Finally, she found it. Realizing that she’d been holding her breath, she let it out.

“I won’t try to make excuses for my behavior,” Kirk went on, “for there are none.”

Maggie was only half listening; her attention was focused on the sounds of tinny piano music and raucous laughter coming from outside. Underneath, she thought she detected the gentle whoosh of an incoming tide. She was near the harbor then, and in an area where men came to drink and revel. She remembered that part of Sydney that she and the maid, Sally Crockett, had ridden through on the trolley car. If this place was like that one, she was probably safer inside the carriage.

On the other hand …

Suddenly, the rig came to a lurching stop and the driver began shouting at someone who had gotten in his way. Without taking another moment to consider, Maggie wrenched open the door and leapt out.

As luck would have it, the toe of her slipper caught in the hem of her gown, and she went rolling across a hard-packed dirt road instead of landing at a dead run as she’d hoped to do. Finally, when she’d stopped trundling end over end, she came, bruised and scraped and rumpled, to a stop against a pair of scuffed and muddy boots. Untangling herself from her skirts, Maggie looked not at the wearer of the boots, but back over her shoulder.

Duncan was striding toward her, and while he might have felt sorry minutes before, there was no sign of remorse in his moon-washed features now. He resembled a devil, and his plans for Maggie would be worked in hell.

Hardly daring to hope, she looked up at the man against whose boots she’d landed with such dash and flare. He was tall and he wore a slouchy leather hat and a vest, but that was about all Maggie could tell about him from her position. She did catch a glint of brass or gold at his throat, and for a moment her heart did a wild leap, but instinctively she knew that, whoever this man was, he couldn’t be Reeve.

He bent and, with one work-hardened hand, hauled Maggie to her feet. She huddled against him, staring at Duncan, who reached out for her with a grasping motion that made Maggie remember how he’d hurt her inside the carriage.

“No,” she whispered, and the stranger held her close to his chest.

“Let her go,” Duncan ordered peremptorily. “This is a private matter!”

The stranger’s arm was hard as steel, though he held Maggie gently. “Did you throw her out of that carriage, mate,” he asked, “or did she jump?”

Maggie turned her head and felt a cold metal circle press against her cheek. The man’s chest was hairy and warm and hard, and she clung to him mostly because of the medallion he wore. “I jumped,” she whispered miserably.