“What do you have on under that dress?” Whatever she had expected him to say, it certainly hadn’t been that. She stared at him, her eyes going suddenly enormous.

“Well?” He sounded impatient. Amanda wet her lips before replying.

“A petticoat,” she whispered. She was not going to describe her underclothing in any more detail than that.

“Is it clean?” he demanded.

“Of course,” Amanda retorted, stung, before she remembered her situation and hastily subsided.

“Take it off.”

Amanda blanched. Oh, dear God, surely he didn’t mean to… to ravish her? Sheltered as she had been, she knew that low men sometimes forced women to perform indecent acts, and a murderer was about as low as one could go. She stared fearfully at him. He was eyeing her, his expression unreadable, his teeth clenched against the spasms that racked him, as they seemed to periodically.

“No. Please,” she breathed, knowing it was useless to beg but not willing to resort to physical resistance unless she had no choice. Incapacitated as he was, she had little doubt that he was still considerably stronger than she, and she was afraid of putting her assumption to the test unless and until it became absolutely necessary.

At her whispered plea, his eyes raked her from head to toe as she crouched beside him, her head bent with the weight of his hand in her hair. Although she did not know it, her small, slender body looked very young-and very vulnerable. His mouth twisted sardonically.

“Despite anything you may have heard to the contrary, I’m not in the habit of raping children,” he rasped. “You’re perfectly safe from that particular fate, I assure you. Now, are you going to take off that damned petticoat-or do you need help?”

That threat, plus his assurance that he had no intention of raping her-which, oddly enough, she believed-sent her fumbling under her skirt for the tapes to her petticoat. But with his eyes watching her every move, and obviously noting with interest the slender, white-stockinged ankles that she could not help but reveal, she could not seem to untie the knot, and her awkward position made it doubly difficult.