All her thoughts were on the tender and tempestuous now.

Chapter 24

THERE WAS STILL ONE THING LEFT UNSETTLED, FOR ALL THE FOR-giveness and the lovemaking, and Bliss flung the sponge into Jamie’s bathwater in fury when she remembered it. The splash was horrific.

Jamie groaned. “What now?” he asked.

Bliss’s color was high. “There’s still that little matter of what you said down in the garden, Jamie McKenna! ’I never meant for us to have children, Bliss,’ you told me. ’I married you to keep from being shot, in case you’ve forgotten’!”

“God,” Jamie breathed, “what a memory you ’ave, Duchess, and for all the wrong things, too. I didn’t mean anything by that and you know it.”

“I know no such thing,” Bliss retorted, kneeling there beside the bathtub. “And don’t start thinking you can just make whatever nasty remark comes into your brain and then smooth it all over by taking me to bed, Mr. McKenna!”

He was watching her lips as she talked with a half grin on his face. “Oh, I won’t think that, Duchess,” he breathed, and then, without giving Bliss any warning at all, he grabbed her and hauled her into the tub with him, clothes and all.

She shrieked with rage and struggled hopelessly, subsiding only when he kissed her so soundly, so thoroughly, that her entire body went limp.

Jamie laughed, his voice low and husky, when he drew back from her and looked into her wide, bewildered eyes. “Ah, Duchess,” he said, “I do love you. I do indeed.”

The words were precious to Bliss, but so was her pride. Her dress was wet clear through, and there was such a thing as maintaining personal dignity, after all. “Let me go!” she ordered breathlessly.

“Never,” Jamie answered, catching her lower lip gently, tantalizingly between his teeth. “Seems to me that it might be time to start that first red’eaded baby growin’ inside you.”

A tremor went through Bliss. “Jamie—”

He started kissing the sensitive hollow at the base of her neck and his hand moved beneath the water. “Ummm?”

“Damn you,” Bliss gasped as he began causing her an exquisite pleasure. “Baby or no baby, I won’t be had in a bathtub!”

Jamie laughed again and lightly bit her earlobe. “Won’t you, Duchess?”

Increase Pipher traveled to Brisbane and appeared before the magistrate in person. “James McKenna is an escaped felon, Your Grace,” he said, pushing an old handbill under the man’s nose. “And he’s being harbored illegally at Seven Sisters, his brother’s plantation near—”

“I know where Seven Sisters is,” the magistrate broke in, sounding impatient. He was studying the tattered paper with a frown puckering his brow. “This bloke is Reeve McKenna’s brother, is he?” Without waiting for an answer, he sighed and added, “Old bit of business, this. Best forgotten, don’t you think?”

Increase trembled, putting most of his weight on his walking stick, and young Walter Davis hurried forward to support him. “It was thanks to that young hellion that I lost the strength in my legs, Your Grace,” Pipher bit out, barely able to keep his tone civil, “as well as a year’s crop of sugarcane, my house—”