Bliss fought for her freedom, kicking and clawing and making a furious, incoherent sound in her throat, while Jamie used every ounce of strength he possessed to subdue her.

Finally, she lay gasping on her back, Jamie kneeling astride her hips and pressing her wrists to the ground with his hands. The moonlight gave her skin an opalescent glow; the evening gown barely covered her full breasts, which were moving rhythmically with every breath she drew.

The hint of a pink nipple taunted him, and though it was nothing he hadn’t seen before, a thousand times, he was stirred by the sight. After a moment, he thrust himself to his feet, breathing hard, as though he’d run a far distance.

“Are you out of your mind?” he demanded, extending one hand to the woman raising herself from the ground.

She glared at the offered hand, and for a moment Jamie fully expected her to spit upon it. In the end, however, she took it and allowed herself to be hauled upright.

Jamie was furious, his mind full of the injuries Bliss could have suffered had she fallen. She might even have been killed. “I asked you a question!” he bellowed.

Bliss squared her moon-kissed shoulders and then bent to take up her satchel from the ground. “So you did,” she answered coolly. “But it just so happens that I don’t choose to answer.”

The visions of this redheaded snippet lying broken and bleeding on the frozen ground were instantly displaced. In fact, Jamie considered carrying Bliss back upstairs and throwing her out the damned window. He grabbed her by one elbow and flung her toward the back of the house.

She bristled, drawing her dignity around her as she would a shawl or a cloak, and marched ahead of him. She put a man in mind of a martyr, on the way to the gallows or the stake.

Inside the kitchen, glass clinked as Jamie angrily lit a lamp. “Sit down,” he bit out, and to his utter amazement, Bliss obeyed him, taking a seat at the table. Her eyes, blue as wet ink, were full of pride and challenge, and her red hair tumbled down her back in a coppery cascade.

She smoothed the skirts of her black satin evening gown, and her manner said that climbing out a second-story window in the middle of the night was behavior a normal person wouldn’t presume to question.

“I’m cold,” she announced, with frosty stateliness, “and I would like a cup of tea.”

“A cup of tea, is it?” Jamie muttered, but nevertheless he ladled water into the pot and slammed it down on the stove. Since the fire had been banked for the night, he had to add kindling and stir the embers. “A cup of tea, she wants, after climbin’ down the side of me ’ouse like a thief—”

Bliss’s nervous but glad giggle startled him. He whirled to face her, glaring.

She pursed her lips and sat up very straight in her chair. “You left me no choice but to escape by any means available to me,” she said loftily.