Apparently sensing that she’d found the near disaster amusing, Jamie glared at Bliss as he hoisted the large lidded basket into his arms and started toward her.

“If you’d bothered to wait,” he remarked, hurling the basket into the back of the wagon with a total disregard for the delicacy of anything that might be inside it, “I’d have helped you into the wagon—just as if you were a lady.”

Bliss’s cheeks flamed. It was bad enough that he’d kept her a virtual prisoner throughout the night; now he was implying that her manners were less than admirable. If they were, it was certainly none of his affair.

He climbed up into the wagon box, sat down heavily, and took the reins into his gloved hands. His sea-blue eyes were snapping as he inclined his head formally and asked, “Did I strike too close to the truth, Duchess?”

Bliss chose to ignore his question and present one of her own. If she was expected to be unladylike, then so be it. She would behave accordingly. “Was your lady love angry because you’re going away with me?”

Jamie brought the reins down on the horses’ backs with a little more force than necessary, and the team bolted forward. Caught off guard, Bliss nearly lost her balance and tumbled backward into the wagon bed. Only her desperate grasp on the sleeve of Jamie’s rough woolen coat saved her.

“You were saying?” he prompted, attempting to hide a smile, as Bliss struggled for composure. She drew a deep breath, smoothing her frightfully tangled hair with her hands and willing her heartbeat to slow to its normal pace.

The wagon was moving, rolling and bumping over the rutted lane beyond Jamie’s gate, before he broke the thick silence. “Not that it’s any of your business, Duchess, but Carra cleans my house and cooks my meals—she does not share my bed.”

“But—”

Jamie cut Bliss off by saying, in a tone that did not encourage challenge, “Carra is young, and she has a few romantic ideas about me, but that’s as far as it goes. Her father is a powerful man among the Maori—if I dishonored Carra, I would also dishonor him, and that’s asking for more trouble than I care to have.”

Subdued, Bliss lowered her eyes to her lap. She was relieved that he and Carra weren’t lovers, but she wasn’t about to let this hardheaded sheepherder know that straight out.

“It’s a very long way to Wellington,” she said, fixing her eyes on the familiar hillsides, green even in the dead of winter, with their neat hedgerows.

Jamie said nothing in response, and a surreptitious glance in his direction revealed that his jawline was clamped down tight. Probably, he resented taking time away from his work to run a fool’s errand like this.

The lane dipped and then rose again, at an almost vertical angle, and Bliss grasped the wagon seat hard in both hands, fearing that she would go tumbling backward. She could hear the contents of the picnic hamper rattling dangerously.