Kimberly Cates - The Wedding Dress

Enthroned in a leather chair, a man of about eighty leveled a hawkish gaze at the camera. Emma, at least twenty in the picture, curled up on the old man’s lap, her face so fresh and blooming it shoved hard at even Jared’s cynical heart.

Leaning over Emma’s shoulder, a young man with features more perfectly sculpted than Orlando Bloom’s beamed as he held up her left hand and pointed to the flash of a diamond ring.

This picture with its ugly frame was the thing Emma had fought like a wildcat to keep from her suitcase? A family photograph with her ex-husband front and center? It was the last thing Jared would have expected someone like her to value.

And how had she spent last night? Obviously writing something. Two letters from the look of it. Jared glanced down at the pieces of parchment. Despite a dozen ink blots and painfully cramped script, he could see Emma had worked damned hard with the period materials at her disposal. Dear Mom, one page read. The other: Hey Jake…

Jake?

Jared hastened to put the frame back down. Hell, he’d almost started feeling sorry for her. But she already had some other man writhing on her hook—besides green college kids like Davey.

He almost walked away. Could hear the grandmother who’d helped raise him scolding from the grave. Jared Robert Butler, for shame. Don’t you even think of reading that lady’s mail. Your father and I taught you better manners than that.

Tried to teach him would be more accurate, Jared amended. He’d been the despair of both of them more often than he cared to remember.

In the end, his insatiable curiosity won out as it always had. But what better way to obliterate any shreds of empathy he might be tempted to feel toward the actress than reading her tale of woe? Line after line of how Jared had abused her. What a bastard he’d been. He’d been generous on that count anyway, given her plenty to bitch about.

Jared picked up the sheets of parchment, scanning Emma’s letters. He frowned. Who the devil had written this thing? Because it sure as hell couldn’t have been the pampered Emma McDaniel. She’d made her miserable flight sound like an adventure, her arrival at the castle so cheerful and full of enthusiasm Jared had to shake his head to try to clear his confusion. She’d warned this Jake to be on the lookout for a box she’d sent—a surprise for her mom—and promised to bring him back a kilt.

Anybody reading these letters would think the woman was having the time of her life, if one tiny detail hadn’t betrayed her. Two watery splotches blurred the ink where she’d scrawled something about “hugs and kisses.” Teardrops. Jared stared down at the marks, suddenly damned uncomfortable.

“So the lady cried,” he growled aloud. “Why should you care?”

Good question. But somehow, deep down in his gut, he did.

Had he made her so miserable? So desperate that he’d driven a woman to risk…Jared’s jaw hardened. Why should that be so hard to believe? His abominable temper had done plenty of damage before.

Guilt a decade old ground like a fist into his stomach. He pushed open the window frame, half-afraid he’d find Emma McDaniel lying like a broken doll on the rocks below.

Nothing. The cliffs were empty. He breathed in a sigh of relief. But he’d barely taken a step out of the alcove when voices drifted up.

He leaned out the window, pain vanishing in cold, clean anger as he took in the scene below him. Emma McDaniel, resplendent in medieval garb, strolled beyond chains that marked places as dangerous and out of bounds, while Davey Harrison stumbled along the precipice after her, his eyes so glazed with adoration Jared doubted he would even know he was dead until he hit the rocks below.

Maybe not, chief, but what a way to go, Jared could almost hear him say. Brash words and yet nothing Davey said could mask the almost invisible cracks Jared knew were inside the kid. Fissures akin to the ones in the medieval clay pitcher Jared and Davey had pieced together with painstaking care on the boy’s first stay at the site.

Damned if Jared was going to let someone like Emma McDaniel breeze into the lad’s life and carelessly dash it to pieces again.

Hands knotted in fists, Jared charged down the tower stairs, ready for battle.

EMMA BREATHED IN the sweet scent of her first Scottish morning, her thin leather shoes growing damp from the dew clinging to the tussocks of grass and springy moss around her. The cluster of tents at the far end of the broken curtain wall stood dead silent.

Thank God no one was stirring. Especially Jared Butler. Her cheeks burned. She didn’t even want to think what the genius archaeologist would say if she told him she’d come out this morning to search for a ghost.

Especially since she’d already broken one of Mussolini the Scot’s cardinal rules. Don’t be wandering around where you don’t belong, he’d roared at her in his sardine can of a car. I won’t have you contaminating my dig site.

His? The land had been deeded over to the National Trust before Butler had been born, from what her research had said. And yet the Scotsman acted as if it were his own private kingdom.

Maybe the castle wasn’t his exclusive domain, but the dig was. Even Barry had warned her to cooperate with Butler any way she could; the archaeologist’s goodwill was vital to the film.

Well, at least she’d hedged her bets by obeying Butler’s second warning, she rationalized. Obviously this section of the castle grounds wasn’t part of the excavation. There wasn’t a shovel in sight.

Of course the danger signs marking the rear of the castle as off-limits were a different matter. Strung at intervals on a thick chain between two concrete posts, the warnings were giant-sized, with big red letters.

“Nobody has to know I came back here,” Emma rationalized as she made her way onto the narrow, rocky band that topped the cliff guarding the castle’s back. “I’ll just nip over to the cliff edge, take a quick look around and then beat feet out of here before anyone is the wiser.”

If only it were that simple. Instinct made her want to hurry, afraid with every minute that passed that any remaining clue regarding the apparition might wash out into the sea. But she had to watch every step, gingerly testing each piece of moss-slick stone to see if it could bear her weight.

Breaking her neck on her first day at the castle would be a very bad idea. Especially when she thought of how pleased Jared Butler would be if she ended up out of commission.

But she’d never been able to resist mysteries like this one. Never quite shaken her fiercely held childhood belief in spirits who wandered the night and the gifts they could bring.

Ghosts or fairies like the ones in old Irish stories her Aunt Finn had told her, carrying warnings of impending doom or promising love so strong the person who won it would never die. After all, hadn’t a ghost brought Aunt Finn into her life? Aunt Finn, who had brought Emma’s mother back to stay.

Who knew what kind of luck the knight of the sea might bring?

Emma swore under her breath as her ankle wrenched, just enough to startle her.

“Ms. McDaniel?” Behind her a worried voice cracked the way Drew’s had in middle school. Emma all but jumped out of her skin, tripping over the unfamiliar hem of her dress. The smooth leather soles of her shoes slipped on the damp rock and would have dropped her smack on her backside if a skinny young man of about nineteen hadn’t grabbed her around the waist at the last possible instant.

She flailed, fighting to regain her balance. It only took a heartbeat for her instincts to kick in, and she murmured a grateful thanks to the skills she’d gained from stunts she’d done herself in the Jade movies. The beet-red young man couldn’t have let go of her any faster if she’d caught his hands on fire.