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continue?”
    So she meant to take him at his word. Another surprise, and with even more agitating results. Part of him thought continuing the tour was useless, since he’d given his word not to seduce her. The other part, though, was practically pointing the way down the hall. “What are you scribbling there?” he asked in an attempt to distract himself, as they continued toward the far end of the hallway.
    “Notes.”
    “About storage room size?”
    “I prefer not to say until I present my plan in its entirety, Lord St. Aubyn. I believe you have enough preconceived notions about me without my providing you more.”
    “Saint,” he said, ignoring the rest of her commentary.
    She looked up at him, her cheeks still glowing with the attractive half blush from which she seemed perpetually to suffer in his presence. “I beg your pardon?”
    “I 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.
    “So…these are all unused rooms?” she offered into the silence.
    “I 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—”
    “I 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.
    “Aren’t you going to say anything?” Evelyn asked, facing him again.
    “I 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.
    “And so I should be grateful?”
    “Not 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?”
    “The 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.”
    “I 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
    ’ 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?
    —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