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Page 324

| pressed against her pink cheeks in her sleep. With her cotton nightgown lying loosely around her, she looked no less than adorable. |

| Bending over her, Ashton brushed her lips with a kiss, tingling all over from the pleasure of even this little contact with her. |

| But not wanting to awaken her, he stepped back away from the bunk and finished dressing. He eyed his gunbelt and shrugged as he slipped it around his waist. He had gotten so used to wearing his revolvers that he felt naked without them. He had learned long ago not to trust anything that crawled, walked, or talked in Australia. |

| There were only three exceptionsSasha, Crispin, and Rufus. |

| He choked back a lump that formed in his throat every time he thought of Rufus. It still did not seem real that he was dead. |

| Shaking off memories that filled him with an aching despair, Ashton went to the door and slowly opened it. He took one last look at Sasha, smiled, then stepped out onto the deck and closed the door quietly behind him. |

| The air was cool and fragrant as he walked past the other closed doors of the cabins along the top deck, then went to the rail and clasped his hands around it, leaning his full weight against it. Yellow sprays of mimosa flashed in the morning sun, and in the tall and stately trees that lined the river, several kinds of parrots thronged the bushgalahs, bold-eyed corellas, and pink leadbetter cockatoos. The yellow-and-black cockatoos cried brrrarrrk, alert as sentinels. A kookaburra jeered from somewhere in the distance. |

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