Jamie’s face was still impassive, giving no indication that his mind was reeling. Pipher had probably been in the Victoria Hotel all the time that he and Bliss were there. He’d been watching, and waiting, and when he’d seen how much Bliss mattered to Jamie, he’d sent the whip as a grisly wedding present.

Now he was on his way to Australia, like Bliss, and the width of the Tasman Sea separated the both of them from Jamie.

He strode out of the tavern where he’d encountered Johnson without so much as a look back, and started toward Shallie’s. He’d think things through while he took care of his business there.

Johnson had been right about the Yanks. They were both at Shallie’s, grogged to their eyeballs and sharing a whore when Jamie kicked in the door of their room.

The whore squealed in alarm and scrambled out from between her clients, her painted face contorted with fear. “I ain’t done nothin’, love,” she wailed to Jamie. “I swear I ain’t!”

Jamie had no quarrel with the woman. He gestured toward the door and muttered, “Get out.”

The whore didn’t need to be told twice.

Wilbertson and Cook, meanwhile, were just sitting up on that flea-ridden, sloping mattress, gazing blearily in Jamie’s direction.

“Who the hell are you?” one of them asked.

Jamie’s blade materialized in his right hand, as it had a way of doing when he was furious. Images of the ugly burns on Peony’s back filled his mind and soured the back of his throat, like vomit. “Me name’s not important, mate,” he said evenly, with an acid smile. “And I’m straight out of the worst dream you ever ’ad.”

A few screams never meant much of anything at Shallie’s, especially when they came in the night, and nary a man so much as looked up from his mug when Jamie McKenna came back down the same set of stairs he’d climbed earlier and strode outside. There were some people it was just better not to see.

Bliss liked Maggie McKenna the instant she saw her. She was a beautiful blonde, with wide gray eyes and a ready smile, and she flung herself into Reeve’s arms without a care for the disapproving looks she got from the other people on the wharf.

“Hello, Yank,” Reeve said tenderly, and then he kissed her before turning to introduce his traveling companions. He presented Peony first, and then, with a sparkle in his eyes, he said, “And this is Bliss. She’s Jamie’s wife.”

Maggie’s wonderful charcoal eyes rounded in delight and her face glowed. “Jamie’s married!” she crowed in her strange accent. “I don’t believe it!”

Bliss was about to offer the golden ring as proof when Maggie hugged her and then planted a kiss on her cheek.

“Welcome to the family, Bliss,” she said, putting one arm around Reeve’s waist and one around her sister-in-law’s, Peony walking a little ahead and to the side as they started up the wharf. “These McKenna men are stubborn, but there are ways to keep them in line,” Maggie went on to say.