Jamie didn’t so much as glance in his wife’s direction. His orders were simple and to the point. “Turn over,” he said to Peony.

Peony again looked to Bliss, her eyes appealing for understanding. “Look away, then, Jamie,” she murmured. When he did, Peony removed her bed jacket and lay down on her stomach.

Jamie cursed when he saw the gruesome initials burned into the flesh between Peony’s shoulder blades. “Bring some whiskey and a clean cloth, Bliss,” he said in the next moment, and he might have been a stranger for all the warmth his voice held.

Bliss hurried to fetch a linen sheet from a cabinet in the upstairs hallway, then found the liquor supply in Jamie’s study and grasped a bottle. When she returned to the downstairs bedroom, Peony was paler than ever and biting her lip, while Jamie stood at the window, every muscle in his body rigid with outrage.

He turned when he heard Bliss enter the room and gave her a despondent smile. So briefly did it touch his lips that Bliss wasn’t sure she’d really seen it.

“Not whiskey, Jamie,” Peony whispered. “Please—”

Jamie didn’t even seem to see Bliss as he took the bottle and sheet from her and approached the bed again. “I’m sorry, love,” he said quietly. “If I could suffer this for you, I would. You know that, don’t you?”

His words broke Bliss’s heart, as did Peony’s trusting reply. “Yes, Jamie love. I know.”

Bliss bit her lower lip as she watched Jamie tear away part of the sheet she’d given him and soak it in whiskey. He spoke in a gentle murmur to Peony—Bliss could not make out the words—as he began to clean the infected wound.

Peony stiffened and screamed into her pillow, but there was never a break in Jamie’s quiet reassurances. Bliss turned and stumbled back along the hallway, into the kitchen, and out the rear door.

There, in the windswept winter grass, she covered her face with both hands and sobbed out her anguish.

“’Ere now,” said a low masculine voice behind her, as strong hands turned her so that she could rest her forehead against a chest as broad and steely as Jamie’s. “It can’t be so bleak as all that, now can it, Red?”

Bliss looked up at Reeve and trembled with grief. He was a man, and Jamie’s brother in the bargain, and he would never understand. She sniffled bravely and dashed at her tears with the back of one hand.

“It’s time I gathered the eggs,” she said with resolve.

Reeve bent to place a brotherly kiss on the top of her head. “You’re the best thing that ever ’appened to Jamie, little one. Don’t forget that, no matter what.”

Bliss nodded and made herself smile, and when she reached the chicken coop, Caesar was up to his old tricks. Apparently, he hadn’t learned his lesson after all.

Again, Bliss imprisoned him beneath the old washtub, again he railed and squawked and flapped his wings. With a sigh, she found a good-sized rock and gave the metal tub a hard, resounding thump with it.