“Right.” Davey bolted toward the stairs, so recklessly Jared yelled after him. “Breaking your neck won’t solve anything, lad!”
But Emma intercepted the boy, hugged him tight. Her brow clouded with fear for the boy that echoed Jared’s own. “Davey, this isn’t your fault,” she said fiercely. “No matter what happens, you’re much more important to me than a dog.”
Davey hugged her back, a stifled sob breaching his lips, but even the vulnerable boy couldn’t doubt Emma meant what she said. Jared clenched his jaw against the pain of awakening to her in yet another way, a sharp-edged coming to life in his heart he hadn’t asked for, didn’t want.
Davey fled down the stairs. The instant Jared was sure the lad was back on level ground, he turned to where Emma was fumbling to get her feet into her trainers. “You—you go on to the dig site,” Emma said, frantic now that Davey couldn’t see. “You have work to do. I’ll look for Captain.”
“Alone? I don’t think so.”
A shoe popped out of her hand, skittered across the floor. Jared retrieved it before Emma could.
“Jared, I’ll be all right.”
He knelt down, took her foot in his other hand and slipped the shoe into place. “Sure you will,” he said as he tied it to spare her shaking fingers. “But if that terror of a dog comes to anybody, it’ll be me.”
“He…he’s just so little…”
Jared scowled, mad as hell at the terrier for distressing her so. “He’s a black curse and a wee devil and why the hell you’re determined to love him, I’ll never know.”
“I can’t—can’t help it,” Emma choked out, tears pushing against her lashes, her heart in her eyes. “He needs me.”
Like I need you,
a voice inside Jared whispered in ruthless honesty.
Need you to make me laugh, fight with me, make love with me. Make me feel alive.
Jared wanted to fold her in his arms, but he knew that was the last thing she needed. She’d never forgive herself if she wasted time crying. Instead he resorted to his gruff dragon’s voice to help brace her.
“Think you’ll get rid of me this quick now you’ve had your way with me, eh, woman? I don’t think so. I’m not about to risk that pretty backside of yours getting snapped by a camera or spattered with buckshot.”
“Buckshot?”
Jared grabbed her hand, hauling her down the stairs. “If I were that mongrel of yours, locked out of your bed, I know exactly what I’d do.”
“What?”
“Go straight to the one place in all the world I shouldn’t, just out of sheer contrariness,” Jared said grimly. “Snib MacMurray’s farm.”
E
MMA’S THROAT BURNED
, already hoarse from calling for Captain as she and Jared neared the length of stream where they’d first run across the scrappy dog. But they hadn’t heard so much as a yip or seen a flash of dingy gray fur.
Jared reined in his horse, signaled Emma to a halt as well on the stream’s rocky bank. “We’ll have to stay quiet,” he warned. “No telling where Snib might be. We don’t want to let him know the mutt is missing or he’ll set the collies on him.”
“Right. I won’t…won’t…” Emma swallowed the lump in her throat, trying not to imagine her brave little Captain, torn and bleeding. If they were too late…
Jared’s expression softened. “I’m not meaning to scare you,” he said gently, “but with their sense of smell they’d find Captain before we could, sure. And I intend to have the pleasure of ringing the little scamp’s neck myself for worrying you this way.”
Emma nodded, knew her fear still shone in her eyes.
“Whist, then, lady,” Jared soothed. “Have a little faith. What kind of knight would I be if I let something happen to your dog?”
Images flashed into her mind. Jared garbed in chain mail, a warrior from another time. Jared appearing over the cliff’s edge, pulling her to safety like a shadow from hero tales of long ago.
Emma tried not to think of his sword, fallen beneath those crashing waves because of her carelessness, tried not to imagine fate somehow evening up the score between them by snatching Captain away. The little dog meant so much to her. She’d never known how hungry she’d been since Drew left, hungry not to be alone.
Jared urged his mount across the stream and Emma followed. As they crested the first hill, a crazy quilt of meadows spilled out below them, piled stone fences hundreds of years old dividing one pasture from the other. Where would they even begin?
She felt lost, anchorless as a rowboat in a storm. Overwhelmed by the enormity of trying to find one tiny dog in so much space. But Jared wound his way from gate to gate with an instinct that surprised Emma, as if he knew every rock and tree on the property.
Deeper and deeper they plunged into the forbidden grounds, whistling softly in hopes that Captain would hear them and the collies would not. From the height of the horse’s backs, Emma and Jared searched among the black-faced sheep eyeing them with mild curiosity. With every minute that ticked by, Jared’s face grew more grim, his shoulders stiffer as Emma’s own hope dimmed.
“Maybe he went the other way,” Emma said as Jared expertly maneuvered to open another rusted gate from the back of his horse. He motioned her through and she followed him, drawing rein long enough to catch his answer.
“There’s one more place to look. It’s too close to the farmhouse for my liking, but it would be just like that dog of yours to make this rescue as difficult as possible. Not to mention digging in the one place in all Scotland I’d sell my soul to excavate.” Jared glanced at his watch. “Damn. We’re running out of time. Snib will be sending the dogs out for the sheep any time now. Go back, Emma. To our side of the stream. I’ll keep looking for Captain on my own.”
“I’m not leaving either one of you. Just…just hurry.”
Swearing under his breath, Jared kneed Falcon into a run, his gaze sweeping the landscape all around them. Emma glimpsed a smear of run-down cottage in the valley as she kept pace, the yard overgrown with weeds like some haunted house in a child’s book of ghost stories. Like March Winds before Aunt Finn had loved it back to life.
What if Captain had caught a whiff of some kind of food set out to cool in the cottage’s kitchen? Or wanted to torment Snib out of pure orneriness? The doggy equivalent of her sister Hope’s “Na, na, na, boo, boo.” If her grandfather was on the loose anywhere in this vicinity and someone had set dogs on him, that’s exactly what the old man would do.
But Captain was a dog, not a person, no matter how much intelligence shone in the terrier’s eyes. She’d just have to hope he wasn’t smart enough to know where his tormentor lived.
“There’s a ring of standing stones atop that rise,” Jared called to her. But Emma could already see the slabs of gray against the horizon. Completely unexpected, a cloud of mist snagged about the base of stones so heavy they seemed a giant’s playthings. Neolithic building blocks set with the same careful precision her little sister had used arranging the hand-cut wooden blocks Uncle Cade had made for her third birthday so long ago.
Despite Emma’s distress, she felt the ancient site’s pull deep in her core, a world of untold mystery, ageless magic. A faint sound echoed from the mist. Emma’s heart leapt. Was it an excited yip or just her own wishful thinking?
A heartbeat later, a far more piercing whistle reverberated from the direction of the farmhouse below. Emma raised up on tiptoe in the stirrups and glanced over her shoulder, seeing a tweedy brown figure emerge from the cottage’s door in the distance, splashes of white and black fur tumbling out in his wake.
Snib….
But Jared was already rushing into the sheltering mist. Emma plunged in behind him, praying the farmer hadn’t seen.
Inside the stone circle the mist thinned and Emma gave a choked sob of relief as she glimpsed a gray ball of fur digging against one of the stones in puppy glee. Sprays of dirt flew up behind his wriggling little body, his nose thrust into a freshly-dug hole three times his size.
Jared started to dismount, but Emma was already on the ground running toward the dog. She flung herself down on her knees and scooped the little scoundrel into her arms. Captain snarled around whatever he held in his mouth, and writhed in frustration until he caught her scent. He gazed up at her with black shoe-button eyes, wondering what all the fuss was about as she buried her face in his fur.
“Bad dog! Bad, bad dog!” she cried. “What were you thinking, running away to this awful man’s place?”
“If he’d been one of my undergrad assistants he couldn’t have found a likelier site to dig.” Jared loomed over them, like some guardian of old. Emma surfaced from her reunion with Captain to see the big Scotsman peering around the circle of stone with unabashed longing.
“What is this place?”
“The stone circle that figures in the Lady Aislinn legends.”
“The one I read about in the script?” Emma clung to Captain’s collar and looked at the site around her, awed. “If there’s room for it, Barry’s got a wonderful flashback of their parting just before her husband left. She’d stolen off alone to leave flowers and such—making offerings to the old ones, hoping they would give her a child. Lord Magnus finds her there and she cries, wanting his baby with all her heart, saying that then if he died in battle, at least she’d have a part of him to hold, a child of their love.” She felt the tug in her own womb, the vast emptiness in her arms despite the terrier she held.
“That’s how the legend goes.” Jared frowned. “A woman who couldn’t give her husband a son in medieval times was seen as cursed by God. As if barrenness were her fault. Not ever that of her husband.”
“I would have thought she’d have gone to the church instead. Didn’t I read somewhere that desperate women bought religious relics from priests?”
“One of the favorite cures was vials of milk, supposedly from the Virgin’s breast. But the church couldn’t wash all the old ways from these hills. A woman like Lady Aislinn would have tried anything for the chance to provide her husband with an heir.”
“Maybe she didn’t see a child as an heir at all.” Emma snuggled Captain closer. “She’d been taken away from her own family, her father dead. Maybe she just…just wanted someone of her own to love.”
“Whatever her motive, she never conceived.”
“Hard to do when your husband’s off running amok in France, fighting the English king’s battles,” Emma scoffed. “What did the guy expect? If I’d been Lady Aislinn, I’d have given him a piece of my mind. Written him a letter that burned his socks right off!”
Jared chuckled. “I doubt the Lady could read or write. There’s no record of it, at least. But if
you’d
been at the castle, I doubt the letter would be necessary.”
“Right. He wouldn’t have gotten past the gates before I—”
“He wouldn’t have gotten past the gates at all.” A shadow fell across Jared’s beautiful face. “I doubt any knight bewitched by the likes of you would have been strong enough to ride away, to leave you behind.”
Except you…
Emma thought sadly, turning her face away.
Jared kicked dirt back into the hole with the side of his shoe.
“How did you know how to get to this place?” Emma asked. “It seemed like you knew every curve, every gate.”
“I do.” Jared busied himself forming a makeshift leash out of his belt and fastening it around Captain’s collar. “This used to be my grandfather’s farm. My da grew up here. When my grandfather died, Gran wrote to Da, told him the property was his for the asking. But da had already fallen madly in love and my mother wasn’t the type to bury herself in the hills. Da told Gran to sell it. No matter how he loved the place, he was never coming back.”
Emma felt the hollow ache, the sacrifice gentle Angus Butler had made for a woman who would leave him far too soon. “You grew up around here? I didn’t know.”
“Just a nice walk of a Sunday from gran’s house in town to here.” Jared grimaced. “When I was a lad, Da and I would steal across the fence and he’d show me…” His voice trailed off. “This is where I fell in love with the legend of the fairy flag. The stories my father could tell…as if he’d lived every moment himself. Kid that I was, I still felt as if this place was mine.”
Emma reached up to him, squeezed his hand.
Jared drew her to her feet, Captain held captive in the crook of her arm. “One of the stones has a hole in the center,” Jared said. “God knows how it got there.” He led her to where a stone sat off-kilter, a perfect circle cut in the middle of the slab.
Fascinated, she paced around the stone, examining it from different angles. Unable to resist, she ran her fingertips over the smooth worn edge of the opening.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Jared warned from the opposite side of the slab. “Legend claims that if you put your hand through the hole and clasp a lover’s hand, it will bind you to each other forever.”
Emma peered at him through the opening, noting the sudden husky timbre to his voice. “No matter how far you wandered,” he said, “your hearts would be melded into one for all eternity.”
A subtle movement of his hand caught her eye, the callused fingers, as roughened by life as his heart, drifting toward hers as he finished. “Any woman reckless enough to link her heart with the wrong man would be cast adrift forever. But then who would be reckless enough to dare…” His voice trailed off. Emma was sure she could hear his heart pounding.
“You should know better than that, sir knight.”
“Than to believe such a story? I suppose—”
“No,” she cut him off. “You should know better than to dare me by now.” Emma reached through the opening in the stone, twining her fingers with Jared’s own. He stunned her, making no effort to pull away. They stood staring at their linked hands, frozen in time, palm to palm. The whole world was suddenly still.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Jared murmured after what seemed forever. “About the consequences…”
“I’m not afraid.” She let her eyes speak words he couldn’t bear for her to say. “Don’t you know, it was already too late for me long before we came here?”
His beautiful green eyes answered her, a wealth of desperate love trapped inside his heart. His hand tightened around hers until her fingers ached. She welcomed the pain of it, the fierceness.