Kimberly Cates - The Wedding Dress

Sometimes the dragon got to win.

JET LAG COULD BE a beautiful thing—at least if your goal was to make someone as miserable as possible come morning. And that was exactly what Jared Butler had in mind as he tugged on his Barbour coat to head up to the castle. By his calculations, it must be the middle of the night in Los Angeles. Between the grueling twelve-hour flight with its half-dozen delays and spending her first night in medieval luxury, he figured the pampered Ms. Emma McDaniel must already be running on empty.

Of course, he’d be able to enjoy a whole lot more the prospect of her starting their first day of historical consulting with a bad case of sleep deprivation if it weren’t for one minor hitch: he’d barely slept a wink himself.

He ran one hand over the rough stubble on his jaw and glared at his reflection in the shaving mirror nailed to one of his tent posts. He looked like he’d spent the night wrestling a wildcat. His eyes were bloodshot, the lines in his brow carved deep.

And damn if he didn’t have a bruise on his arm where Emma McDaniel had whacked him at the airport. Only because she’d surprised him, masculine pride nudged him to add. He wouldn’t give her the chance to do it again.

His mouth hardened with what his father had called the pure perishing for a fight look he’d inherited from the mother he’d barely known.

Emma McDaniel might be a third-rate actress, but she’d demonstrated one talent he could attest to. He couldn’t remember the last time a woman had made him so mad.

Hell, he couldn’t remember the last time a woman had made him feel anything at all. For a heartbeat he remembered how warm feminine fingertips could be, how soft tracing the planes and angles of his body, how delicate the piercing pleasure as they feathered across his skin.

Damn Davey and the rest of the crew for putting thoughts of Emma McDaniel in his mind. Drops the goddess into the lap of the one man who hasn’t fantasized about what he’d do with her…

Oh, he’d fantasized plenty since he’d gotten word McDaniel was invading Castle Craigmorrigan. Throwing her off the cliff. Hanging her from a tower. Packing her back on an airplane bound for America. But hearing Davey and Nigel extolling the woman’s beauty had unsettled him in a new way.

Not that he’d ever been tempted by the nipped and tucked, painted and polished type of woman who spent hours perfecting herself in the mirror. Case in point: Angelica Robards. A woman who was not only drop-dead gorgeous but one of the most talented actresses of her generation. If she hadn’t gotten under his skin sexually, then Emma McDaniel never would.

The Jade Star actress and everything she stood for made Jared furious. It wasn’t thoughts of steamy, mindless sex that had wrecked Jared’s sleep. What kept him up all night was knowing McDaniel would be making a nuisance of herself around the dig site, distracting his crew of students. The thought made him resolve to exhaust the woman so badly this morning she’d crawl up those tower steps begging for mercy, too tired to turn the heads of kids like Davey Harrison.

Entering the castle, Jared blinked, trying to accustom his eyes to the dimness, the dawn’s haze that filtered through the arrow loops doing little to relieve the shadows. But he knew this site as well as he knew the rough lines and angles of his own face. By instinct, he crossed to the spiral stairs, taking fiendish delight in the dead silence as he strode up the stone risers. Perfect. His prey must be sound asleep.

As he neared the landing to Emma’s tower room, his eyes narrowed in anticipation. No point in knocking. There was no door. One more realistic tidbit from the time of LadyAislinn that Jade Star would have to get used to. A complete lack of privacy.

An unexpected image stung Jared: the tabloid headlines he’d seen in the airport. And he wondered for an instant what it would be like to have his most personal failures splashed across a gossip rag. When his marriage had crumbled he’d been able to bury himself in his work, lose himself in a past far less agonizing than losing Jenny had been. But the press could’ve had a field day with what he’d done if anyone besides Jenny’s father and friends had cared enough to read about it.

Don’t be an eejit. Butler crushed any sympathy he felt. Emma McDaniel had chosen the attention, the fame, the money, the fans clambering around her. What had Davey said? Every men’s dorm room had posters of the woman plastered on the wall? Probably poses of her half-naked. What else could Emma McDaniel expect besides this feeding frenzy in the press?

Well, she was about to find out some men weren’t impressed by a centerfold-worthy body or a lush red mouth or big brown eyes. The castle history claimed Lady Aislinn was distraught when Sir Brannoc and his mercenaries arrived? By the time Jared was through with Emma McDaniel, she’d welcome an invading army catapulting stones at her tower wall!

Jared crossed the threshold, the larger windows cut in the more defensible top of the tower spilling rose-tinged rays of dawn across the chamber. “Time to get up.” Jared let his voice boom against the stone walls. “Can’t waste daylight when candles are so expensive.” Not to mention the cresset lights, rush lights and candles gave a far fainter light than audiences conned by costume dramas on the movie screen would ever have guessed.

What, not so much as a groan from Her Royal Highness? Jared strode to the bed, gave it a sharp kick to shake it. “This is your wake-up call—” he began, then froze. The piles of furs had barely been touched, the pillow still fluffed, no hollow formed by a sleeping head. The bed hadn’t been slept in.

What the hell? Was it possible the prima donna had already taken off for greener pastures? No. He couldn’t be that lucky. He hadn’t heard a car start and God knew he would have. He’d heard every other damn sound around camp last night. She could hardly have walked all the way to the main road hauling that heavy suitcase.

His brow furrowed with a niggling of worry. Of course, somebody who came from L.A. wouldn’t be stupid enough to hitchhike. It would be dangerous for any lone woman and downright suicidal for a celebrity.

There was no way McDaniel had gone that far, he reassured himself. More likely she went for a walk. But he hadn’t seen a soul on his way to the castle. And over the years he’d loved this place, worked on it, he’d developed a sixth sense about anyone prowling around the space. He would have noticed. Unless she’d gone wandering around the cliffs in the dark and fallen. Impossible, he told himself sharply. He would have heard her scream.

His father-in-law’s white-bearded face swam in his memory, the man who had once been Jared’s mentor, so cold, so fragile, aged a hundred years since the last time they’d seen each other. Don’t pretend you even noticed what was happening to my daughter until it was too late. You always were a selfish man, Jared, lost in your own world…

Last night Jared had been lost in his own world again. Just like he’d been with Jenny.

He rushed toward the window to look outside, but halted at the tabletop that had been empty the last time he’d seen it.

The rough wood now held a cluster of things carefully arranged. The ink and quills he’d packed in the chest, two sheets of parchment filled with writing and one object he’d never seen before, completely out of place with the medieval decor. A cheap purple, glitter-encrusted frame so dinged-up it might have gone a few rounds in the barrel of a clothes dryer. A thin crack snaked across the glass, dividing the photograph the frame held in two.

Jared picked up the frame, held it to the light. Christmas lights glowed against a backdrop of Norfolk pine so fresh he could almost smell the needles. What was obviously a family clustered before it. Two sets of parents wrangled a herd of sugar-overdosed children who were flashing sticky smiles at the camera. A sweet-faced redhead with dreamy eyes nestled close to a tall dark-haired man who looked about the right age to be Emma’s father. Another man cradled a toddler in his arms, while a woman with restless blue eyes and a crop of Emma’s wild dark hair laughed up at him.