“Cutter?” she ventured shyly.

“Aye, lass,” the old man replied, hoisting himself into the loft with a lusty grunt of fatigue. “What is it?”

“Thank you,” Bliss responded. “Thank you for everything.”

Cutter uttered a gruff disclaimer and crawled off into the shadows of the loft. Within minutes, he was snoring fit to shake the floorboards.

Smiling, Bliss banked the fire, blew out the lanterns, slipped off her soiled shirtwaist and skirt, and crawled into bed beside Jamie. He stirred as she settled beneath the blanket, but didn’t awaken.

For the next little while, Bliss lay looking up at the darkness, silently thanking God that Cutter and Dog had come along when they had. If it hadn’t been so, she had to confess, she and Jamie might truly have been “shaking hands in heaven” at that very moment.

There was a shifting on the mattress beside her, along with a muffled groan. “Duchess?”

Bliss laid her hand on Jamie’s arm. “Yes, my love,” she said softly, “I’m here.”

At her touch and words of quiet reassurance, Jamie went back to his rest.

Much later, in the depths of the night, Bliss opened her eyes, uncertain as to whether she’d been roused by a sound or a feeling. Fear possessed her, and she groped in the darkness with frantic hands. Finding the bed empty, except for herself, she whispered, “Jamie?”

“Here I am, darlin’,” he told her. She heard the door close and the draft that had chilled her began to dissolve.

“What are you doing out of bed?” she asked angrily as she felt the mattress give under his weight.

He stretched out beside her. “No gentleman over the age of two stays in bed to do what I just did,” he said.

“Oh,” came the meek response. “Well, good night, then.”

There was a mischievous silence. “I need something for the pain,” Jamie said.

Bliss sighed. “There’s Scotch on the table. Shall I get it for you?”

Beneath the blankets, his fingers began unfastening her camisole. “It isn’t Scotch I want,” he replied in a low and husky voice, cupping her bare breast in his hand and training the nipple to the shape he wanted with the pad of his thumb.

Now it was Bliss who groaned, and not from pain. She decided to address him formally; perhaps that would serve to remind him of the proprieties. “We are not alone, Mr. McKenna,” she said.

He chuckled in the darkness, his hand still doing its devilish work. Soon enough he’d be up to real mischief. “Cutter sleeps like the dead,” he told her. “I could have you on the ladder to the loft and he’d never know the difference.”

The very idea made heat throb in Bliss’s face and caused a moist ache between her legs. “You forget yourself, sir,” she insisted, at once desperate and angry. “Furthermore, you’re in no condition for such goings on as—”

His hand left her breast to sweep down over her silken belly and dally dangerously close to the nest of curls where her womanhood was concealed. “As this, for instance?”