Angelfire

by Linda Lael Miller

  She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror over the chest of drawers. Dressed for a formal ball, yet with straw in her rumpled and dirty hair, she was indeed a sight. It was no wonder that Carra disliked and mistrusted her.

  Bliss began to pace the small, immaculately clean room, planning, waiting, wondering.

  She would have her bath, and a much-needed rest, and then, when night came, she would escape again. No one was taking her back to Alexander.

  No, Bliss meant to be in Auckland before more than another day or two passed. Now that she was so close, she could afford to spend some of her scant supply of money on coach fare. When she reached Auckland, she would make her way to the harbor, find out which ships were bound for America, and go from one to another until she found someone looking to hire a governess or companion.

  Despite her earlier insistence that she would do nothing of the sort, Carra brought hot water upstairs for Bliss’s bath. Although her expression was grim, she also provided the unwanted guest with a warm flannel nightgown, a pot of tea, and a plate of sweet cakes, along with more wood for the fire.

  The bath and the tea made Bliss languid, lowering her defenses. The weariness she’d been fighting overwhelmed her, and she crawled into the narrow bed, with its clean, crisp sheets, and fell into a sound sleep.

  When she awakened, the room was dark, except for the silver light of an icy winter moon. The tub had been taken away, as had the tea tray, and the fire had shrunk to a few flickering embers in the grate.

  Bliss crawled out of bed, stretched, and carefully dressed herself in the black silk gown, wanting to save her good tweed skirt and linen shirtwaist to wear when seeking a post in Auckland. She took great care to be quiet in packing her few belongings and crossing the room.

  Holding her breath, she reached out for the doorknob—and found that it wouldn’t turn.

  The door between Bliss Stafford and her glorious future in America had been soundly locked.

  Chapter 2

  JAMIE LAY ALONE IN BED, HIS HANDS CUPPED BEHIND HIS HEAD, HIS mouth curved into a grin as he listened to Bliss Stafford’s futile struggles with the door of her room. She was determined, he’d give her that.

  With a chuckle and a shake of his head, he sat up. Not bothering to light the lamp first, he reached out for the tin packet of cheroots on his bedside stand. A flame rasped in the darkness, smelling of sulfur, as he struck a match. Next door, Bliss was still grappling hopelessly with the knob.

  Jamie drew deeply of the smoke from his cheroot and listened in amused silence. The misnamed little chit was trying to kick down the door now, from the sounds of things.

  “You’re a scoundrel and a bastard!” she shrieked suddenly, her shrill voice carrying. “Do you hear me, Mr. McKenna?”

  Jamie sighed. A man would have to be deaf not to hear her, he thought, wondering why he didn’t just let her go and be done with the whole mess. The fact was that he couldn’t bear the thought of Bliss all alone in the world, making her bumbling way to far-off America. She needed a man, be he father or husband, to look out for her.

  “Let—me—out!” The words were screamed, punctuated by wrenching rattles of the doorknob and furious kicks at the panel itself.

  In another minute, Jamie reflected, she’d be knotting sheets together to climb out the window. He smiled and then snuffed out his cheroot and clambered out of bed, both in the same motion. Saints in heaven, it would be like her to try that—she hadn’t a brain in that beautiful little head of hers.

  Hastily, he struggled into his pants and a woolen shirt. The silence from the room next door to his was unnerving. “Bliss?” he called out, in question, at the same time wrenching open his bedroom window.

  The night wind was brisk and icy, taking away Jamie’s breath. Still, he managed to rasp a curse, for a twisted bit of sheet was just slithering out of Bliss’s window, like a fat white snake.

  “You’ll break your fool neck!” he shouted, before slamming the window shut and whirling around. He wrenched his boots onto his bare feet and dashed down the rear stairway, stumbling once and nearly falling down the steps.

  He didn’t bother with a coat, and the cold stung his face and hands and seeped through his clothes. Swearing under his breath, he rounded the large stone house to stand directly beneath Bliss’s window.

  Sure enough, the little fool was halfway down the side of the house, nimble as a spider. And herself dressed in that evening gown, with no coat to cover her bare shoulders.

  Jamie couldn’t remember being angrier—or more frightened. He stood perfectly still, watching as Bliss descended the makeshift rope, praying that she wouldn’t fall. The moment she was within reach, he grasped her by the waist. The motion sent them both toppling backward onto the frosted ground.

  Bliss fought for her freedom, kicking and clawing and making a furious, incoherent sound in her throat, while Jamie used every ounce of strength he possessed to subdue her.

  Finally, she lay gasping on her back, Jamie kneeling astride her hips and pressing her wrists to the ground with his hands. The moonlight gave her skin an opalescent glow; the evening gown barely covered her full breasts, which were moving rhythmically with every breath she drew.

  The hint of a pink nipple taunted him, and though it was nothing he hadn’t seen before, a thousand times, he was stirred by the sight. After a moment, he thrust himself to his feet, breathing hard, as though he’d run a far distance.

  “Are you out of your mind?” he demanded, extending one hand to the woman raising herself from the ground.

  She glared at the offered hand, and for a moment Jamie fully expected her to spit upon it. In the end, however, she took it and allowed herself to be hauled upright.

  Jamie was furious, his mind full of the injuries Bliss could have suffered had she fallen. She might even have been killed. “I asked you a question!” he bellowed.

  Bliss squared her moon-kissed shoulders and then bent to take up her satchel from the ground. “So you did,” she answered coolly. “But it just so happens that I don’t choose to answer.”

  The visions of this redheaded snippet lying broken and bleeding on the frozen ground were instantly displaced. In fact, Jamie considered carrying Bliss back upstairs and throwing her out the damned window. He grabbed her by one elbow and flung her toward the back of the house.

  She bristled, drawing her dignity around her as she would a shawl or a cloak, and marched ahead of him. She put a man in mind of a martyr, on the way to the gallows or the stake.

  Inside the kitchen, glass clinked as Jamie angrily lit a lamp. “Sit down,” he bit out, and to his utter amazement, Bliss obeyed him, taking a seat at the table. Her eyes, blue as wet ink, were full of pride and challenge, and her red hair tumbled down her back in a coppery cascade.

  She smoothed the skirts of her black satin evening gown, and her manner said that climbing out a second-story window in the middle of the night was behavior a normal person wouldn’t presume to question.

  “I’m cold,” she announced, with frosty stateliness, “and I would like a cup of tea.”

  “A cup of tea, is it?” Jamie muttered, but nevertheless he ladled water into the pot and slammed it down on the stove. Since the fire had been banked for the night, he had to add kindling and stir the embers. “A cup of tea, she wants, after climbin’ down the side of me ’ouse like a thief—”

  Bliss’s nervous but glad giggle startled him. He whirled to face her, glaring.

  She pursed her lips and sat up very straight in her chair. “You left me no choice but to escape by any means available to me,” she said loftily.

  Jamie shook his head, marveling, and reached out for the tin of tea leaves Carra kept on a shelf above the stove. He slammed it down on the counter with a crash that made Bliss give a satisfying little start of surprise.

  “Men,” Bliss observed, extending her bare, chapped hands and assessing them as though she were wearing a fine and immaculate pair of gloves. “They are always so upset to disco
ver that a woman has thoughts of her own and the gumption to carry them out. Gumption is highly admired in America, you know.”

  “How the ’ell do you know what’s admired in America?” Jamie demanded, furious beyond all good sense and grateful that he didn’t have to explain why. He couldn’t have done that, even to himself.

  He hurled spoonfuls of tea into a crockery pot as heat began to surge through the kettle on the stove.

  Bliss wet her lips with the tip of her tongue—Jamie found the gesture patently disconcerting—and kept her eyes averted. “One couldn’t possibly expect a man of your insensitivity and social awkwardness to understand,” she sniffed.

  Jamie drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Keep your ’ead, man,” he muttered to himself. Then, in a louder voice, he added, “Thank you very much, Miss Stafford. I ’old you in the fondest regard, too.”

  She blushed beneath a soft, golden spattering of freckles. Jamie found himself wondering whether or not the rest of Bliss Stafford’s lush little body was so decorated.

  “We seem to be at sixes and sevens, you and I,” she said, in that haughty way of hers.

  Jamie fought conflicting urges to carry her off to his bed and to turn her across his knee, right then and there. The little bird on the spout of the teakettle, the one frivolity he’d permitted in his house, began to whistle. Leaving Bliss’s observation to dangle unanswered in the air between them, he turned to take the kettle from the stove and promptly burned his fingers on the handle.

  “Good heavens.” Bliss sighed, standing up and dipping water from the bucket beside the sink. “Put your hand in here,” she ordered briskly, holding out the ladle.

  Jamie did so; the numbing cold soothed his burn. Utterly baffled by the new emotions he was feeling, he could only stare down at Bliss Stafford and wonder what capricious fate had sent her to hide out in his barn, irritate Carra, and then scare him out of his hide by shinnying down the outside wall of his house. Saints in heaven, he’d hardly lapsed into the brogue in years, and now he was thinking in it!

  Bliss was examining his fingers. “Better now?” she asked, as though speaking to an injured little boy.

  Jamie remembered himself and jerked his hand from hers. “Never mind that. If you ’ave to ’elp, make the tea.”

  A small and rather annoying smile touched Bliss’s mouth as she obligingly reached for a potholder, took up the kettle, and poured scalding hot water over the tea leaves. Jamie sank into a chair with a despondent sigh.

  Bliss found mugs and carried them to the table, along with the pot of freshly brewed tea. Anyone would have thought, Jamie observed miserably to himself, that she belonged in this house. Was its mistress.

  She sat down across from him and poured tea for him and then herself. Every move was one of dignity, until she took a noisy sip from her cup.

  In spite of his confusion and his anger, Jamie laughed, and Bliss glared at him, insulted.

  “It’s hot,” she explained.

  He inclined his head slightly. “Yes, Duchess,” he replied, fighting to keep a straight face.

  In the next instant, without any warning at all, there were tears brimming in her indigo eyes. “You needn’t make fun of me,” she said, sniffling. “It isn’t as though the past few days have been easy for me, you know. I’ve had hardly anything to eat the whole time, and I’ve slept in the most dreadful places.” She stopped and drew a deep and very moist breath. “I have been in terrible danger, too. I might have encountered bushrangers, after all.”

  Jamie took a leisurely sip of his tea, then quipped, “Or broken your neck climbing out an upstairs window.”

  A single tear streaked down Bliss’s cheek, and Jamie found himself thinking soft, silly thoughts.

  “You have no right to hold me prisoner, Mr. McKenna,” she pointed out. “I’m a subject of the Crown, after all—”

  “Strange talk, coming from a future Yank,” Jamie interrupted lightly. “They bend their knees to nobody—nary a king or a queen among ’em.”

  Bliss blushed, and again Jamie was possessed of a longing to see her without her clothes.

  “Sometimes,” she confessed softly, “I wonder if I’m ever going to get away from New Zealand.” She lifted her beautiful eyes to Jamie’s face. “You’re going to take me back to Wellington, aren’t you?” she asked.

  Jamie only nodded. For some reason, he couldn’t speak.

  “I know you believe that’s the honorable, upright thing to do—”

  He waited, willing to listen even though his mind was made up. And Jamie McKenna rarely retreated from a decision, once he’d made it.

  “You can’t possibly know what a mistake you’re making, of course,” Bliss went on distractedly. She was a little pale, and he suspected that her hands were knotted in her lap.

  He’d seen such female theatrics before.

  “Alexander will force me to address him circumspectly, as ’Mr. Zate,’ from the day we’re married,” she said.

  “I’ve ’eard of worse things,” Jamie remarked, after taking another swallow of tea.

  All of a sudden, Bliss’s small, cold hands were out of her lap and reaching across the tabletop, gripping Jamie’s. “I’ll have to share his bed,” she whispered, “and I don’t love him.”

  Jamie thrust himself out of his chair, turning his back. He didn’t want to hear what privileges her husband would have; he didn’t want to think about them. “You’re not my problem, Duchess,” he said, after a lengthy silence. “Not after I leave you off in Wellington, anyway.”

  Bliss rarely wept; she’d found it such a fruitless occupation in the past. Now, however, faced with the prospect of a lifetime spent curtsying and crawling to a man she didn’t love, she gave free rein to her emotions. A heartsick, snuffling wail escaped her, and she covered her face with both hands.

  Jamie McKenna’s voice was surprisingly gentle. “Don’t cry, please,” he pleaded hoarsely, crouching in front of her chair. “It can’t be as bad as all that, now can it?”

  “It’s every bit as bad, and worse!” Bliss sobbed. She fought for the dignity to blurt out, “Rest assured—you shall have me on your conscience, Mr. McKenna, for the rest of your life!”

  He gave a rueful chuckle and straightened, taking one of Bliss’s hands in his and pulling her easily to her feet. His next motion should have incensed and terrified Bliss, but instead she found it comforting. Jamie McKenna lifted her into his arms, seemingly expending no more effort than if she’d been a child.

  “There, now,” he said, his voice coming rough and soft from the depths of his throat. “I doubt if this bloke is as bad as all that. What you want is a good night’s sleep, Duchess.”

  Bliss stared at him, blinking away her tears. Her arms had automatically wound themselves around his neck. Perhaps there was still hope of escape, if she remembered to keep her wits about her. “I don’t want to be alone,” she heard herself say.

  Jamie laughed softly. “Don’t worry—I wouldn’t think of turnin’ me back on you. You might be out the window again.”

  He paused to quench the flame in the lamp, then carried Bliss through the darkness, up invisible stairs, along a hallway glowing faintly with stray shafts of moonlight.

  Bliss marveled at herself. She’d always been independent and strong-minded. Now, just because Jamie McKenna had lifted her into his arms, she had all the resistance of an unstarched petticoat. “Put me down,” she said, but she didn’t mean a word of it and Jamie obviously knew that.

  He carried her into a darkened room with a rumpled, unmade bed and tossed her onto the mattress. “Reminds me of another night,” he muttered, sitting down on the edge of the bed to wrestle off his boots. “In Melbourne, it was.”

  Albeit at a rather late date, Bliss had recovered her strength of character. “Now, just a minute!” she sputtered, inching toward the side of the bed. “You can’t possibly think that I’m going to spend the night—”

  In a deft motion of one hand, Jamie reached out,
caught her wrist in a grasp as steely as a manacle, and effectively pinned her in place. “That’s exactly what I think. I’m not about to let you out of me sight, Duchess.”

  Bliss’s heart was thumping in her throat. If she screamed, would Carra come to her aid? “What are you going to do?”

  “Dived out of a carriage, she did,” Jamie went on, as though Bliss hadn’t spoken. He stretched out on the bed, fully clothed, and she had no choice but to do the same, since he was still holding on to her wrist. “Came rolling toward me like a Texas tumbleweed.”

  If he thought Bliss was going to be swayed by a chummy reference to something American, he was dead wrong. “Let me up! I’ll be spoiled for Alexander, or any other man!”

  “Isn’t that what you wanted?” he asked, pretending befuddlement.

  Oddly enough, a part of Bliss wanted to be besmirched. By this man, at least. It was exciting, in an uncomfortable sort of way, to be lying beside him in the darkness. “Yes—no!”

  He laughed. “Make up your mind, Duchess.”

  “Stop calling me that!”

  “Never. It suits you too well.”

  “I hate you, Jamie McKenna!”

  He sighed companionably. The man had a gift for overlooking the incongruities of a situation. “Tell me about yourself, Bliss. Did you grow up in Wellington?”

  His grasp on her wrist had loosened, if not relaxed entirely, and Bliss realized that she wasn’t afraid, though by all accounts she should have been. “No. My father keeps a lighthouse down the coast from Wellington, and I spent my childhood there.”

  Subtly, Jamie’s fingers had shifted; he was holding Bliss’s hand. His thumb stroked the tender flesh of her wrist in a way that produced feelings of sweet discomfort.

  “Have you any brothers and sisters, then?” he asked, and the meter of his voice was such that they might have been at a very proper lawn party, instead of lying, alone and unchaperoned, in a dark bedroom.

  An old sadness filled Bliss. “I had a brother, but he died when I was small. I hardly remember him.” It was a lie that she didn’t remember Colin; her father had never allowed her to forget that the lad might have lived if he hadn’t gone out to search for her that stormy night.