me as some helpless damsel who fell victim to your charms! Charms which, I might add, have been sadly lacking in your follow-through.”
“Oh, is that right?”
“As a matter of fact, you’re being a real bastard!”
“You knew that before you slept with me. It shouldn’t come as any big surprise.”
They faced each other down, breathless, quivering with emotion, as angry as they’d been in any previous battle. And then Emma glimpsed it—beyond the rage, beyond the stubbornness, beyond the snarled words and steely glares. Icy cold, paralyzing fear.
Oh, God, what had put so much hopelessness in her bold warrior’s eyes?
She drew in a steadying breath, stepping away from the shield of her own fury. She looked Jared straight in the eye. “You are a bastard,” Emma observed softly. “But when you turn into the beast there’s always been a reason. I might not find out what the reason is until later, but it’s always there.”
Jared kicked the bench with his bare foot. He swore, but she knew he was glad of the pain. “Don’t tell me,” he snapped. “You played a psychiatrist in some movie I’ve never seen, and now you’re going to analyze me? Poor boyo from a broken home. He’s got commitment issues, and never dealt with—”
“Don’t make something complicated out of this,” she broke in, determined not to rise to his bait, the anger that would make him feel safe. “This thing between us is far too simple for that.” She raised her chin, quiet, defiant. “I know you, Jared. You may not have meant for it to happen. You may not like it a bit. But I do.”
He flinched back as if she’d struck him. “You don’t really know me. No one does. If you could only see, you’d be sickened by the kind of man I am.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“It’s true. I knew it from the moment I watched those director’s cuts, you playing with that bunch of kids on the set. Laughing with them and swinging them ’round in that harness thing of yours—”
“You mean the cuts from the first Jade movie?”
“Any man with a brain could have seen how much you loved them. What a…a fine mother you’d make someday.” His eyes darkened with sadness, an awe that made her ache inside. “How did you learn that, Emma? When your own mother left you the way she did?”
Emma’s mind filled with images of Deirdre McDaniel Stone’s catlike face, all edges and restlessness and self-blame, her blue eyes hollowed out with regret. “I forgave my mom a long time ago. She was gone for nine months. She spent the rest of her life trying to make it up to me. She even stopped singing. Some kind of twisted penance.”
Emma shrugged. “Maybe it sounds hokey, but I just try to remember the good things that came out of the time she was gone. I got my family back, my uncle Cade and the Captain. And Aunt Finn…if I hadn’t been in Whitewater to stir things up, Uncle Cade would’ve scared her off for sure.”
“There you go again. Making it sound like fate.”
“It’s the only thing that gets me through. Believing something better is just around the corner, that there’s a plan, you know? And things will work out in the end.” But they hadn’t always worked out, a practical voice in her head challenged. Things hadn’t worked out with Drew. “Maybe you’ve been studying Lady Aislinn’s story for too many years, Jared. It has such an unhappy ending.”
“Most of the stories I’ve known do.”
Emma swallowed hard, trying not to look away from the stark honesty in his face. And she wanted to reach beyond the chain mail of his defenses, to where he was vulnerable. To real flesh and blood beneath. To where the hurting lived.
She crossed to him, laid her hand on his arm. “Won’t you tell me?” she asked softly. “What is it, Jared? What’s wrong? This…weight I can see you’re carrying deep inside you. Maybe it’s not as bad as you think.”
“Not bad?” His face contorted in misery. “It’s fecking hideous, Emma. Makes any other life impossible. Us impossible. Don’t you see?” Jared sucked in a deep breath, blew it out, his features drawn, so raw it hurt her to see. “You want…things I don’t want.” His jaw clenched. “Ever.”
He crossed to the window, staring out to the sea. And Emma sensed he was about to tell her what kept his heart as locked away from life and laughter and love as Lady Aislinn had been in her prison tower. Then maybe, just maybe for the first time since she’d met this enigmatic man Emma would understand what he’d been fighting out on the waves, all alone.
“You know I have a dead wife,” Jared began. “If I didn’t mention it, I’m sure Davey must have.”
Emma hadn’t seen so much as a picture of the woman, any hint of her memory in Jared’s tent. “I remember hearing something about her,” she said evenly. “Not much.”
“That’s because I don’t talk about her. To anyone. Ever.”
“You weren’t happy.” It was a statement, not a question. There wasn’t any joy in Jared’s eyes. Not even bittersweet echoes of joys remembered, like the memories she still had of Drew.
“Not happy?” Jared scoffed. “That’s an understatement of epic proportions. We were…a disaster from the day I put my ring on her finger.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me, too.” He ran his fingertips over the edge of Emma’s purple frame, glitter clinging to his fingers. “Before Jenny and I got married we never talked about the important things. What we wanted. Who we were.”
“Things like…kids?” Emma hazarded, remembering his reaction to the kids in Jade Star.
“Jenny always joked that she wasn’t about to share my attention with anyone else. There was a twisted kind of logic in it. She was a child herself, really, needing someone to take care of her.”
“A real damsel in distress, huh?”
Jared grimaced.
“I’ll bet that was pretty irresistible to a man with his head all stuffed with tales like Sir Tristan and Isolde,” Emma said.
“I fell in love with the idea of her. And she…God knows why she thought she loved me.”
It was all too easy to imagine the young man Jared must have been: so strong, so talented, so bright, with those knee-meltingly sexy, dangerous good looks that would have turned any young girl’s head. And the secret sadness in him Emma wished she could heal.
“I was always ambivalent about parenting,” Jared continued, “but somewhere in the back of my mind I figured that in time kids would be…natural, you know? The next step. I’d just have to get through it. There were kids on the dig sites I interned at during both my undergraduate and graduate studies. Archaeologist’s families. The families would spend summer holidays together on this grand adventure, then the kids would go to boarding schools the rest of the year.”
“Boarding schools.” Emma knew some of her dislike had leaked into her voice.
Jared bristled. “I know you Yanks think it’s terrible to send your kids away from home most of the year, but plenty of people in Britain do it.”
“Yeah, I read Harry Potter,” Emma said. “No offense, Butler, but unless I’m going to Hogwarts, it doesn’t sound like such a great idea to me.”
An old yearning shadowed Jared’s face. “I would have killed for a chance to get away from home like that as a boy. Nothing but books and classes and learning.”
“No watching your father’s heart break every Christmas when your mother didn’t come home,” Emma probed gently.
“Perhaps,” he confe
ssed. “In the end, I learned to bury myself so deep inside my mind I might as well have been two hundred miles away in some ivy-walled school. And as a man, I fully intended to do the same thing. But as long as I had what I needed to survive—the work like a shield to keep the painful bits from showing—I figured I could make an adequate father a few months a year.”
Emma listened, aching for him, this man, so sure he didn’t know how to love.
He shrugged. “First time I met Jenny I was on a dig with her father. He was a world-renowned expert in medieval history. Had made discoveries that—it doesn’t matter.” Jared paused, shrugged his shoulders. “Hell, he was my hero, you know? Everything I wanted to be. If I was ever going to make a go of this family thing, I figured it would be by marrying his daughter, seeing his example before me all the days of my marriage. Sounds naive, doesn’t it? Planning life out that way. But then, I was only twenty-four.”
Emma didn’t want to think of Jared, young and full of enthusiasm, his face softer, far less careworn than it was today. She didn’t want to think of another woman smiling up at him, didn’t want to picture his hands on this Jenny’s body, didn’t want to imagine his rough Scottish burr repeating wedding vows, promising to love, honor and cherish this Jenny forever and meaning it.
She imagined that lost, lonely boy Jared had been, wanting the kind of family his friends had, with a mother at the table, smiling and pouring tea. Had he hoped to recapture a bit of his own childhood by marrying Jenny? Or had he feared it?
“It wasn’t until after we were married that Jenny came clean,” Jared said, old bitterness tingeing his voice. “She told me she hated spending her time in the field with her father. She always had. She was willing to endure it for a time, because she loved me so much. And she knew I’d be fair, because I loved her. She’d be perfectly happy in the field as long as I gave her my solemn word that once we had children I’d take a job at her dad’s university.”
Emma tried to imagine Jared confined in a classroom year after year, no excavation sites, no fresh air, no dirt from the past under his fingernails. She might as well have imagined a dragon at the chalkboard, giving students exams. That kind of life was Jared Butler’s definition of hell.
“It was the first time she’d mentioned having kids at all. But once it was on her mind, she was obsessed by the idea. Imagining what our life would be like. Jenny wanted our kids to have stability, she insisted, not be dragged from one malaria-infested site to the next.”
“Don’t they have vaccines to prevent malaria? Most strains, anyway. When I was filming in…Oh, never mind.” She stopped herself. It was ridiculous to argue the point, as if she were reasoning with the dead woman. She settled for the obvious, cutting straight to the point. “Sometimes compromise sucks.”
Emma didn’t add what she’d learned from Drew. That sometimes no matter how hard you tried, compromise wasn’t enough.
Jared’s face darkened. “I’d be a bastard if I didn’t agree to her plan, right? I mean, she was my wife. I’d made a commitment.”
“From your tone it sounds more like a jail sentence.”
“She was so…young. She acted like it was a game, getting me to write my promise down. I felt like an idiot, but I did it just to please her. After we sealed our little agreement, Jenny was…” Jared made a rough sound, low in his throat. “The sex…”
“Don’t want to know, Butler,” Emma cut him off, holding up one splayed hand. “Really don’t want to know.”
“No,” Jared agreed grudgingly. “I suppose I wouldn’t want to know either if I were you. But it is…well, pertinent to the story.”
Emma pursed her lips. “Go on.”
“Later that month I was chosen for an internship with another world-renowned scientist on this amazing dig site in Kenya. It just blew me away. The man said he had no intention of taking on someone so inexperienced, but something about my application got his attention, made him think I had the potential to be…” Jared broke off, looking uncomfortable.
“I already know you’re brilliant. And I’m not a world-renowned scientist. It’s not bragging for you to say the guy figured it out, too. Jenny must’ve been so proud of you.” Emma would have been. Bursting with pride.
“That’s the strange thing. I expected her to be upset. She was usually resigned at best when something like this happened for me. I was going to Kenya for six months and she hated Africa. This may sound petty, but I expected to pay.”
Irritation jabbed Emma, this woman she’d never met annoying the blazes out of her. Sounded like Jenny had tried to suck all the joy out of Jared’s achievement. “Well, she did promise she’d buck up and deal until you had kids, didn’t she?”
“She didn’t want to come with me.” He still sounded amazed. “Said she’d stay with her father, visit friends. This time she packed me off without a single tear. I hoped that maybe we were finally growing up.”
Emma sighed. “Call me psychic. You were doomed to be disappointed, weren’t you?”
“She called me from the States three weeks later. She was pregnant.”
“Oh, God.” Emma’s stomach fell, imagining how Jared must have felt, hearing that news over the phone. “But there hadn’t been that much time! I mean, she couldn’t have expected you to just quit. How did it…Scratch that question. I know how it happened. The biology and all. But still…”
Jared kneaded his brow with his fingers. Emma could almost feel his head throbbing. “I don’t know how the hell it happened. She was on the pill. Just to be sure, I was using condoms as backup.”
“This isn’t…any of my business, Jared,” Emma faltered. “Your private arrangements with your wife.”
“I just want you to know I wasn’t leaving the whole birth control thing up to Jenny. Abdicating responsibility.”
“No. I’m sure you wouldn’t.” If there was one thing she’d learned about Dr. Jared Butler in her time in Scotland, it was that he had an incredible sense of responsibility. How many men would have bothered to be so careful if they’d known their wife was on the pill?
“It just…” Jared rammed his fingers back through his hair. “It wasn’t supposed to happen, you know? I felt…”
“Stunned?”
“Trapped.”
Trapped. The word hung between them. Hard. Ugly.
“You think she did it on purpose?” Emma asked in a small voice.
“Went off the pill? Tampered with the condoms? I’ll never know for sure. But I’m a scientist. I know the odds of both methods failing at the same time. They’re slim to none. Hell, when she called to tell me she was pregnant it was like being kicked in the stomach. She insisted on holding me to my promise, saying her father was overjoyed at the thought of a grandchild. He had already arranged a position for me at the university and they’d picked out the baby’s crib.”
“Ouch.” Emma imagined just how that must have cut him. “Her father knew before you did? That must have been hard.”
“She wouldn’t even give me any time to process it, you know? She insisted on flying out to the site to get things settled between us, even though I promised to come back to the States in two weeks. I asked her to stay away. Hoped to buy myself a little time to…I don’t know. Sort out my feelings. She was my wife. That was my baby she was carrying. I didn’t want to resent it. But, selfish bastard that I was, all I could do was think how much I was going to miss the smell of dirt on my hands. Never knowing what the next moment might bring.”
“It must’ve hurt so bad, thinking of losing the work you loved. Work she knew you loved before she married you.” Realization struck Emma, the memory of Jared’s face the night he’d soothed her grief about Drew. “That’s why you said what you did the night I told you I offered to give up my career for Drew. You said a person couldn’t turn their back on work they adore even for love. You can’t change who you are. Because you had already tried.”
“No.” Self-loathing and bitterness twisted his beautiful mouth. “I never had
to make that sacrifice. Fate stepped in and swept my slate clean. A nice, convenient sandstorm blasted Jenny’s plane out of the sky. She died and so did my baby.”
Emma wanted to slide her arms around him. Knew she didn’t dare. He seemed so brittle, as if one touch might crack something inside him she could never repair, something even more irreplaceable than the sword her recklessness had cost him.
“I’m so sorry.” It sounded so lame, her sympathy so useless.
Jared’s throat convulsed. “Know what’s hardest of all for me to live with?”
“What?”
“I’m still not sure if I am. Sorry. Deep down, underneath, where I felt so damned hurt and angry and trapped.” He turned away from her, paced into the shadows. “What if…if somewhere in my subconscious I was glad that crash took the whole mess out of my hands?”
“I don’t believe that.”
A ragged laugh tore from his throat. “No offense, but you believe in knights fighting on the sea and fairy flags and little girl ghosts that live in deserted mansions.”
“I believe in you.”
“Don’t!” He wheeled on her, fierce, but she didn’t back down.
“In time you would have come to terms with the baby. You would have loved your little boy or girl, the way you do Davey and the other kids. Even if you didn’t want to.”
“Or maybe I would have walked away, like my mother did,” Jared countered, despair in his eyes. “Maybe I simply would have turned my back on my child and—God, what a nightmare. My worst fear, being like her. But I’ll never know for certain what I would have done in the end, will I? And neither will you.”
“Maybe I can’t prove it, but…”
His fierce gaze raked her. “When I buried Jenny I swore to myself that there’d be no more mistakes. No wife. No child. Not ever.”
Tears burned Emma’s eyes, her heart breaking with love for this wounded, wary man. “Time heals, Jared. People grow. It’s not betraying Jenny’s memory to change your mind.”
“I won’t be changing my mind, dammit! There won’t be any little boy waiting for me, putting a present under a goddamned Christmas tree for someone who’s never coming home. I won’t risk being a parent who wishes he could wave a magic wand or cause a plane crash and make my own kid disappear.”