If he thought Bliss was going to be swayed by a chummy reference to something American, he was dead wrong. “Let me up! I’ll be spoiled for Alexander, or any other man!”

“Isn’t that what you wanted?” he asked, pretending befuddlement.

Oddly enough, a part of Bliss wanted to be besmirched. By this man, at least. It was exciting, in an uncomfortable sort of way, to be lying beside him in the darkness. “Yes—no!”

He laughed. “Make up your mind, Duchess.”

“Stop calling me that!”

“Never. It suits you too well.”

“I hate you, Jamie McKenna!”

He sighed companionably. The man had a gift for overlooking the incongruities of a situation. “Tell me about yourself, Bliss. Did you grow up in Wellington?”

His grasp on her wrist had loosened, if not relaxed entirely, and Bliss realized that she wasn’t afraid, though by all accounts she should have been. “No. My father keeps a lighthouse down the coast from Wellington, and I spent my childhood there.”

Subtly, Jamie’s fingers had shifted; he was holding Bliss’s hand. His thumb stroked the tender flesh of her wrist in a way that produced feelings of sweet discomfort.

“Have you any brothers and sisters, then?” he asked, and the meter of his voice was such that they might have been at a very proper lawn party, instead of lying, alone and unchaperoned, in a dark bedroom.

An old sadness filled Bliss. “I had a brother, but he died when I was small. I hardly remember him.” It was a lie that she didn’t remember Colin; her father had never allowed her to forget that the lad might have lived if he hadn’t gone out to search for her that stormy night.

Jamie was silent for a few moments, seeming to sense Bliss’s reluctance to speak of her childhood. His thumb continued its disconcerting work along the inside of her wrist.

“I have a brother,” he told her, at length.

“I know,” Bliss responded, possessed with sweet misery. “You’re in love with his wife.”

Jamie let go of her wrist and sat straight up in bed. “What!” he demanded.

“You told me so yourself.” She started to leave the bed, but Jamie pulled her back.

“I said I loved her,” he admitted. “But I didn’t mean it the way you’re thinkin’,” he said, with that Irish lilt in his voice. “She’s a sister to me, is Maggie, and nothin’ more.”

The importance Jamie attached to convincing her of this secretly pleased Bliss. “I see,” she said coolly.

“Why am I explainin’ to you, anyway?” he muttered, folding his arms across his chest with such force that the whole bed shook.

Even though Jamie was no longer holding her hand, Bliss made no move to climb off the mattress. “How should I know why you’re explaining, Jamie McKenna? As far as I can tell, you’re a maniac. Why, if my papa knew that you were forcing me to share your bed, like a common strumpet—”

Jamie laughed and turned onto his side, facing Bliss. The light of the moon caught in his fair hair and glistened on his white teeth, and the odd, achy sensation in the depths of her, at once pleasant and frightening, grew worse.