“So it was you that tried to rob me in that Brisbane alley, was it?” Reeve accused him, but his hands were gripping Jamie’s shoulders. The talisman he wore around his neck, a twin to Jamie’s, glistened in the bright Queensland sunshine.

Eleanor felt an ache in one corner of her heart as she watched Jamie smile. “Aye, mate—that was me.” In a wink he was out of his jacket and rolling up one sleeve to show off the scar Eleanor remembered so well. “Made a job of it, didn’t you, now?”

Reeve swore as he assessed the injury he’d done his brother.

Elisabeth began to fret at her mother’s side, and Eleanor knew it was time to step forward. She assembled a sweet expression and started toward Jamie, only to have the little girl at her side pull free and dash toward Reeve, shouting, “Papa! Papa!”

Reeve’s face was a study in surprise as he lifted the delighted child into his arms. Frowning, he scanned the people milling along the wharf and on shore. “What are you doing here, shoebutton?”

While Elisabeth was prattling out her answer, Jamie’s robin’s-egg-blue eyes at last found Eleanor. Instead of the welcome she had hoped to see there, though, she discovered a glacial hardness. This is our child, she wanted to scream out, but she didn’t dare. It was clear that Jamie still hated her, would always hate her.

She turned from the scene on the wharf to flee, looking back only once. Reeve and Jamie were striding along a good distance behind her, engaged in an earnest conversation, Elisabeth riding happily on Reeve’s shoulders.

On the path leading to the hotel Eleanor encountered Cora, who was blubbering and wringing her hands.

“First you take off with little Elisabeth, and now Duncan’s gone and kidnapped Mrs. McKenna—where is that child, Eleanor Kilgore? What have you done with her?”

Eleanor wiped the tears from her cheeks with the back of one hand. “Elisabeth is with Reeve,” she said quietly. She didn’t ask where Duncan might have gone with Maggie, because she knew; she’d guessed his plan, seen it written in his eyes the moment he’d learned that Maggie was to be separated from Reeve for a period of time. Together, they’d plotted the rest.

It wasn’t far, the little hideaway Duncan had taken for the occasion of winning the fair Maggie. Eleanor decided to go there and have vengeance on all the men who had scorned her: Duncan, Reeve, and Jamie.

It would be so easy.

“I shouldn’t have done this, Maggie, and I’m sorry.” Duncan was so contrite that his captive was hard put to be furious with him, though she knew she should have been. Her main concern was Elisabeth; she prayed that the child was safe.