But most painful of all were the extra clips from the first movie, where she played with the pack of kids who costarred as children marooned on an obscure planet, waiting for their parents to come and reclaim them after the war against evil forces was won.
One clip showed Emma twirling a tiny dark-haired girl in the harness Jade used to fly, then setting the deliciously dizzy mite down in soft grass to stumble about. Emma caught the girl just as her wobbly legs gave out, cushioning the fall by plopping the little girl’s bottom on her own lap as the child giggled madly.
Jared couldn’t stop replaying the clip, imbedding it in his memory where he could press on it, like a wound, if he were ever foolish enough to believe there was a place for him in Emma McDaniel’s life.
Hell, whenever he was around anyone under the age of twelve, the kids looked at him as if he were a dragon in disguise. He scared them on purpose, subtly bullying them into keeping their distance. Because every so often, when he looked into a soft, vulnerable child’s face, the guilt still seared him.
But Emma…she was a natural with kids. So…free. Had her ex-husband ever bothered to watch that cut? The man from the purple-framed picture. Mr. Father of the Year, if the tabloids could be believed.
Jared seethed inside. How could anyone watching Emma with those kids ever think she didn’t want children of her own?
Or that she was some kind of shallow Hollywood sexpot who just fell into bed with whatever man she happened to be with at the time….
She’d only been divorced two years. And this Drew Lawson guy…they’d been married since she was in drama school. That’s what Emma had said, wasn’t it?
Jared hit the remote, selected a scene from the middle of the last installment of Jade Star. “God, look at her,” he whispered to himself. “She’s still acting her heart out, but it doesn’t matter. The director’s sold his soul to the special effects department instead of banking on Emma’s talent.”
And she was talented. Gifted in ways Jared had never imagined. Because he’d never given her a chance to show him what she could do.
A knock on the door made him hit the power button, turning the telly off as guiltily as if he’d been watching porn. He grimaced, knowing he must look ridiculous, sitting here in the dark. He groped his way to the door of the trailer, banging his elbow on something in the process.
He opened the door.
Emma. She stood there, flushed with pleasure, her hair tousled, a smile on her face. A far sadder, far wiser smile than the young actress in those outtakes should ever have owned.
Jared’s voice felt tight in his throat. “Guess I don’t have to ask whose team won.”
“That’s right, Butler. We creamed ’em. God, I love to win.”
But she’d lost where it mattered most, hadn’t she? Been left with her career instead of her husband’s love, nasty lies instead of the truth. People believing the worst about her, thinking they knew her when they didn’t have a clue who the woman really was beneath all that glitter.
Maybe it was time Jared tried to find out.
“Davey was helping Beth put the game stuff away,” Emma explained. “I figured I could walk the twenty yards to your trailer by myself.” She flipped Jared a teasing salute. “Prisoner McDaniel reporting for lockup, sir.”
Jared searched her face, wondering if that might be the most honest thing she’d ever said to him. It made him ache thinking of that free-spirited young woman on the DVD, now unable to walk through an airport without being recognized, being stalked by the press even here in the wilds of Scotland.
He locked the trailer door and they walked to the castle in silence, Emma’s face turned up to the stars.
When they reached the tower room, he lit the branch of candles on the table, his gaze straying toward the purple frame. He picked it up, turned toward her.
“Nice picture.”
Her mouth softened, wistful. “Yes, it is.”
“It’s the last thing I expected you to choose the night I told you that you could keep one thing from your suitcase.”
She wiped the softness from her face, pulling down a brittle, devil-may-care mask. Her armor against him during the days since he’d all but called her an easy lay. “Yeah, well,” Emma said. “I’m just full of surprises. Of course, the folks back home don’t know my black leather bondage side. You know, that whole Hollywood swingers scene. You should see what I can do with a riding crop.”
“Don’t.”
She stopped, peered at him, off-balance. “What do you mean, don’t?”
“Act. I know I’m the one who cast you in that role, but…it doesn’t fit you at all, does it? While this…” He trailed his fingers over the glass, touching her face, frozen forever, happy. “This seems to suit you a whole lot better. You want to tell me why it’s so special? I mean, besides this…er, positively elegant, exorbitantly expensive designer frame?”
He smiled, displaying the purple glitter clinging to his fingers.
Still wary, Emma approached him, sliding the frame from his grasp as if it were too precious to let careless hands touch. “This Christmas was the last time I truly felt at peace,” she said with an honesty that seared his heart. “Everybody was so happy. All of the family, together. Drew and I had just gotten engaged.”
Ouch. Jared tried to keep the sharp jab from showing on his face. Why the hell should that hurt? Because the son of a bitch had broken her heart? And Drew hadn’t exactly been ringing up the reporters to set things straight when that whole “Ice Queen Freezes Out Husband, Denying Him Children” story had broken.
I’m sure Drew will be a wonderful father….
Emma’s quote burned through Jared’s head. The lady showed more class than her GQ cover model of an ex-husband deserved.
“My sister Hope was scared I was going to forget her when I got famous. She gave me this and made me promise it would be the first thing I put out whenever I got to a new movie set. It’s been all over the world. I keep a paper in the back of the frame where I write down all the countries it’s been to. I figure I’ll give it to her when it’s her turn to wear the wedding dress.”
“The wedding dress?”
“The Civil War era one we found in a trunk in March Winds’ attic.”
The preservationist inside him kicked in, hard. Jared choked, horrified. “You’d actually wear an artifact?”
“My Aunt Finn wore it. My mom—well, dresses aren’t her style, antique or otherwise. But ever since I was a little girl, I dreamed someday…well, you know. When Aunt Finn packed it away in that trunk in the attic, she promised she’d keep it for me.”
“Did you? Wear it?” Why the hell did he want to know? Wedding dresses—real or imaginary—made a better signal than a bloody plague cross on the door to send him running in the opposite direction.
Emma made a wry face. “I grew to roughly the height of a Los Angeles Laker. You ever see period clothes, Butler? They’re so small, they look like they should barely fit on dolls.”
“Too bad.” Yeah, boyo. The fact that she hadn’t worn the dress she’d cherished for Drew the Asshole just breaks your heart.
Emma seemed to shake herself, as if suddenly aware she’d let her guard slip just a little. “One of the producers at my studio showed me a great picture of Emma Thompson’s wedding here in Scotland. Her groom was wearing quite a lovely dress of his own.”
“A kilt,” Jared corrected.
“If you say so. Apparently the bugs had a real good time biting his bare…assets.” Her eyes twinkled and he wondered if she was really amused or resorting to acting for self-protection. “You know, Butler, this is the last subject I thought you’d be interested in. Wedding dresses and my family and such. What about yours?”
“My what?”
“You’d look pretty silly in a wedding dress. What about your family? Your father and…oops.” She looked like she’d swallowed a raw egg.
“My father?”
“Uh, obviously you had to have one,” s
he stammered. “I mean, it’s a scientific necessity. Unless you came from a sperm donor, but I hardly think he’d be able to squeeze a book of poetry into the test tube.”
“Davey.” Jared’s hands clenched.
Emma pressed her hand to her breast, obviously rattled. “Listen, this isn’t Davey’s fault,” she began. “I mean, I wasn’t supposed to tell but my family is really crappy at keeping secrets. I suppose I should have warned him.”
Jared scowled. “What did he say?”
“Nothing, really. That you gave him your dad’s book of Robert Burns. It meant the world to Davey.” Her voice disarmed Jared, suddenly so hushed, almost tender.
“Da would have loved him.”
“Loved. Past tense.” Emma’s eyes filled with empathy. “Your father…he’s dead?”
“Years ago. My whole family is dead.”
“I’m sorry. I bet he was so proud of you.”
“He didn’t know any better.” Bitterness crept past the edges in Jared’s voice. He hadn’t meant to let it.
“You don’t mean that!” Emma pressed her hand to his forearm, her touch warming places he’d kept cold far too long. He pulled away, unable to bear it. “God, Jared. Look at you. You’re brilliant! Any scholar who loved Burns that much must’ve been overjoyed with a son like you.”
“My da was a simple working man, with hands like iron, all battered and scarred. If only his heart had been half as tough. But it was far too tender. Life…hurt him. But I was too wrapped up in my own world to care.”
Why was he telling her this? Things he never spoke of to anyone. Not even Jenny. He’d tried, the night after his father’s funeral, tears streaming down his face when he’d hidden himself away by his father’s favorite trout stream. The place where Angus Butler had gone on a Sunday, his one day off from grueling, spirit-breaking work, to read poetry and dream. But Jenny had recoiled in horror, frightened by the sobs that had racked Jared’s body when he was supposed to be the strong one, the one who sheltered her from sadness, from life.
Maybe he’d known even then that their marriage was doomed. She was more child than wife, determined to shut her eyes to anything hard or painful that demanded of her a strength she didn’t have.
It’s up to you to make her happy, Jared, Jenny’s father had said on the day they’d married. It’s your responsibility to take care of my baby girl….
Jared had been too young to realize then that you couldn’t “make” anyone happy. And too arrogant to know there were times he’d need someone to care for him as well. A woman with a heart big enough and brave enough and strong enough to endure the dark times, the haunted times, in a life far too full of secret pain.
“Every child is self-absorbed,” Emma murmured, seeming far away, her thoughts fixed on some distant point she alone could see. “We think we’re the center of our parents’ world. It doesn’t even occur to us that they have their own wounds, their own scars. The year I turned ten, my mom left me on my uncle’s doorstep. I didn’t even know him and…well, he was about as thrilled to have a little girl dropped in his lap as you were when Captain came on the scene.”
She’d been abandoned by her mother? The knowledge jolted Jared. He crossed to the picture, picked it up. “Your mom is the dark-haired one, isn’t she?”
“Yeah.” Emma smiled tenderly.
“You don’t look much alike. But she has the same determination in her eyes.”
“Jake calls it our ‘dead stubborn’ look and thanks God she has it. Otherwise, he figures she’d have given up on him.”
Jared stared at the images as if trying to unravel something foreign, full of mystery. “Strange. Looking at this picture, it’s hard to believe your family was ever anything but happy. From the way you and your mom were smiling, I thought…”
That you’d been together always, had bedtime stories and lullabies and that soft mother smell of talcum powder and perfume swirling around you when she tucked you into bed…all the things I can’t ever remember….
“There are no perfect families, Butler,” Emma confided. “They all have their flaws, their vulnerable places. But we McDaniels figured out the hard way things have a way of healing, as long as you’ve got the courage to bring them into the light.”
“My mum left when I was a year old. I…don’t remember her at all.”
Emma reached out. Touched his cheek for just a heartbeat, then let her hand fall away. Silent understanding shone in dark eyes that didn’t look away from his.
“My da spent his whole life waiting for my mother to walk back in the door,” Jared confessed, his voice frayed on edges still sharp in spite of the fact that they were decades old. “Sometimes I despised him for it.”
“You must’ve been waiting for her as well,” Emma said. “I mean, if your father thought she’d come back, how could a little boy not keep hoping?”
Jared turned away, pressed his palm against rough stone wall, as if to scour away the pain of it, that waiting, that hoping he’d denied forever, even to himself. “Every Christmas my father would slip a present under the tree for her. Just in case. Sometimes I heard Da and Gran fighting about it. She’s gone, Angus! And good riddance to her, flighty baggage that she was. Let her go then find that poor lad of yours a mother!”
“God, I hate it when grown-ups yell like that, completely oblivious, as if somehow being a kid makes you deaf or stupid. When I have kids, I’ll never—” She stopped, fresh pain in her face. “If I have kids, I won’t ever do that.”
Jared would have wagered his life she was right. Emma would never indulge her temper in front of a child. But Jenny wouldn’t have bothered to hide her emotions from anyone, even her own children. She’d been brittle as a weather-battered Ming vase, ready to crack at the slightest pressure once her father had passed her into Jared’s care.
He remembered their last fight, her voice, on the edge of hysteria, crackling over the international telephone line. I’m flying out to the site in the morning to talk about this….
I’ll be back in the States in two weeks, Jen. Time enough to settle this then.
You mean time enough for you to close me out! Ignore me! This is your problem, too, Jared….
For Christ’s sake, Jen! You think I don’t know that?
And it had been. The end to all of his dreams until he was too old, too tired to care. A prison where he’d be locked too deeply into a world he’d never wanted to inhabit.
Emma slid onto the bench and leaned her face toward the open window as if giving him privacy, letting him sort out memories she sensed were better handled alone. After a long moment of staring at the sea’s moon-sheened surface, she spoke. “My mom would love this place. All those crashing waves and twisted trees and stone cliffs. It’s wild, you know? So…so free. Just as long as you never took her to a pub where she’d have to listen to suicide music.”
“Suicide music?”
Emma chuckled. “My Aunt Finn is Irish. Instead of normal lullabies, she sings all these haunting ballads to her kids, you know, where everybody dies or—worse still—leaves Ireland. One particular gem always kicks my mom’s blood pressure into overdrive. I’ll dye my petticoats, I’ll dye them red and round the world I’ll beg for bread until my parents would wish me dead… Mom says it’s a wonder the kids don’t have nightmares.”
Jared heard strains of his own, haunting music carried on the wind. “My da always sang one of Burns’ songs,” he confided softly. “But it was more for my mum than for me.” Jared shifted into his baritone, his voice filled with his father’s longing. “Ae fond kiss and then we sever, Ae farewell and then—forever. Deep in heart wrung tears I’ll pledge thee, Warring sighs and groans I’ll wage thee. Had we never loved so kindly, had we never loved so blindly, never met or never parted, we had ne’er been broken hearted.” The melody drifted into silence, joining the sea’s timeless mourning.
Emma swallowed hard. Her eyes shone up at his, over-bright. “That’s beautiful.”
“I never
thought so. Romantic rubbish and all that. My da said he hoped I’d fall in love someday, deep enough to understand it. Hopeless that, wasn’t it?”
Emma smiled, as if she sensed humor was safer. Too much tenderness might undo him. “You’re not in the grave yet, Butler,” she said. “Besides, I think you’ve been in love a long time.”
“Me?” He frowned, incredulous.
“Yes, you. But you were born six centuries too late to woo your lady fair.”
A flush burned into Jared’s cheekbones. “That’s absurd.”
But Emma brushed his protest aside. “Of course, if you ever could manage to surrender your grand passion for Lady Aislinn, there are plenty of real live women who’d be happy to take her place. Veronica Phillips, for example.”
Jared grimaced. “I think that might be taking Burns’ ‘loving blindly’ thing a little too far.”
Emma laughed. “I guess you’re right. Maybe that’s why fate threw us together, Butler. We’re both hopeless. You’re in love with Lady Aislinn and I’ve got it bad for some knight in shining armor who doesn’t even exist.”
Jared sucked in a breath, feeling suddenly, unutterably old, tarnished and battered beyond help. “Ah, so that’s your secret. Emma McDaniel, on a quest for the proverbial fairy-tale knight.”
“Nope.” She turned back to the window, the pale curve of her cheek fragile with dreams that could never be. “My knight looks like the dragon won. Beaten down and exhausted, as if he’d been fighting his way forever through a million seas.”
Jared stilled. “Seas?”
She glanced over her shoulder at him. “That’s where I saw him. Out there.” She gestured out the window to the rugged coast beyond. “He looked so tired, so sad. I wanted to…help him. Tell him it’s alright to lay down his sword.” She looked at Jared. She seemed so tender, bruised by life, as if kissing her might break some dire enchantment. “I know it’s silly.”
“I’m not laughing,” Jared said hoarsely, groping for the right words. “Maybe the only thing a knight knows how to do is fight. If he stopped…” He might have to learn how to live. Might have to listen to poetry. Might know what he’s missed all those years at war. He might face the most terrifying dragon of all, without his sword to defend himself. A dragon named Loneliness….