Reeve hurried away to fetch the requested items.
Bliss’s eyes went wider, and her knees felt weak. She drew deep breaths in an effort not to faint, but the smell and the scent of blood seemed to be everywhere.
“God knows, I’m—no friend—of Jamie McKenna’s,” Duncan went on, despite Maggie’s earlier words. “But—Reeve should know—”
Bliss drew nearer, holding her breath. There was no chance of her swooning now; the mention of Jamie’s name had brought her around as effectively as smelling salts could have.
“The old man—said this would—explain.” Duncan opened his hand, and what rested inside it made Bliss bound forward with an anguished cry. She snatched the blood-covered beggar’s badge on its rawhide strip from his fingers.
With a scream of grief, she whirled and ran blindly outside, ignoring Maggie’s cry of, “Bliss, come back!”
Duncan’s terrified gelding nickered and danced in the road, its reins dangling along the ground. Forgetting that she knew little or nothing about riding a horse, Bliss managed to drag herself into the saddle and gather the reins into her hands.
Some instinct told her that she need only follow the road to Brisbane. She wouldn’t have to find Jamie’s captors; they would find her.
Tears were streaming down Maggie’s face as she knelt beside a half-delirious Duncan on the floor and stared up at her husband, who had just returned with the supplies she’d asked for. “They’ve got Jamie,” she sobbed. “Oh dear God, Reeve, they’ve got Jamie! And Bliss has gone after him!”
Reeve swore, torn between Maggie and the brother he’d failed once before, however inadvertently. “Yank,” he whispered brokenly, “can you ’andle things ’ere, if I go?”
Maggie nodded, after only the briefest hesitation. “God be with you, Reeve McKenna,” she whispered. “And no matter what happens, don’t you forget that I love you!”
Reeve bent to kiss her briefly, then, after collecting a rifle and scabbard from a locked cabinet in his study, ran out of the house and around toward the stables. He’d have given nearly anything he had for one of the racehorses he kept at Parramatta, but there was little point in making wishes. He saddled a buckskin gelding and set out after Bliss.
It was no real surprise that she’d vanished, even though she’d been only minutes ahead of him. That was the kind of day it was turning out to be.
Walter Davis came forward, wearing rough, bushman’s clothes rather than those of a gentleman, when Bliss was brought into camp. “You little fool,” he rasped, gazing up at her with misery in his eyes.
Bliss was weary and dirty and afraid, and she looked around the strange little compound with rounded eyes. There was no sign of Jamie, although she could see Peony lying on the ground, a stone’s throw away, motionless.
Bliss dismounted, shunning Walter’s offer of help, and raced toward Peony. It took only one look to realize that she was dead.
Her head spinning, Bliss battled back the sickness burning in her throat. It was then that she heard the cry, like the keening of a furious, tortured animal. Lifting her eyes, she saw Jamie, bound to a tree, with his hands behind him, his face so bloody that his features were barely recognizable.
“Oh God, Bliss,” he choked out, “not you, not ’ere—”
She ran to Jamie before any of them could stop her, and put her arms around him, resting her head against his shoulder. His medallion was still clutched tight in her fingers. “I love you,” she said softly.
Jamie’s whisper was a grating sob. An anguished prayer. “Sweet Jesus, no—no—”
Bliss lifted her hands to his bloody face, her heart breaking within her. Hard, thin fingers curled around her arm and tore her away from Jamie. She was stunned that Increase, that tremulous old man, had such strength.
She soon saw that it was the hatred within him that gave him power, and the terrible, fathomless evil. He laughed with delight at Jamie’s agony.
“I told you, didn’t I, you filthy little mick? I warned you that you’d pay, and pay dearly, for what you and that whore did to me!”
Jamie strained at his bonds, almost insane in his rage and his frustration. Bliss knew that however Peony had died, he had been forced to look on, helpless, and with a shiver she realized that this was what was planned for her as well. A terrible death, with Jamie as a witness. For him, there could be no greater torture.
She lifted her chin, determined not to let either Increase or her husband know how frightened she really was.
“Let ’er go,” Jamie bit out, twisting against the rawhide that held him. “It’s me you want—not ’er!”
Increase smiled with pleasure. “Ah. And now the pleading begins,” he said.
Chapter 25
BLISS WRENCHED HER ARM FREE OF INCREASE PIPHER’S GRASP AND hurried back to Jamie. She planted a gentle kiss on his lips and then carefully slipped the rawhide chain over his head, so that he once again wore the beggar’s badge. The torment she saw in his eyes as he watched her made her regret every sharp, angry word she’d ever said to him.
It was as though Bliss were looking deep into Jamie McKenna’s soul, seeing for the first time who and what he really was—the most honorable, the bravest of men. She swallowed a hard lump of shame to know that she’d brought him here, to this time and this place, and hot tears of regret burned in her eyes.
She was quick to force them back, to raise her chin. For Jamie’s sake, and her own, she must be stronger and more courageous than she’d ever been before.
“I love you, Duchess,” Jamie said brokenly. The bloody medallion resting against his torn, stained shirt was dull even in the late-afternoon sunshine.
Increase stepped between them, smiling that cadaverous smile of his, one thin hand resting against his chest. “Such sentiment,” he taunted, his sunken eyes glowing as he looked at Jamie. “It’s worthy of a sonnet, my boy. What exquisite agony it will be for you to watch your Juliet suffer.”
Jamie didn’t speak, and his gaze was level. His contempt for Increase was almost palpable.
His calm manner infuriated the old man. He hobbled over to Walter Davis, who was looking on with an unreadable expression on his face, and snatched the riding quirt the man held from his hand.
Bliss glanced at Jamie and saw a flicker of fear in his eyes as Increase stormed toward them. The expression changed to one of relief when the old man struck him with the whip instead of Bliss. The lash, striking Jamie’s right cheek, turned his head but did nothing to dislodge the pride that held him upright as surely as the bonds held him to the tree.
For her part, Bliss would have preferred taking the blow herself. She cried out as though she had, and attacked Increase in hatred and fury, her fists and feet flying.
“Bliss, stop it!” Jamie bit out the order, and it was not one she dared defy. She stepped back, breathing hard, her hands clenched at her sides.
There was a terrible silence, and then Increase touched the tip of the quirt beneath Bliss’s chin and hissed, “For that, little kitten, you will shed many tears of remorse.”
Bliss thought of poor Peony, only now being carried away by a silent Walter, and of all Jamie had suffered. She spat in Increase’s face.
He gave a strangled cry of rage that attracted the attention of the other men in the camp. Their expressions reflected a desultory sort of interest, along with a measure of amusement, but nothing else.
Bliss knew that none of them would come forward to defend her. These, after all, were the same men who had stood by and watched Peony die as a sacrifice to Increase Pipher’s hatred.
She stood her ground as Increase advanced toward her with the quirt unraised.
“Don’t,” Jamie whispered.
Increase halted, turning his devil’s smile on Jamie. “Do my ears deceive me, or did Jamie McKenna just ask for mercy?”
Jamie closed his eyes for a moment, opened them again. “Don’t ’urt ’er,” he said clearly. “Please.”
Increase laughed, slapping the quirt against one s
crawny leg. “Not good enough, Irishman. Not nearly good enough.”
As far as Bliss was concerned, the most savage beating could not equal the torment of seeing Jamie, proud, strong Jamie, reduced to hopeless pleas. “Stop it,” she screamed, flying at Increase once more and snatching the quirt from his hand. She went on with her senseless raging as she lashed Pipher, again and again, and it took Walter and another man to subdue her.
Increase was trembling visibly, long red welts rising across his face and neck where Bliss had struck him with the quirt. “Tie her to the wheel of that wagon,” he grated out, gesturing behind him.
“No.” The word left Jamie’s throat with a scraping sound, husky and painful to hear.
Walter and the other man hesitated only an instant before obeying Increase’s orders. They forced Bliss to her knees, wrenching her hands high and wide of her body before binding her wrists tightly to the rim of the wagon wheel. She looked back over one shoulder, her eyes shooting blue fire as she called out to her husband, “Don’t you dare give in and crawl for these jellyfishes, Jamie McKenna! Don’t you dare!”
“My God, Bliss,” Walter whispered desperately near her ear. “Shut up! Can’t you see that you’re making things worse?”
Bliss’s throat was parched, but she would not ask for water—or clemency. The other man had walked away, but Walter lingered, and Bliss knew then that he wanted to help but was far too frightened to try. Despair cooled her fiery temper.
“How could you, Walter?” she asked in a despondent whisper, her eyes closed, her cheek resting against a hard, splintery spoke of the wagon wheel. “How could you just stand there and watch Peony Ryan die, without lifting a finger to help?”
She heard Walter swallow. “Have you looked around you?” he countered after a moment’s hesitation. “There are twenty men here!”
She bit her lower lip, gathering the courage to hear the answer to the question she was about to ask. “Was it—bad?”
“Yes,” Walter answered, and Bliss heard all the brokenness and pain of mortal man echoing in that one word. “Yes, it was bad.”
“And J-Jamie?”
“He didn’t break, Bliss,” Walter marveled. “He was like a man made of stone. But you could feel the hatred coming out of him like heat from a fire.” He paused, tensing, and then whispered an oath.
Bliss turned her head to see for herself what was coming and then wished she hadn’t. Increase was approaching, carrying a blade as formidable as Jamie’s in one hand.
Muttering to himself all the while, he crouched and rent the back of Bliss’s bright yellow dress, as well as the camisole beneath, with the point of the knife. She trembled slightly as she felt a warm spring breeze touch her bare skin.
Visions loomed in her mind; she saw the ugly whip, wrapped as a wedding present and delivered to the suite she and Jamie had shared at the Victoria Hotel, and then the terrible, ridgelike scars on her husband’s back. Bliss closed her eyes and prayed silently for the courage to bear whatever she must.
Jamie saw a mist rising out of the ground, like smoke. He knew it would grow denser and denser, until it finally enshrouded his mind and extinguished his sanity.
A few yards away, Bliss was kneeling in the dirt, her yellow dress torn open to the waist, her arms outstretched on the wagon wheel, tightly bound at the wrists. Jamie did not feel his own injuries, he felt Bliss’s.
The sun was still fairly high. He ran a dry tongue over even drier lips and waited, as his enemy wished him to do. That was Increase’s favorite form of torture, after all; he wanted Jamie to sweat, and sweat he would. It might be hours before the old man used that whip on Bliss, and it might be minutes.
For now, Increase was inside that tent of his, in the center of camp.
The things Pipher had done to Peony rose in his mind, but Jamie forced them back. When he thought of them, the smoky mist grew thicker, more deadly. . . .
One hour passed, and then another. At intervals, Bliss looked back at Jamie over one naked, freckle-spattered shoulder, willing him to be strong. Jamie didn’t know which would kill him first, the fear of seeing her suffer or the awesome, aching love he felt for her.
Increase’s men began to move restlessly around the camp, no doubt hankering for the sport of watching another woman die. Bile rose in the back of Jamie’s throat, and his numb hands craved the sweet labor of vengeance. The men brought out bottles and cards and began amusing themselves as they waited.
By the time Increase made his appearance, strutting out of the tent with the coiled bullwhip in one hand, his cohorts were drunk to a man, but Jamie had no interest in them now. All his attention was fixed on Bliss; he saw her look at Increase and then lift that insolent little chin of hers, and in that moment his love for her bit into his middle like the teeth of an animal.
Like a ringmaster in a circus, Increase took his time, relishing the moment. To Jamie, he was as repulsive as a coffin worm.
The old man came over to him, shoving the whip under his nose. “Do you smell your own blood on this, McKenna?” he asked, sawing each word off with a rusty rasp. “You should.”
Jamie spoke evenly, quietly, and without betraying any emotion at all. “If you want to whip somebody to death, make it me. You’ve no quarrel with Bliss.”
Increase smiled and touched a welt that lay across his face in a red streak, thanks to Bliss’s temper. “Don’t I?”
“Mother of God, man,” Jamie breathed. “Tell me what you want to hear, and I’ll say it!”
Pipher laughed and strutted away toward Bliss. With a practiced flip of his wrist, he unfurled the lash, and the snapping sound made vomit rush into Jamie’s throat.
His knees weakened when he heard the sound of a snapped twig behind him and felt the rawhide binding him beginning to loosen. “This will make up, I’m thinkin’,” Reeve said in a whisper, “for that other time when you needed me and I wasn’t around.”
In an instant, Jamie’s hands were free; he felt the familiar handle of his own blade pressed into his palm. He didn’t look back, lest he reveal Reeve, and even as he stepped away from the tree he feared he might be hallucinating.
A man rushed toward him with a drunken shout, and the blade penetrated that man’s chest with a resounding thunk. His compatriots stood back, their eyes nervously scanning the trees.
Increase’s throat worked as he saw Jamie walking toward him; terror widened his eyes until they seemed to fill his head. His ceaseless hatred made him draw back the whip to strike Bliss, but Jamie stepped into the lash before it reached her. He felt it tear through his shirt, but there was no pain. That would come much later.
Wildly, Increase struck another blow, but Jamie didn’t feel that, either. He just kept advancing until he was face-to-face with the old man. He wrenched the whip out of Increase’s hands and flung it aside. The old man screamed as Jamie grasped him by the front of his collar and lifted him off the ground.
He watched, with satisfaction, as the viper began to die, his own collar a hangman’s noose.
Jamie heard Reeve shout at him, but the sound seemed to come from far away. He dismissed it, caring about nothing except this vengeance that he craved from the very core of his being.
Bliss gave a hoarse shriek and struggled violently against the bonds that she had tolerated until that moment. Jamie was killing Increase Pipher by inches, and in her mind she saw her husband dangling at the end of a rope as punishment for the murder.
“Jamie, no!” she screamed. “No!”
He was deaf to her words, but Walter Davis wasn’t. Shamefaced, he used Jamie’s bloody knife, wrenched from a dead man’s chest, to free her hands.
Bliss’s legs would not support her at first; she stumbled and fell twice in her desperate scramble to reach Jamie. To stop him.
Reeve got to him before she did, dropping his rifle to the ground in an effort to break Jamie’s hold on Pipher, but it was useless. In his all-consuming fury, Jamie was impervious.
Increase’s eyes ha
d rolled back into his head and his face was a crimson purple.
“In the name of God, Jamie,” Reeve bellowed, “stop before one of these troopers shoots you!”
Bliss looked around her in a frantic twist of her neck and saw the captain and some of his men. Increase’s people were already under control and now, sure enough, the soldiers’ rifles were fixed on Jamie’s back.
Sliding under the outstretched arm that held Increase suspended in the air, grasping the front of her dress in place with one hand, Bliss positioned herself directly in front of Jamie and raised gentle fingers to her husband’s filthy, beard-stubbled face.
“Jamie,” she cried. “Jamie, listen to me—if they don’t shoot you, they’ll hang you—and—and there won’t be any redheaded babies!”
A strange expression crossed Jamie’s face; he looked as though he’d just been wrenched back inside himself from somewhere far away. He released his hold on Increase and the man toppled, unconscious, to the ground.
Jamie’s eyes glistened and his hands trembled as he reached for Bliss and drew her close, so blessedly close, to him. “Thank God you’re safe,” he said thickly, his breath ruffling her hair. “Thank God.”
Even when he turned to look at Reeve, Jamie didn’t release Bliss, and that was fine with her, because she didn’t ever want to be separated from him again. His eyes were bright with questions that had apparently been cut off at his throat.
Reeve laid a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “I found your blade along the road—catchin’ the sunlight, it was—and right after that, the captain and ’is lads caught up to me. I don’t mind tellin’ you, little brother, that it was glad I was to see them.”
Jamie’s voice was almost gone. “These soldiers—will they be takin’ me away, then?”
Bliss tensed for the answer to that question; her breath stopped and she would have sworn that her heart did, too.
But Reeve shook his head. “No, Jamie. You’re a free man now.”
“I’ll never be able to repay the debt I owe you,” Jamie told his brother as the soldiers gathered Increase’s men into custody. Pipher, just recovering consciousness, had been left on the ground.
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