animal that he was, he quite naturally wanted to show his appreciation.
Having convinced his besotted owner that a collar worn anything less than loose enough for him to slip his head through and free himself from at will was an instrument of torture highly likely to cause him death by strangulation, as soon as he spotted Georgia he slipped his head from his collar with practised ease and tore across the yard towards her, scattering pets and owners as he did so, launching himself at Georgia and almost knocking her to the ground with the force of his enthusiastic greeting.
‘Ben…down,’ Georgia instructed firmly.
Tongue lolling, Ben obligingly wagged his tail.
‘Ben,’ Georgia repeated, ‘down.’
Ben nuzzled her neck lovingly.
‘Dr Dolittle, I presume,’ Piers drawled sarcastically as he reached his escapee charge and unceremoniously yanked him off Georgia by the scruff of his neck, instructing him in an ominously quiet voice, ‘Sit.’
Ben knew when a little diplomacy was called for. Obligingly he sat very heavily on Piers’s feet, leaning lovingly against him and looking up into his eyes.
Ignoring this touching appeal, Piers sternly refastened Ben’s collar—several notches tighter.
Georgia knew that it was up to her to take charge, but for some reason her thought processes seemed to have turned to gooey marshmallow. All she could focus on was how wonderfully broad Piers’s chest was, how flat his belly, how corded with male muscles his arms were, as Ben twisted and turned in his hold, giving sharp, short barks of feigned distress.
‘I don’t know who was responsible for foisting this delinquent hound on my godmother,’ Piers was saying through gritted teeth, ‘but if I ever find out…’
So he was Mrs Latham’s godson. Sternly reminding herself that she was a trained professional, and that right now her attention ought to be focused on her canine pupils and not on the six-foot hunk of hormone-level-raising male gorgeousness standing in front of her, Georgia dipped her hand into the box of rewards she had put down at her feet, proffering one to Ben.
‘Good boy, Ben. Sit…’ she cajoled him.
‘Don’t—’ Piers began sharply, and then stopped as Ben suddenly turned into the most demure dog imaginable, giving Georgia a liquid-eyed look of love before taking the titbit she was offering him.
‘Come on, everyone,’ Georgia instructed her small group. ‘Let’s go inside and get started.’
Once inside the large, empty room it quickly became obvious to Piers that, whilst the majority of the other dogs there were responding to Georgia’s careful instructions to their owners, when it came to doggy obedience Ben was in a class of his own.
When he had disrupted the class for the fifth time, by grinning wickedly at the slightly nervous collie bitch to one side of him and standing, Piers was quite sure deliberately, on the tail of the dog on the other side, Piers decided he had had enough.
There was no doubt about it: Ben was a master manipulator and most definitely not the dog for a woman as hopelessly incapable of disciplining him as his godmother.
Several yards away Georgia tried to keep her mind on what she was doing. Ben’s waywardness was communicating itself to the rest of the class, and Georgia could see the sardonic look in Piers’s eyes as the dogs grew restless, their concentration broken by Ben’s sabotage.
Ben’s trouble wasn’t that he wasn’t intelligent enough, Georgia reflected; it was more that he was too intelligent. Too intelligent and far too energetic for his current sedate lifestyle. Setters were gun dogs; they needed exercise and lots of it, and equally large amounts of firm handling.
The class came to an end and, as was her custom, Georgia made a point of going up to each dog to pet it before it and its owner left.
Ben she left till the last. Not, she assured herself, for any reason other than that she was curious to know why Mrs Latham had not brought him to the class.
‘My godmother has hurt her ankle,’ Piers informed Georgia curtly after she had introduced herself and asked him where Mrs Latham was.
Close up, Piers was even more excitingly masculine than she had imagined. Stern, cold-eyed men were not normally her style, Georgia admitted; she preferred good humour to good looks any day of the week. But something was quite definitely causing that little quiver of female appreciation she could feel disturbing her normal level-headed calmness.
However, it was plain that Piers was nowhere near as impressed by her as she was by him, Georgia conceded ruefully as she heard him telling her curtly, ‘If today’s evidence of the success of your dog-training classes is anything to go by, I’m not surprised that Ben is proving so obdurate. Have you any professional qualifications for this?’
Immediately Georgia’s hackles rose.
‘I’m a fully trained vet,’ she informed him shortly, ‘and, yes, I have been trained to—’
‘You may be trained, but Ben most certainly isn’t,’ Piers cut across her coldly. ‘He’s too much of a handful for my godmother, and…’
As she listened to him Georgia’s heart began to sink. What he was saying was quite true, of course, but in his short life Ben had already had two homes and, despite his wilful determination to resist instruction, there was no doubt that in his own way he was devoted to Mrs Latham. Heavens knew what would happen to Ben if her godson were to persuade her to part with him.
Crossing her fingers mentally, Georgia told Piers semi-truthfully, ‘Setters can initially be a bit wild, but once they get over that they calm down tremendously.’
‘I’m sure they do,’ Piers agreed, giving Georgia a narrow-eyed look, ‘provided they are living in the right environment, and the right environment for Ben is not, in my opinion, the home of a sedentary woman who’ll not see sixty again.’
‘Ben has already been re-homed once,’ Georgia told Piers protectively. ‘It’s a traumatic experience for a dog to be parted from an owner it’s become attached to.’
‘Indeed. However, I’m sure you’ll agree that it would be an equally traumatic experience for my godmother if, as fortunately did not happen on this occasion, Ben were to pull away from her again and, instead of merely causing her to stumble and hurt her foot, dash out into the road with possible fatal consequences for himself.’
Georgia bit her lip. He did have a point, but she still felt she had to defend Ben.
‘Once Ben can walk properly on the lead that kind of thing won’t happen,’ she informed Piers.
‘Once! Don’t you mean if, or more probably never?’ Piers asked.
He looked down at the dog sternly. Ben smiled back at him, and then tensed as, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a cat strolling round the corner of the building. Springing to his feet, he tugged hard on his lead, forgetting that Piers had tightened his collar.
Piers gave an exclamation of irritation as Ben’s leap for freedom caught him off guard and slightly off balance, and, instinctively knowing the dog’s strength, Georgia reached
