Tremaine's True Love (17 page)

“Bellefonte is attempting to lure two men to the altar with the same flock of sheep,” St. Michael said, casting sand over his letter. “He’s neglected to consider how we’re to lure the ladies to the altar, for a man cannot be married to a lot of bleating livestock.”

“How to lure the object of one’s tender emotions is always a fraught question,” George allowed. “How will you answer it?”

St. Michael sat back. “I want those sheep, but if I acquire them as part of your sister’s dowry, Lady Nita will not be well pleased. Lady Nita doesn’t want Squire Nash to have Lady Susannah
or
the sheep, but then, what does Lady Susannah want, and what does the earl want?”

“Do you come from a large family?”

“I own enormous quantities of sheep, but come from barely any family.”

“One would not have guessed as much.” George passed St. Michael his glass. “You’ll need this more than I do, but when it comes to my sisters, I’ve been plagued by a thought.”

St. Michael poured the sand off his letter. “Don’t be coy. If I’m not engaged soon, we might be traveling to Germany together.”

Interesting prospect, about which St. Michael seemed to feel no hesitation.

“My sisters each need what the other has,” George said. He would never have aired this notion before Nicholas. “Nita needs more poetry and rest, Susannah needs a purpose beyond verse and endless sedentary hours of embroidery. Della needs to be taken more seriously and patted on the head less, and Kirsten needs to laugh more and be cosseted.”

St. Michael waved the letter gently over the dustbin, then laid it exactly in the middle of the blotter.

“Nash represents a purpose for Lady Susannah, then,” he said. “A household she can take in hand, an estate she can help run. Interesting.”

He took a whiff of George’s drink, grimaced, and set the brandy aside, making even that mundane activity attractive. George noted it, probably the way Nita noted that an infant in the churchyard was healthy or St. Michael would note that a herd of sheep was in good weight.

A passing observation, not a passionate preoccupation—thank God.

George took the empty glass over to the sideboard. “So you want Nita, but she’ll turn you down if she thinks you’re marrying her to get the sheep, yet Nash shouldn’t have the sheep either. Complicated.”

“She might turn me down because I’m no sort of marital bargain, and because I haven’t proposed.”

St. Michael would propose though. He might not get the prescribed words out in the prescribed order, but he’d convey his intentions well enough.

Lucky Nita. St. Michael would give her babies and a household to run while putting a stop to the endless progression of sore throats, influenza, and rheumatism that now filled her days.

“I would not want to see Lady Susannah attached to Nash’s household,” St. Michael said, “though my hesitance is unrelated to the fate of the sheep.”

George had pleasant associations with Stonebridge. Warm ginger biscuits, the Second Punic War, and Elsie Nash’s surprising tolerance.

“Suze wants Edward Nash,” George said. “The man’s fate is sealed. Nicholas will like that she’s close by, and so will I.”

“Lady Nita fears for the safety of the women in Nash’s home, though I very nearly violate a confidence when I tell you that. If Lady Nita is to be believed, then Mrs. Nash at this moment is sporting a black eye courtesy of the head of her household.”

St. Michael’s voice was as cold as the wind moaning around the corner of the house.

“Lady Nita is to be believed,” George said slowly, while consternation warred with outrage inside him. “Nita does not indulge in falsehoods. Nash struck Elsie?”

Elsie was petite, kindhearted, fair-minded,
a
mother.

“Lady Nita came to that conclusion, and if you’re about to tell me I must disclose this situation to the earl, I cannot. I gather Lady Nita is in Mrs. Nash’s confidence, and were her ladyship not enraged beyond endurance, she would never have spoken to me so honestly. I apologize for burdening you with this information but will prevail on your gentlemanly honor to keep it between us.”

St. Michael was upset about Elsie’s situation, upset enough to disclose it when he hadn’t meant to. No wonder Nita saw potential in him.

“Nita holds herself to the standards of a physician when it comes to people’s privacy,” George said—though George did not, and perhaps St. Michael perceived as much. Something would have to be done, and Susannah could not marry a man who lacked control of his own temper. “Shall I have Nicholas frank your letter?”

St. Michael capped the ink and tucked it into a drawer. “Thank you, no. The matter requires some discretion. I’ll post it myself.”

George set his mind to the problem that was Elsie Nash’s safety—Digby had also said Nash had a sour temper—but St. Michael’s comment nagged at him too.

What could require such very great discretion that Nicholas mustn’t even be allowed to
see
the epistle St. Michael had penned with such dispatch?

The Haddonfields were an incorrigibly merry bunch when the ladies were at their cordials, and Tremaine had thus had an opportunity to give Lady Nita her evening of cards and silliness.

They’d put him in mind of a bunch of shepherds, gathered around the fire and flask. Somebody would get out a fiddle, somebody else would tell a tale or get started on a rendition of “Willie Brew’d a Peck o’ Maut,” and the laughter would crest higher and higher until Tremaine’s sides ached with it. He’d forgotten about those nights, though he hadn’t forgotten the hard ground or the cold mornings.

He rapped on Lady Nita’s door, quietly, despite a light shining from beneath it. Somebody murmured something which he took for permission to enter.

“Mr. St. Michael?”

Tremaine stepped into her ladyship’s room, closed the door behind him, and locked it, which brought the total of his impossibly forward behaviors to several thousand.

“Your ladyship expected a sister or a maid with a pail of coal?”

“I wasn’t expecting
you
.” Lady Nita sat near the hearth in a blue velvet dressing gown. The wool stockings on her feet were thick enough to make a drover covetous. “Are you unwell, Mr. St. Michael?”

“You are not pleased to see me.” Did she think illness the only reason somebody would seek her out?

She set aside some pamphlet, a medical treatise, no doubt. No vapid novels for Lady Nita.

“I was not expecting you, sir.”

“You were not expecting me to discuss marriage with you earlier. I wasn’t expecting the topic to come up in a casual fashion either. May I sit?”

Tremaine was egregiously presuming, but he had earned significant coin by seizing opportunities, and Lady Nita had very much the feel of an opportunity.

She waved an elegant hand at the other chair flanking the hearth. Tremaine settled in, trying to gather his thoughts while the firelight turned Lady Nita’s braid into a rope of burnished gold.

“You are pretty.” Brilliant place to start. The words had come out, heavily burred, something of an ongoing revelation.

“I am tall and blond,” she retorted, twitching at the folds of her robe. “I have the usual assortment of parts. What did you come here to discuss?”

Lady Nita was right in a sense. Her beauty was not of the ballroom variety but rather an illumination of her features by characteristics unseen. She fretted over new babies, cut up potatoes like any crofter’s wife, and worried for her sisters. These attributes interested Tremaine. Her Madonna-with-a-secret smile, keen intellect, and longing for laughter
attracted
him.

Even her medical preoccupation, in its place, had some utility as well.

“Will you marry me?”

More brilliance. Where had his wits gone? George Haddonfield had graciously pointed out that Nita needed repose and laughter, and Tremaine was offering her the hand of the most restless and un-silly man in the realm.

The lady somehow contained her incredulity, staring at her stockings. “You want to discuss marriage?”

“I believe I did just open that topic. Allow me to elaborate on my thesis: Lady Bernita Haddonfield, will you do me the honor of becoming my wife? I think we would suit, and I can promise you would know no want in my care.”

A proper swain would have been on his damn bended knee, the lady’s hand in his. Lady Nita would probably laugh herself to tears if Tremaine attempted that nonsense. He’d seen her laugh that hard earlier in the evening, over Lady Kirsten’s rendition of the parson’s sermon on women keeping silent in the church.

Lady Nita picked up her pamphlet, which Tremaine could now see was written in German.

“Why, Mr. St. Michael?”

“I beg your pardon?” Tremaine was about to pitch the damned pamphlet in the fire, until he recalled that Nita Haddonfield excelled at obscuring her stronger emotions.

“Why should you marry me, Tremaine St. Michael? Why should I marry you? I’ve had other offers; you’ve made other offers. You haven’t known me long enough to form an opinion of my character beyond the superficial.”

This ability to take a situation apart, into causes, effects, symptoms, and prognosis, was part of the reason she was successful as a healer. Tremaine applied the same skills to commercial situations, thus he didn’t dismiss her questions as dithering or manipulation.

Neither was she rejecting him.

“My appraisal of your character goes beyond the superficial, my dear. You can be shy, but you haven’t a coy bone in your body,” he said, propping his feet beside hers on the brass fender. “Your heart is inconveniently tender, but you are so fierce and so disciplined, few suspect this about you. I do not pretend my offer is that of a passionate young swain for a lady he has long loved, but I will guard your heart with my life, my lady.”

She folded the pamphlet but didn’t set it aside. “Will you entrust your heart into my keeping?”

Did Tremaine even have a heart to entrust? His parents had shown him the folly of allowing that organ to overstep its biological functions, and yet he liked Nita Haddonfield, he desired her, and her regard for him mattered very much.

“I will entrust my heart to no other.” Tremaine could give her that assurance. He sealed his promise with a kiss to her knuckles and kept her hand in his.

“Interesting reply, Mr. St. Michael. I’m happy with my life as it is, though. Marriage has always struck me as a poor bargain for the lady. She ceases to enjoy any sort of independence and must endure her husband’s pawings and beatings without recourse to the church or the law. She risks her life in childbirth, repeatedly, and should her husband die, she’s best advised to get another as soon as possible.”

Lady Nita’s objection was to marriage in theory, not to Tremaine personally. He took courage from that.

“You are slow to trust,” he said. “I’m not exactly atremble with confidence in the institution myself. Marriage means my wife’s entire health, happiness, and safety lie exclusively in my hands, and all my wit, my meager store of charm, my plowman’s poetry, and my coin may be inadequate to keep her safe from the foxes and wolves.”

Tremaine should probably not have likened a husband’s responsibilities to those of a shepherd, but the sentiments were similar. Nita would be his exclusively, her welfare his responsibility.

“I like kissing you,” she said, regarding their joined hands. “Will you come to bed with me?”

Tremaine’s breeding organs offered an immediate, unequivocal yes. The stakes were too high to indulge in such folly, however.

“Why, my lady? Are you anticipating vows with me?”

“I’m making up my mind,” she said. “I like you, Mr. St. Michael, but I would not be a biddable or easy wife any more than you’ll be a biddable or doting husband. We both must be very sure of this decision.”

Lady Nita would be a loyal wife, one who never compromised Tremaine’s interests or countermanded his decisions—not the important ones. As for the doting, a man could learn new skills when sufficiently motivated.

Tremaine had ever enjoyed a worthy challenge, after all.

“Would it help to know I’ll happily purchase a house here in Kent?” he asked, a bid in the direction of doting such as he understood it. “There are several possibilities in this vicinity—I’ve inquired—and I’d happily make our Kent property an addition to your dowry portion.”

Some part of Tremaine—the prudent businessman or possibly the awkward suitor—did not want to join Lady Nita in bed unless and until she’d accepted him as a spouse.

“You are thorough about your campaign, Mr. St. Michael, but I cannot take a house to bed. I cannot, with any hope of enjoyment, kiss a house or hold its hand. I cannot fall asleep with the arms of a house about me, and a house cannot recite Scottish poetry about a shepherd boy’s heart breaking because he’s been banished for loving his shepherd girl.”

The “Broom of the Cowdenknowes.” Earlier in the evening, Tremaine had offered up a simple lament as an antidote to the indecipherable subtlety of old Shakespeare.

Tremaine’s heart would not break were he banished from Lady Nita’s boudoir, which pragmatism was part of why he could offer the lady marriage.

And yet…what she wanted was understandable.

“I can be those things you ask for, Lady Nita. I can be the man who holds you as you sleep, who gives you all the kisses you want, who indulges your appreciation for poetry, and whose hand is always yours to hold.”

Tremaine had Lady Nita’s attention now. The pamphlet lay forgotten in her lap, so Tremaine gathered his courage and leaped. “I can be the man who takes you to bed and indulges your every intimate passion as often and as wantonly as you please.”

* * *

Tremaine St. Michael had traveled the Continent in times of war, he moved nimbly between cultures, rattled off poetry in broad Scots
and
French, taught letters to children among the ashes, and turned pages for Kirsten as she raced through Scarlatti at the pianoforte.

Such a man commanded hordes and warehouses of aplomb—Nita’s bold proposition had failed utterly to scare him away—and yet something was off.

Nita considered the translation of Paracelsus sitting in her lap and made another grab for logic, reason, common sense, for anything that would keep her from dragging her visitor to her bed.

“How do you know I’m capable of wantonness?” she asked. Nita certainly suffered doubts.

Mr. St. Michael slid from his chair with the ease of a cat hopping to the carpet. He arranged himself before Nita, his arms loosely about her hips.

“Anybody who defies her family as easily as you do, who takes on the worst of winter’s weather, who challenges death itself, has a capacity for considerable passion. Stop diagnosing a simple case of attraction between healthy adults and kiss me.”

He moved closer, close enough that Nita caught a whiff of mint on his breath. She cupped his cheek, finding it shaved smooth. He’d prepared for his campaign while she’d read medical wisdom written hundreds of years ago.

Nita was tempted. Tempted by the flesh-and-blood man before her, tempted by his assurance that passion and pleasure could be hers. She set her pamphlet aside, leaned forward, and touched her lips to Mr. St. Michael’s. His shoulders relaxed, but he did not assume control of the kiss, a point in his favor.

For Nita would allow no man to assume control of
her
, marriage be damned, attraction be double damned.

“More,” he whispered. “Again.”

As she leaned forward and anchored her hands in his hair, Nita shifted, so Mr. St. Michael knelt between her legs. His arms snugged around her waist, and tension seemed to drain from him.

“I’m not saying yes,” she muttered against his mouth.

His reply was rendered with more kisses, delicate, entreating, fascinating kisses to which Nita most assuredly assented.

And then she wasn’t saying anything. She was kissing him back like a woman who might never have another kiss, who might die, with all her passion spent on other people’s colicky babies and gouty grandparents.

Mr. St. Michael shifted up so he embraced Nita as she sat before the fire. The contours of his body were more evident than in any of their previous encounters, because Nita wore only her nightgown and robe while he wore only breeches, waistcoat, and shirt.

Nita knew the names of the muscles—
pectoralis, subclavius, serratus
—but she was frantic to learn the feel of them, of
him
. Without breaking the kiss, Nita went after the buttons of Mr. St. Michael’s waistcoat.

“You will take me to bed,” she said as a button went flying.

“You like giving orders.” He smiled against her mouth and brushed her hands away. “Like being in charge. Maybe this is part of the appeal of the sickroom.”

Nita hated sickrooms. “How can you think of such matters at a time—?”

Mr. St. Michael rose away from Nita and she wanted to roar at him to get back to their kissing, except he yanked his shirttails out of his waistband and hauled his shirt over his head, waistcoat and all.

Firelight turned his skin golden, and the dratted man must have had some sense of the picture he made, half-naked and all gloriously healthy male, dark hair whorling down the midline of his flat belly.

“I think to please you,” he said, extending a hand to Nita.

She regarded that callused, masculine hand, stretched across the marital equivalent of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling.

“I would not be a biddable wife. I would be headstrong and difficult. I am not very sociable. I do not hold my opinions lightly.”

“You will not hold your vows lightly either,” Mr. St. Michael said, his hand steady. “You would protect our children with your life, and you’d manage easily when I’m traveling for extended periods. You’d enjoy your independence, in fact, and be neither impressed with our wealth nor heedless of it.”

Our
wealth.
Her
independence. Nita loved the sound of that, though as for Mr. St. Michael’s extended travel… Nita’s brothers had traveled. She’d tolerated their absence with an abundance of prayer and activity.

People would still fall ill, suffer injuries, and have babies, regardless of Mr. St. Michael’s traveling. She’d stay busy. Nita put her hand in his and let him draw her to her feet.

“You will give me time to consider your proposal, sir.”

He scooped her up against his chest. “You are magnificently stubborn, which only attracts me more. I will give you something to think about then, besides a few tame kisses.”

Tame
kisses?

He settled Nita on the bed, and while she tried to decide if she liked being handled like a sack of flour—albeit a precious sack of flour—Mr. St. Michael toed off his boots and peeled away stockings and breeches.

“We didn’t bank the fire,” Nita said, gaze glued to the middle of his chest.
Sternum, rectus abdominis. Do-not-look-down-imus.

Wearing nothing but a smile the likes of which would set every female heart in the shire pounding, Mr. St. Michael crossed the room and took up the poker.