It was probably the worst thing Bliss could have said, but the words were out before she was able to stop them. “Not even Eleanor? Or Peony?”

Jamie’s hands, warming and caressing her icy, wind-stung cheeks only a fraction of a moment before, fell away.

By then, there seemed no point in turning back, since the grave mistake had already been made. Bliss compounded it. “Cutter told me that you loved Eleanor,” she said.

Jamie had taken up the reins again, and he brought them down on the horses’ backs with a near-cruel force. “I ought to pull that old gossip’s beard out!” he bellowed over the clomping of hooves and the frightened nickers of the team.

Even though she knew it was highly inadvisable, Bliss couldn’t help laughing at the image that sprang up in her mind. She covered her mouth with one hand and held on to the seat with the other as Jamie drove the team to a near run.

“What’s so funny!” he roared at Bliss, who should have been intimidated but was not.

She laughed until tears were streaking down her face, scalding her cold-reddened skin, and Jamie grudgingly slowed the wagon to a more judicious pace.

“I could do without all this interference!” he fussed, and he sounded so ridiculous that Bliss squealed with amusement and was carried away all over again.

Presently, her mirth subsided, but Jamie’s high dudgeon did not. They had reached their destination and were pulling to a stop in the gathering dusk before he said another word.

“Go and tell Carra to warm some brandy,” he told Bliss abruptly, easing down from the box and moving with obvious stiffness to begin unhitching the exhausted team.

Bliss knew he was hurting and, for that reason, she was willing to forgive an attitude that would normally have been insufferable. “I think,” she said, bunching her skirts in her hands and climbing down from the wagon seat with care, “that I can manage to heat brandy without Carra’s help, Mr. McKenna.”

Jamie made a rude, grumbling sound and went on about his work. After allowing herself a notion of putting her tongue out at him—Bliss doubted that he’d even noticed the gesture—she turned and started across the barnyard toward the sturdy house. A light burned in the parlor window, and Bliss quickened her pace at the promise of warmth and food and maybe a taste of brandy for herself.

Carra met her at the front door with a face turned to stone. “You came back,” she said.

Bliss knew the time was wrong to announce that she and Jamie were married. She wasn’t without sympathy for Carra, after all, because she knew what it was to love Jamie McKenna and have no hope of ever being loved in return. “Yes,” she answered simply. “But I doubt that I’ll be here for long. Carra, Mr. McKenna was—injured—on the journey. I’m going to warm some brandy for him, and I wonder if you’d mind making a nice fire in his room so that he can rest in comfort.”