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to every rig."
    "Don't be silly," Lydia said briskly while hustling her indoors. "I've made my share of mistakes."
    She noticed that Susan showed no signs of jealousy, which looked promising.
    She had also resisted the temptation to play with the new human toy. This was considerate of the mastiff, since the girl had been terrified out of her wits already, and—misinterpreting affectionate canine overtures—might start screaming, which would upset Susan very much. Nonetheless, as they entered the hall, Lydia took precautions.
    "This is a friend," she told the dog while lightly patting Tamsin's shoulder. "Be gentle, Susan. Do you hear? Gentle ."

    Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion
    Susan licked the girl's hand, very delicately.
    Gingerly, Tamsin petted her.
    "Susan is highly intelligent," Lydia explained, "but you must communicate with her in simple terms."
    "They used mastiffs to hunt wild boar in olden times, didn't they?" the girl asked.
    "Does she bite?"
    "Devour is more like it," Lydia said. "Still, you've nothing to fear from her. If she grows too playful, tell her firmly, ' Gentle ,'—unless you'd rather be knocked down and drowned in doggy drool."
    Tamsin chuckled softly, which was an encouraging sign. Bess appeared then, and in a little while the guest was borne off for tea, a hot bath, and a nap.
    After a quick washing up, Lydia adjourned to her study. '. Only there, with the door closed, did she let her mask of unshakable confidence slip.
    Though she'd seen a great deal of the world—more of it than the majority of London's most polished sophisticates, male and female—she was not altogether as worldly as the world believed.
    No man had ever kissed Lydia Grenville before.
    Even Great-Uncle Ste, kindly if misguided, had never done more than pat her on the head—or, when she started sprouting into a giantess, upon the hand.
    What the Duke of Ainswood had done was very far from avuncular. And Lydia found she was very far from immune.
    She sank into the chair at the desk and pressed her bowed head against the heels of her hands and waited for the hot inner tumult to subside and her neatly ordered, well-controlled world to settle back into place.
    It wouldn't. Instead, the chaotically uncontrollable world of her childhood Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion
    flooded her mind. The tide of images ebbed and flowed, to settle at last upon the scene most deeply etched in her memory: the time when her world and sense of who she was had changed irrevocably.
    She saw herself as she had been then, a little girl sitting upon a battered stool, reading her mother's diary.
    Though Lydia never would, she could have written the tale much in the same style she used for The Rose of Thebes .

    London, 1810
    It was early evening, several hours after Anne Grenville had been laid to rest in the parish burial ground, when her eldest daughter, ten-year-old Lydia, found the journal. It lay hidden under a shabby collection of fabric scraps intended for patches, at the bottom of her mother's sewing basket.
    Lydia's younger sister, Sarah, had long since cried herself to sleep, and their father, John Grenville, had gone out to seek solace in the arms of one of his trollops or in a bottle — or both, most likely .
    Unlike her sister, Lydia was awake and her blue eyes were dry. She had not been able to cry all day. She was too angry with God, who had taken the wrong parent.
    But then, what would God want with Papa? Lydia asked herself as she pushed away a stray lock of golden hair and searched for a patch for Sarah's pinafore.
    That was when she found the little book, its pages filled with her mother's tiny, precise penmanship .
    The mending forgotten, she sat huddled by the smoky hearth and read on through the night the vastly puzzling story. The diary was small, and her mama had not made entries faithfully. Consequently, Lydia reached the end before her Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion
    father staggered home sometime after dawn.
    She waited until