The sky was beginning to grow dark and cloudy, and a swift wind came up from the south. In unspoken agreement Maggie and Reeve returned to the house, this time through a rear door.

The kitchen, roomy and immaculate, was empty. Maggie didn’t protest when Reeve led her up the rear stairway without a word of explanation, and she was, to her shame, actually disappointed when he deposited her in front of a door on the second floor and ordered her to make up for some of the rest she’d lost the night before.

All the same, Maggie was tired and, yawning, she opened the door and went in. The room was not large, but it was pleasant and airy, with a colorful patchwork quilt on a carefully polished brass bed. There was a rocking chair and, wealth upon wealth, a small shelf stuffed with books.

Maggie helped herself to one after dutifully removing her muddy shoes, and stretched out on the bed. She was asleep before she’d reached the end of the first page.

Reeve paced the parlor as he would have paced the study had he been in Sydney, fighting whatever it was inside him that made him crave the silken feel of Maggie’s flesh trembling against his own. Never in all his life had he been as obsessed with a woman as he was with this saucy, gray-eyed Yankee snippet, and he didn’t like the feeling, as treacherously pleasant as it was.

Kala entered the room silently, as she entered every room, and squatted in front of the fireplace to light the fire she’d laid earlier. The wind howled outside, sending huge droplets of rain lashing against the windows. When a blaze was crackling on the hearth, Kala left again.

She was a mystery to Reeve, ageless, as though she might have existed since the Dreamtime, the time of Aboriginal legend, before the start of recorded history. Kala might have been twenty, and she might have been a hundred and twenty, and because he didn’t want to think about Maggie Chamberlin, Reeve pondered his silent housekeeper.

An insistent pounding at the front door brought him out of his wanderings; to save Kala the trouble, he made his way into the entry hall and answered the knock himself.

Few things would have surprised him more than finding Loretta standing on his porch, wet to the skin. A wagon, probably hired at the inn, was just pulling away, the driver’s back hunched against the thundering rain.

“Aren’t you going to let me in?” Loretta asked sweetly, her lips curved in a smile that belied her sodden clothes, her drenched hair, and the forlorn feather drooping from the side of her once fashionable hat.

Reeve stepped back to admit her, having no other choice. “What are you doing here?” he managed to demand as Loretta made a beeline to the parlor fireplace.