She barely noticed when Jared loaded her into his car, steered it out to the street. A streetlight blazed, casting Jared’s rugged face in sharp relief. Wariness and alarm deepened the lines and grooves. His green eyes were filled with the desperation of quarry.
She
had done this to him, Emma knew. Put him in the hunters’ sights. Without her, no journalist would torment him.
Emma huddled against the passenger door as Jared drove like a fury, leaving the bright blur of London’s city lights behind. Jared, racing back to his castle, back to his cliffs, back to the boy he’d fought so hard to save.
Emma closed her eyes, too filled with pain to look at Jared’s beloved face. Drew was right, she thought in anguish. It
was
dangerous to be close to her.
She left everyone she loved bleeding.
Chapter Twenty-One
R
AIN SLASHED FROM
the sky, obscuring the rising sun and slowing the car’s climb up the treacherous mountain roads. Aching from driving all night, Jared gripped the steering wheel in white-knuckled ferocity, the elements threatening to pull the vehicle out of control in an eerie echo of the way he felt inside.
As if he were coming apart. Crashing and burning in a conflagration even more soul-destroying than the one that had killed his wife and unborn child ten long years ago. Because he hadn’t loved Jenny. Not the way he loved Emma. And he hadn’t ever gotten to know or grown to cherish his coming child the way he cherished David Harrison.
A man was supposed to protect the people he loved, Jared thought. Stand between them and all the pain the world could hurl their way. He was supposed to be strong enough, wise enough, brave enough to hold fast, like the mountain cliffs even time could not wear down.
But he was failing. Failing Emma. Failing Davey. Just as he’d failed Jenny and his father years before. What could he do to hold back the forces that threatened to overwhelm them? Drown them in shame and guilt, regret and betrayal, shattering any delusion that their world could be safe again….
Jared swerved onto the lane that led to the castle, the cluster of tents a white smear. The students were doubtless hunkered down to begin the day’s work, cleaning small finds, catching up on paperwork or research or, in the case of Davey, catching up on the moves most teenaged boys had mastered a long time ago. Pleasures Jared knew would be all the sweeter because Davey had waited for love.
Jared winced, remembering the wonder that had lit the lad’s face the morning after the heartrending revelations in the trailer. An elation that had left Jared little doubt that Beth Murphy had not only forgiven Davey for the scene at the pub, but had stolen away with the boy to some secret hideaway in the night. A place that, come morning, David Harrison had left a man.
Changed utterly. Forever. The way Jared had been when he’d first made love to Emma. Jared glanced across the car’s interior to Emma’s heart-shaped face, so pale it terrified him, her eyes huge and bruised, even though the worst blows hadn’t yet been dealt. She hadn’t yet told Davey his secret was out. She hadn’t warned her mother about what was to come.
I need a secure landline…
Emma had said when he offered her his mobile phone.
Something no one can intercept…when I tell Mom….
He’d been afraid she’d start to retch again, but she’d pressed her hands against her belly, holding her emotions in by force of will—all her horror, all her rage, all her fear of facing her family after what she’d accidentally betrayed to the world.
Not “betrayed.” No. Secrets the world had stolen from her, ripped away and thrown into the glaring light for the salacious to gloat over. Matters that should have remained private becoming fodder for gossip in offices and restaurants all over the globe.
I’m afraid…
her voice echoed in Jared’s heart from the night he’d offered to go with her to London.
The press takes things you don’t want to give them….
They’d exposed the pain of her divorce, flaunted her ex-husband’s baby when Emma’s arms were empty. But even that humiliation paled in comparison to what she faced now.
“You’ll want to ring up your mother right away,” Jared said. “The telephone in the trailer should be secure.”
“No. Davey first. It’ll take time for the media to pick up the story in the States. But the press could stampede the castle anytime.”
The trailer was probably the logical place to meet with Davey, too. Private with doors that would conceal what happened inside, if you remembered to close them. But Jared passed the structure up. He couldn’t stomach returning to the setting where the boy had bared his secrets and Jared had cut his hand, bonded them together, promised to be Davey’s father. Made the boy feel safe.
Davey should have
been
safe. But Jared couldn’t shield him from the train wreck that was barreling his way. Couldn’t protect Emma any more than he’d been able to pluck Jenny’s plane safely from the sky.
Truth was, Jared had been right all along. There
was
no safe place. Not when you loved a woman this much. And yet…
The castle…He peered through the rain, making out its beloved warlike silhouette. To Jared, Lady Aislinn’s tower had always seemed strong enough to withstand the pounding of enemy blows.
A moving shape caught the far edge of the headlight beam, a student in a dark green slicker on the way to God knew where. Sean. The lad came up to the car, drenched, but enjoying the storm the way kids often did. The way Jared had when he was a boy, roaming out in the wildness, the crash of thunder like the long-ago battling of Celtic war gods.
Jared rolled down the window, chill rain pelting the side of his face as the boy loped up to the car.
Sean grinned, looking far less green than he’d been in the pub’s W.C. “I don’t have to ask you how the party was, Dr. Butler.” He tried to swipe rain from his eyes. “You look like Emma dragged you behind the car the whole way from London. Should have taken the advice you gave me at the pub and laid off of the whiskey.”
“Send Davey up to the tower,” Jared cut Sean off sharply.
Sean’s humor faltered as he became aware of the edge in Jared’s voice. “Davey? He and Beth were running some tests on…It’s something bad, isn’t it?”
“Just send him. Don’t let him know anything is wrong. Understand?”
“Right,” the lad agreed, but his face paled. Jared’s heart ripped at the sudden protectiveness transforming the gregarious boy’s usually carefree features. Emotion grudgingly won by the quieter Davey…and far more valuable than the hail-fellow-well-met camaraderie of the football boys. Respect. Would it remain once Sean and the other students learned the truth?
Jared pulled away from Sean and drove up to the tower, parking as close to the castle door as possible. Emma climbed out of the car as he jammed the gearshift into Park. Rain battered her, streamed down her face, soaked her hair as he turned off the ignition and got out himself.
The waves the stylists had pressed smooth with some kind of heated contraption rebelled, twisting into their natural riotous curls as she staggered toward the door.
Jared moved to steady Emma but when he tried to take her arm she yanked away as if he’d pounded on an exposed nerve and the merest touch might shatter her. She looked so small engulfed in the folds of his sweater, her eyes burning in a face white as parchment.
How many times had he climbed these stairs with her in the past weeks? Waiting to love her? Fight with her? With swords, with words? Challenging her mind, her heart, her body’s thunderous response to his?
But today the stairs were gravestone cold, the walls hopeless gray, the dream they’d woven here together torn down like the vibrant tapestries that once covered the castle walls, leaving desolation.
Jared had always sensed that this reckoning would come. The end of summer. Happiness all too fleeting. He’d just never known they would face such wanton destruction when it did.
They mounted the landing, Emma retreating to the alcove and the table where her family picture sat in its place of honor. A purple frame full of beaming McDaniels. Would their smiles ever be quite so open again, once the whole world knew secrets that should have stayed their own?
Jared’s hands clenched at the thought of Emma’s mother fielding questions about the rape. Emma herself, pounded by vultures like Feeny: How does it feel to know that you’re the child of a rapist who attacked your mother when she was sixteen years old?
Poison. Pure poison. As toxic and potentially deadly to the spirit as the poison David Harrison would be forced to swallow all too soon.
Jared grabbed the coverlet from the bed and started to wrap it around Emma’s shivering body. He swore when she tried to thrust it away. “You’re soaking wet!” he insisted, forcing her to accept the warm folds he swirled around her shoulders. “You’ll catch your death of cold. That won’t help anybody.”
She huddled on the bench, rainwater dripping from her soaked hair onto the picture in her grasp. Jared saw the hand-painted decorations start to smear, the glue dissolving, sloughing off glitter as it ran. Moisture seeped under the edge of the glass and a water spot bloomed in the photograph’s corner, damaging it the way the family it captured would soon be damaged forever.
Jared grabbed a clean T-shirt from his own stash of clothes and blotted the worst of the rain from Emma’s hair and face. She let him. Her sudden stillness terrified him more than the moments when she wouldn’t let him touch her.
Footsteps.
Jared’s muscles clenched as he recognized the galumphing rhythm all Davey’s own, accompanied by the tick-tick of claws and Captain’s enthusiastic yips as lad and dog rushed up to the tower. The terrier racketed into the room first, flinging his furry body against Jared in canine ecstasy. Jared scooped up the dog, tried to put the terrier into Emma’s arms. But Emma refused even that small comfort.
She took the animal and laid him numbly in the crate near her bed, then waited for Davey to come in.
A moment later, Davey’s lanky frame filled the door, his oiled canvas coat dripping, his eyes shining. Jared scarce recognized the boy. Davey seemed taller with his new confidence, awed by his newfound love, basking in an unexpected peace with the world that had once excluded him.
“What are you two doing back?” Davey exclaimed, obviously glad to see them. “I didn’t think you were leaving London until—” He suddenly sobered, looking from Jared to Emma and back with searching eyes. His voice sharpened with unease. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
Jared clamped his hands on the lad’s shoulders, shoulders far too narrow to hold up under the burden Jared was about to shift onto them. “I’m not sure how to tell you this,” Jared began.
“Is it Mum?” Davey squeezed the words through a tight throat. “Is she sick? Was there an accident?”
“No!” Emma said.
“Your mother is fine,” Jared assured him.
But she won’t be for much longer…not after the headlines run in tomorrow’s
Independent Star.
The boy hitched out a breath, his eyes only a little less filled with alarm. “If it’s not Mum, then what is it? You look horrible.”
Jared struggled to find the right words, knowing all the while that there were none. But Emma beat him to it, gazing up at Davey with banished fairy eyes.
“Someone overheard us the night Jared and I found you in the trailer,” she explained.
“You two find me in the trailer a dozen times a week,” Davey protested in blatant denial. “Which night are you talking about?”
“The night we went to the pub,” Emma said. “When you told us about your father.”
Davey curled into himself, as if trying to ward off a blow. But there was no shield for the kind of sword Feeny wielded. It cut without steel and you bled where the damage couldn’t be seen with the eye, only felt in the heart.
He swallowed hard. “Who heard? It was Veronica, wasn’t it?”
Emma stiffened at the mention of the grad student’s name. Jared’s eyes narrowed. “Why would you say that?”
Davey twisted his fingers together, pacing as if the walls were closing in on him. “I passed her that night when I was running to Beth’s tent.” The kid froze, looking scared out of his wits. He turned to Jared. “Oh, God—Is Veronica going to tell Beth about my dad? They’re friends and—and maybe to warn her…”
That would be difficult enough for Davey to handle, Jared thought. But he would have welcomed it in comparison to what the boy faced now.
“It’s worse than Beth knowing,” Emma said softly.
Davey spun toward her, his voice rising in panic. “There
is
nothing worse than that! It’s the most awful thing that could happen!”
Christ, if the boy only knew. Jared sucked in a steadying breath. “It appears Veronica kept in contact with that reporter I had thrown off the property the first week Emma was here.”
“That Feeny jerk? Why would she do that?”
“To get me out of the way,” Emma explained flatly. “Veronica knew Jared wouldn’t tolerate the uproar of the press swarming all over the site. And she’d be paid God knows how much money for feeding him information. The problem is that, in the process, something else leaked out. How my mother was raped and…” She faltered. Jared jumped in, his rugged features stark.
“Davey, the truth about your father is going to be front-page news come tonight—if it isn’t already.”
Davey backed away, banging into Emma’s arm. The frame slipped from her rain-slick fingers. It crashed to the stone floor, glass shattering, wood miter joints jarred askew. “That’s…that’s impossible…Beth doesn’t…doesn’t…she can’t know I’m—”
“There’s still time to tell her,” Emma urged. “I’ll send you and your mother away for a while. Someplace safe until this all dies down. Anywhere you want to go. Maybe Egypt, to see the pyramids. Or Pompeii or Troy. Some ancient city you’d love and where no one will find you.”
A ragged sob tore from Davey’s throat. “You promised no one would find out!” he accused her. “I trusted you!”
“Emma had no control over what happened,” Jared started to defend her. But Emma cut in.