Tears filled her eyes, fairly blinding her. “Damn that rooster!” she cried, and then she turned on one heel, clutching Jamie’s gifts to her bosom, and ran up the rear stairway, sobbing.

“What did I do?” Jamie asked Cutter, who had just stepped through the kitchen door.

The old man grinned. “All the right things, I reckon.”

Jamie glared at his friend, all the time wondering if he’d insulted the Duchess by giving her a cookbook. He hadn’t meant to imply that her concoctions were bad—exactly.

“What things?” he snapped.

“That’d be your business, mate,” Cutter replied, taking a mug from a shelf and shuffling over to the stove to fill it with day-old coffee. “Could be, though, that them ewes out there in the hills ain’t the only ones what got a baby started.”

Jamie felt the color drain from his face and the starch go out of his knees. He groped for a chair and collapsed into it, shoving one hand through his hair. He muttered a curse.

“Would it be so bad as that?” Cutter asked quietly, sitting down across from Jamie at the table.

Jamie closed his eyes, remembering Eleanor. She’d borne him a child, too, and he hadn’t known until it was too late. “Maybe,” he said.

Elisabeth believed that his brother, Reeve, was her father. That was probably for the best, yet there wasn’t a day when Jamie didn’t think of his daughter and grieve.

“Jamie boy,” Cutter insisted gruffly, “Bliss ain’t the same kind of woman as Eleanor was. You know that.”

Jamie sighed. “Maybe not, but they’ve got one thing in common, me friend—a knack for disappearin’ when they ’ave a mind for it.”

“This calls for a drink,” commiserated Cutter. If the truth be known, Cutter thought just about everything called for a drink. He disappeared into the study, returning moments later with a bottle of whiskey. This he added in generous measures to his mug of coffee and the one he poured for Jamie.

“Maybe I ought to go up there and find out why she’s cryin’,” Jamie speculated. The whiskey made that damnable coffee palatable, at least.

Cutter shrugged. “Like as not, she won’t tell you.”

Jamie nodded philosophically. “Seems like when you ask a woman what’s the matter, she always says ’nothin’.”

Cutter laughed. “Aye. Real primlike, she says it, whilst snifflin’ like a lamb with the slobbers.”

By the time Bliss came stomping down the rear stairway, her eyes all puffy and her nose red, Jamie had consumed enough whiskey to make him forget what it was that was troubling him so much.

He gave Bliss a perfectly harmless pinch as she passed him and she whirled around and fairly broke his knuckles with a wooden spoon. Cutter, who’d downed his share of the whiskey, howled with amusement, while old Dog crouched in the corner by the stove and whimpered.

It turned out that Dog had the best handle on the situation.

“Jamie McKenna,” Bliss said through her teeth while Jamie was still rubbing his sore fingers, “you march right out to that henhouse and gather those eggs. If you insist on keeping that wretched rooster, then you can deal with him yourself!” With that, she shoved a basket into his hands and set to putting away the supplies he and Cutter had bought in town.