Jamie shook his head, marveling, and reached out for the tin of tea leaves Carra kept on a shelf above the stove. He slammed it down on the counter with a crash that made Bliss give a satisfying little start of surprise.

“Men,” Bliss observed, extending her bare, chapped hands and assessing them as though she were wearing a fine and immaculate pair of gloves. “They are always so upset to discover that a woman has thoughts of her own and the gumption to carry them out. Gumption is highly admired in America, you know.”

“How the ’ell do you know what’s admired in America?” Jamie demanded, furious beyond all good sense and grateful that he didn’t have to explain why. He couldn’t have done that, even to himself.

He hurled spoonfuls of tea into a crockery pot as heat began to surge through the kettle on the stove.

Bliss wet her lips with the tip of her tongue—Jamie found the gesture patently disconcerting—and kept her eyes averted. “One couldn’t possibly expect a man of your insensitivity and social awkwardness to understand,” she sniffed.

Jamie drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Keep your ’ead, man,” he muttered to himself. Then, in a louder voice, he added, “Thank you very much, Miss Stafford. I ’old you in the fondest regard, too.”

She blushed beneath a soft, golden spattering of freckles. Jamie found himself wondering whether or not the rest of Bliss Stafford’s lush little body was so decorated.

“We seem to be at sixes and sevens, you and I,” she said, in that haughty way of hers.

Jamie fought conflicting urges to carry her off to his bed and to turn her across his knee, right then and there. The little bird on the spout of the teakettle, the one frivolity he’d permitted in his house, began to whistle. Leaving Bliss’s observation to dangle unanswered in the air between them, he turned to take the kettle from the stove and promptly burned his fingers on the handle.

“Good heavens.” Bliss sighed, standing up and dipping water from the bucket beside the sink. “Put your hand in here,” she ordered briskly, holding out the ladle.

Jamie did so; the numbing cold soothed his burn. Utterly baffled by the new emotions he was feeling, he could only stare down at Bliss Stafford and wonder what capricious fate had sent her to hide out in his barn, irritate Carra, and then scare him out of his hide by shinnying down the outside wall of his house. Saints in heaven, he’d hardly lapsed into the brogue in years, and now he was thinking in it!

Bliss was examining his fingers. “Better now?” she asked, as though speaking to an injured little boy.

Jamie remembered himself and jerked his hand from hers. “Never mind that. If you ’ave to ’elp, make the tea.”

A small and rather annoying smile touched Bliss’s mouth as she obligingly reached for a potholder, took up the kettle, and poured scalding hot water over the tea leaves. Jamie sank into a chair with a despondent sigh.