Red in the face, Bliss nodded and croaked, “Yes, Aunt Calandra, I’m just fine. But—”

Everyone was staring at her.

Bliss drew a deep breath, closed her eyes for a moment and blurted, “But Jamie didn’t f-force himself on me. I was quite willing.”

At this, Calandra swooned but did not faint dead away. Bertha stood ready to slap her mistress awake should the need arise.

Mr. Wilson tossed down his dinner napkin. “There you have it,” he said abruptly. “Nothing can be done.”

Bliss felt a crazy kind of relief, even though this could herald the end of all her wonderful plans. She wondered what Jamie would do if she went to him now and threw herself on his mercy.

Jamie lay stretched out on the bed in the room he always used when he visited Peony in Auckland, staring up at the ceiling. He was too exhausted to sleep, and too worried about Bliss.

Despite the fear he felt for her, he smiled in the darkness. God, what he wouldn’t give to strip her naked and kiss every freckle on that delicious little body of hers.

The prospect made him harden uncomfortably. With a sigh, Jamie sat up and reached for the cheroots on the bedside stand. Peony didn’t allow smoking in her house, but she probably wouldn’t find out until after he was gone, anyway. He struck a match and held it to the tip of the small brown cigar.

As he smoked, he deliberately shifted his thoughts from Bliss and the thousand and one different predicaments she might have gotten herself into, to the skirmish on the road a few days before.

Dunnigan had worked for Increase in Queensland, when Jamie first knew him, and later he’d turned up in New Zealand. He’d wanted Eleanor, Dunnigan had, tried to force his attentions on her, in fact. Jamie had heard her screaming and permanently changed the shape of Dunnigan’s nose.

He sighed, remembering. That had been before he’d learned, the hard way, how Eleanor liked to lead a man on and then watch Jamie take his vengeance on the poor bastard. He waited for the old pain to come over him, but when it did, it was little more than a twinge.

There was a rap at his door and then Peony let herself in, flipping on the electric light switch. The glare made Jamie flinch and close his eyes for a moment.

“Just as I thought,” his friend complained good-naturedly. “You’ve been smoking in here.”

Jamie smiled and shrugged. “Sorry.”

Peony crossed the room and wrestled open a window. When she turned around, there was an expression of concern in her eyes. “No luck today?”

Jamie knew she was referring to the search for Bliss, and he shook his head. For some reason, he wasn’t comfortable talking about the Duchess with Peony, and that was something new, for there had never been anything he couldn’t talk to her about before. “I’ve been thinkin’ about that tiff she and I ’ad with Dunnigan and ’is men—”