Grimacing, she glanced down at the furs she’d used to cushion the stone bench beneath her. She touched a stray tag the archaeologist had forgotten to snip off. The furs and doubtless the bugs he’d threatened her with “Made In China.”
Of course, if she’d been thinking more clearly, she’d never have fallen prey to Butler’s attempt to bait her. She’d known from the beginning that the bed across the room wasn’t six hundred years old, that the tower chamber was stocked by Butler with replicas of old things. The clothing she’d put on and the parchment, ink and quills she’d laid out on the table were nothing more than props, like the polished metal mirror and the comb she’d abandoned after getting it hopelessly tangled in her masses of dark hair. And yet…
Perhaps the furniture and the accoutrements were merely illusions Jared Butler had created to evoke the fourteenth century. But some things in this chamber were real. Loneliness pooled in the shadows. Isolation bled from the stones. Sorrow ages old plucked with spectral fingers at the hem of Emma’s gown.
She couldn’t remember a time when she didn’t sense things most people were oblivious to. Faint whispers through the veil of time, as if lost souls wanted someone to know they’d once lived, imprinting their emotions into walls and wood, china cups and cloth they’d touched generations before.
Here, in this ancient Scottish castle, those sensations felt as real to her as the treasure she’d placed on the table: her talisman on movie locations all over the globe, her way of bringing home with her no matter how far she wandered.
But even in the jungles of Malaysia or while filming in the desert, Emma had never been as miserable as she was tonight. Cold to her marrow, her ridiculously thick hair still damp, she felt more alone than she’d ever been in her life.
That’s not true, a child’s voice argued in her mind. You felt exactly like this one other time. Remember? Ten years old, waking up in a stranger’s room, your mother gone, leaving nothing but a note…
Where had that thought come from? Emma shivered as decades-old emotions washed through her again. Terror, anguish, desperation as her uncle Cade raged, furious that his sister had abandoned Emma and vanished, leaving the traumatized child in his care.
Now Emma understood that her beloved uncle had been just as scared as she was that terrible morning. But her first taste of the famous McDaniel temper had shaken her badly.
Between her uncle, her much-adored grandfather and her cousins who’d inherited the family temper, she’d learned how to fight back in the ensuing years. And she’d done her best to bury the pain of her mother’s desertion, focusing instead on the fact that Deirdre McDaniel Stone had come back for her.
Emma might be alone tonight in this tower room, but she was worlds different from the outcast child who’d once believed her only friend was March Winds’ ghost.
She smiled wistfully, remembering how fiercely she’d clung to that kindred spirit from another century, another girl’s hopes and dreams captured within a Civil War era journal. Addy March would have been as fascinated by this castle as Emma was. For if ever there was a place perfect for ghosts, it was this rugged fortress with its soft curls of mist, moonlight on the water and the raging battle of waves upon shore.
Emma scooted closer to the window, the drafts chilling her as she peered out toward the sea, imagining home so far away. But all thoughts of her mother’s laughter, her cousins’ antics vanished as she glimpsed a quicksilver flash of something on the water. Her heart tripped. No. It couldn’t be. She rubbed her tired eyes, struggling to focus, but the figure remained, dancing with death, no foothold beneath him except the churning waves.
A knight, Emma marveled, his armor gleaming in the moonshine, his sword flashing as he battled demons he alone could see.
Emma flattened her palm on the window, trying to remember to breathe as she watched the warrior battle with the sea, swinging his weapon with terrible grace, leaping and dodging, thrusting and parrying, the weight of his unseen world crushing down on broad, phantom shoulders.
A ghost? Emma’s subconscious queried. How could it be anyone else, out there on the waves? Emma of all people knew about ghosts. But whose spirit could it be? Lady Aislinn’s husband, Lord Magnus, returned at last from King Edward I’s French wars? Trying to fight his way back to her side to rescue her even centuries too late from the foe who had held her prisoner?
As if in answer, a gust of wind rattled the windowpanes. The draft that whooshed through the chamber catching the candle. Its flame leaped wildly, blew out.
Suffocating darkness rolled across the chamber like a sorcerer’s spell, the moonstruck window glowing with new life of its own. She could see the warrior far more clearly now.
The phantom knight was tiring. Emma could feel it as if he were inside her, his battles her own. Pain wracked his muscles, exhaustion slowing the swings of his sword as if he were slashing it through air thick as water. He stumbled and Emma wanted to race down the stairs in spite of the darkness, find some way to steady him, urge him not to give up.
Just what are you planning to do? Butler’s sneering voice demanded in her head. Grope your way through the castle in the dark? Even if you didn’t break your neck on the stairs, you’d fall off the sea cliffs and drown.
But how else could she know for sure? Emma’s subconscious asserted stubbornly. See if he was really there? This warrior trying to fight his way back to the lady he loved even though a chasm of centuries now yawned between them?
And why did it matter so much to her? To prove this phantom was real? A man fighting for love instead of giving up, the way she and Drew had two years ago?
Damn Butler and damn her own good sense! She was going to find out the truth, no matter what….
But she’d barely taken a step away from the window when the warrior made a final wild swing with his sword. She saw the bright blade waver, fall. The knight crumpled to his knees, wind ripping at his silvery hauberk. He yanked a helm from his head, dark hair tumbling about a face she couldn’t see. The sea raged in triumph around him, sucked him down under the waves until he vanished, far beyond her reach.
It was over. Emma sank back down onto the bench, her heart a raw wound in her chest. No question who had won both battles tonight. The knight lost to his ghosts from the past, Emma to demons so old she’d thought she’d forgotten them.
But wasn’t that the hard truth they forgot to tell you in fairy tales? Emma thought sadly.
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