«You’re right,» he said. «It’s storming. It wasn’t when I stepped off the ship.»

«I always know when it’s storming,» Jessica said. «I used to watch the storms rake across the firth and count the seconds until they reached the house.»

Wolfe sensed rather than felt her repressed shudder. His eyes narrowed as he looked down at the young woman who clung just a bit too tightly to him. Yet she wasn’t putting out any of the signals of a woman looking for a lover.

«Were you always afraid of storms?» he asked.

«I don’t remember.»

The lack of music in Jessica’s voice startled Wolfe. He had forgotten that she spoke rarely, if ever, of the nine years before the Earl ofGlenshire died and she became the ward of a distant cousin whom she had never met.

«Odd that you don’t remember.»

«Do you remember your boyhood among the Cheyenne?»

«The smell of a certain kind of wood smoke, the leap of a campfire against the night, chants and dances meant to call spirits…yes, I remember.»

«I bow to your superior memory.» Jessica smiled and glanced up through her lashes as she had been schooled to do by Lady Victoria. «Could we dance farther from the garden window? The draft is quite cool.»

Wolfe glanced at the graceful curve of Jessica’s neck and shoulders and the more intimate curves of breasts whose upper swell was barely sheathed in ice-blue silk. A smooth gold locket lay in the shadowed cleft between her breasts. He had given her that bit of jewelry just before he went to America to remove the Stewart family from the cuckolded duke’s wrath. Wolfe wondered if she carried her fiance’s picture in the locket.

Then Jessica took a breath and Wolfe’s eyes moved from the gold jewelry to the fine skin beneath it. It reminded him of warm cream. The scent of her was a rose garden beneath a summer sun, and her mouth was a pink bud from that same garden. She rested in his arms as lightly as a sigh.