Tentatively, she reached out to touch it, just as she had touched his mutilated back. “What’s this?”

Jamie closed his eyes, and there was a stubborn set to his jaw. Even before the silence lengthened, Bliss knew he didn’t mean to answer.

She bent to squint at the words imprinted on the round piece of brass, now almost worn away. “ ’Blessed—is he—who considereth—the poor.’” Bliss frowned. “The poor?”

“It’s a beggar’s badge,” Jamie conceded, though he still wouldn’t look at Bliss. “Are you satisfied?”

“No, I’m not,” Bliss responded. “What in heaven’s name is a beggar’s badge?”

At last, Jamie opened his eyes, and in their depths Bliss saw remembered misery. “Back in Dublin, a priest—Father McDougal—gave it to me,” he said, in a soft, faraway voice. “It gave me leave to beg.”

Though she was an imaginative person, Bliss could not envision Jamie McKenna begging for anything. “Did you?” she asked, in a stricken, barely audible voice.

He chuckled, low in his throat, but both the sound and the expression on his face were totally devoid of humor. “Never ’ad to,” he replied, gazing up at the ceiling again. “I was transported for stealin’ before it came to that.”

Bliss bit her lower lip. Transported. That explained the scarred flesh on his back.

She said nothing because nothing came to mind.

Jamie sat up, reaching out to take Bliss’s chin very gently in his hand. “Don’t,” he said hoarsely.

Bliss was still gnawing at her lip, and he stopped her by caressing her mouth with his thumb. A shiver of need went through her, and at last she realized that she was naked, as was Jamie, and that they’d been sharing a bed for hours.

Jamie’s eyes danced as he watched hot color climb up over her cheekbones; obviously, he knew precisely what she was thinking. “Nothing happened, Duchess,” he pointed out. There were cheroots on the bedside table, and Jamie lit one with a wooden match.

Bliss was hardly reassured. She squirmed to the edge of the bed and then sat there, miserable with embarrassment, wondering how she could dress without exposing herself. The heated abandon she’d felt earlier, when she’d stood in the bathtub and Jamie had caressed her, was a thing of the past.

After considerable wriggling and wrenching, she managed to wrap another blanket around herself and stand up. Without once looking back at Jamie—indeed, she was trying to pretend that he didn’t exist—she found her satchel, opened it, and took out the tweed skirt and shirtwaist she’d been saving to wear while seeking a position in Auckland, along with clean underclothes. Hastily, she dressed, all the while trying to shield herself behind the blanket.

When she turned around to face Jamie, he was sitting on the edge of the bed, wearing his trousers and buttoning up his shirt. He winked at her. “Everything’s all right, Duchess,” he assured her, with gruff tenderness. “I promise.”

Bliss looked at the tumbled bed and swallowed painfully. Nothing had happened between her and Jamie, but it might as well have. If word of the time she’d spent with this man ever got back to any of the people she knew, she’d be ruined.