For a few excruciatingly sweet moments, he let the natural motion of the carriage do his work for him. Then, ever so slowly, with low, desolate groans of his own, he grasped her narrow waist in his hands and began to raise and lower her in a steadily building rhythm as old as the stars.

There was an awesome trembling in Bliss’s legs as she neared release; she truly feared that she would cry out in her ecstasy, and loudly enough for the carriage driver to hear. For all that, she could not contain what would be unchained by Jamie’s pleasuring; she gave herself up to it completely and so did Jamie.

“Do you suppose he heard us?” Bliss fretted, once the last waves of elation had ebbed away and she’d laboriously put all her senses back in their proper places.

“Who?” Jamie asked, almost irritably. He was fully presentable again, within moments, while Bliss had to right her drawers, straighten her petticoats, and smooth her skirts.

She resented it heartily. “The carriage driver!” she snapped.

Jamie ran a hand through his hair. “’Ow should I know?” he muttered. “It isn’t like I give a damn, Duchess!”

Bliss was livid. “You have so little concern for my reputation?”

Jamie was putting her bodice back in place. “What reputation? You’re me wife—if I want to ’ave you on top of the carriage, I will.”

Perhaps it was Jamie’s audacity that made Bliss unbearably furious. Or maybe it was the fact that the law stood behind him in such matters. Whatever the case, she was outraged beyond all bearing and, for the second time since they’d met, she moved to slap Jamie, putting all her strength behind the blow.

He rendered the gesture impotent by grasping her wrist just as her palm would have struck his cheek. “Is that the thanks I get,” he hissed, “for making you ’owl like the Banshee at an Irishman’s deathbed?”

Before Bliss could think of a response to that, the carriage came to an unexpected stop. If it hadn’t been for Jamie’s grip on her wrist, in fact, she would have gone toppling into the opposite seat.

“I want you to divorce me,” she said with chilly dignity. “Immediately.”

With an insolent sort of tenderness, Jamie kissed her. “Me plans ’aven’t changed, Duchess,” he answered smoothly. “I’m settin’ you up in a ’ouse first thing tomorrow. I rather like ’avin’ a wife.”

The driver opened the door just as Bliss would have told Jamie McKenna what she thought of him, his parentage, and his private parts.

“Here we are, sir,” crowed the driver, pleased as punch.

The lights of a house that surely belonged to Peony Ryan glowed in the darkness.

Chapter 14

JAMIE PRACTICALLY HURLED BLISS UP THE STEPS LEADING TO Peony’s elegant town house. Not even for food, she had decided, could she bring herself to endure this kind of humiliation. Just as she would have whirled on her troublesome husband and given him the kind of kick he’d long remember, the door opened and light spilled out of the house.