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your pardon?”
    â€œI said you should call me Saint. Nearly everyone does.”
    Evelyn cleared her throat. “Saint, then.”
    He gazed at her until she looked away. Apparently she wasn’t going to grant him permission in turn to use her Christian name, but that wasn’t likely to prevent him from doing so.
    â€œSo…these are all unused rooms?” she offered into the silence.
    â€œI thought we’d covered that.” He stifled a grin. “Or have you run out of questions already? You might have spared me the bother of conducting a tour if y—”
    â€œI am clarifying,” she said sharply. “And I didn’t ask you to conduct this tour. That was your idea, my lor—Saint.”
    Now she was arguing with him. Saint wondered what her reaction would be if he pinned her to the plain white wall and kissed her. Nor would he stop there. Once he got his hands on her and pulled off that abysmally prim bonnet and those buttoned kid gloves, he would continue his exploration of her slender naked body until he’d figured out why she aroused him, and until he’d purged the virginal female from his thoughts.
    Perhaps that was it: With her bonnet and her gloves and the high-necked, conservative gown she’d worn for the tour, the thought of her smooth warm skin beneath all that material was causing his imagination to run rampant.
    â€œAren’t you going to say anything?” Evelyn asked, facing him again.
    â€œI would, but I gave my word that I would behave myself.” And he hoped she appreciated that, because he didn’t do it very often. Almost never, in fact.
    â€œAnd so I should be grateful?”
    â€œNot particularly. I know I’d be much more grateful if I weren’t behaving. Do you wish to see the kitchens or the orphans next?”
    â€œThe kitchens, I think.” Her pert nose wrinkled, as though she’d thought of something unpleasant. “I wish to have a basis of reference before I interview the children. I’m not avoiding them.”
    â€œI didn’t say a word.”
    She looked at him sideways, amusement touching her gaze. “You were about to.”
    For a moment Saint was too mesmerized by her smile to reply. Rising this early in the day had made him mad. Nothing else made sense. And certainly nothing else explained why he was beginning to enjoy conducting a tour of the damned Heart of Hope Orphanage for a proper chit like Evelyn Marie Ruddick.

Chapter 4
    â€™ Tis pity learned virgins ever wed
    With persons of no sort of education ,
    Or gentlemen, who, though well-born and bred ,
    Grow tired of scientific conversation :
    I don’t choose to say much upon this head ,
    I’m a plain man, and in a single station ,
    But—Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual ,
    Inform us truly, have they not hen-peck’d you all?
    â€”Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto I
    E vie kept forgetting to write notes to herself, and she knew precisely whom to blame for her absentmindedness.
    She’d begun the day nervous about her ability to appear competent. With Saint as her guide, her anxiety increased a hundredfold. Men were nothing new; she’d talked with, flirted with, and been courted by dozens of them since her debut. They rarely moved her to more than a chuckle or a frown. The Marquis of St. Aubyn, however, wasn’t like any of those men. He was, in fact, precisely the sort of male both her mother and her common sense told her to avoid at all costs. In her first attempt to escape her brother’s staid version of what herlife should be, however, it made sense that she would be confronted with St. Aubyn.
    For some reason he’d been polite since she’d set the rules of behavior this morning, and uneasy as it made her to have the panther at her side, even with claws sheathed, she would use the circumstance to her own best advantage. She glanced over her shoulder at him as he stood, arms crossed, in the entry