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you are to unwanted attentions while you stay by yourself in this cottage with its checkered past. You’d do much better to let me care for the dogs while you take up residence at some respectable boardinghouse, or with some distant relation or whatever.”
    Angelina counted to ten, lest she strike him again. Then she counted to twenty because her palm still itched. Through clenched jaws, she told him, “I have no distant relations, sirrah, and I am not in the least vulnerable to the importunities of any licentious lord.”
    So he kissed her again. What was one more sin? This time Angelina was so shocked she didn’t push him away before Corin could deepen the kiss, could press her against the hard length of his firm body, could run his hands through those soft ringlets. When he did release her, Angelina’s eyes were glazed, her lips were tingling, and her knees were threatening to abandon her altogether. She was pale and paralyzed.
    “Breathe, Lena,” Corin advised, admiring his handiwork with a self-satisfied smile but stepping back a pace from her punishing right arm.
    “That’s ... that’s Miss Armstead to you, sirrah,” she managed to say.
    He made a mocking half bow. “Do you see, Miss Arm-stead? Vulnerable.”
    Angelina had her wits gathered by then. She stepped closer to the open window, pursed her lips, and whistled. Then she crossed her arms and stood back, wearing a fairly smug smile of her own.
    A huge black dog bounded through the window and took up position in front of Angelina, fixing the viscount in its small amber eyes. Keeping her hand on the massive head, Angelina quietly informed Corin, “I suggest you rethink your opinions, rather than repeat your actions. Ajax usually obeys my command to release his prey.”
    Ajax stood higher than Corin’s waist and was as wide around as a sturdy oak. His teeth looked as big as the monoliths at Stonehenge, and the low rumble in his throat made the teaspoons rattle. The little dogs stayed under the chair. The viscount stayed unmoving. When it appeared that he wasn’t to be swallowed whole, Corin exclaimed, “My word, that’s not a dog, it’s an elephant! Why, no one will adopt the beast, for only someone as rich as Golden Ball can afford to feed it!”
    “Ajax is not up for adoption, my lord. He belongs to me, not Lady Sophie. She said I might keep him for my own after we rescued him from that gristmill. The miller’s donkey had died of abuse, so he was using Ajax to turn his grindstone. Ajax was emaciated, covered in whiplashes, and near blind from never seeing the light of day. Lady Sophie cried, before she ran the miller over with her wheeled chair. A very nice family runs the mill now. They took one of the spaniels.”
    “And you ended up with a creature the size of the whale that ate Jonah?”
    Angelina shrugged. “He needed nursing, so I kept him in my room. After that he wouldn’t leave my side for nearly a year. Now he’s never out of sight or calling. And he is very protective.”
    “Point taken, Miss Armstead.” Corin’s leg was getting even stiffer from standing rigid so long, so he asked, “Is there, ah, any way you can convince your bodyguard that I am harmless?”
    “Are you?” was all Angelina replied, her hand still wrapped around the great dog’s collar.
    “Have I a choice? If my alternatives are good behavior or getting eaten, I swear to conduct myself as a gentleman, on my honor.”
    Lord Knowle’s idea of gentlemanly conduct mightn’t quite coincide with Angelina’s, but she didn’t doubt his given word. She mistrusted his morals, his motives, and his methods of getting what he wanted—but not his honor. She bent slightly to Ajax’s eye level, pointed at the viscount, and said, “Friend.”
    At which Ajax wagged his tail, clearing the table of teacups, cake trays, and two china figurines. He gave a happy woof that shook the floorboards, and closed the  distance to his new colleague in one mighty bound, landing with