Tremaine's True Love (27 page)

“How do you stand it?” Kirsten asked before they’d reached the end of the lane.

“Stand the smell?”

“The smell, the dirt, the hopelessness. Addy isn’t much older than you, and she’ll likely die soon of the pox, cold, starvation, or sheer melancholia. I don’t want to go back there, Nita. I should be kinder, I should be braver, but I don’t want to go back there. Addy is fallen, and those children are doomed.”

Atlas plodded along, head down. The weather seemed to have subdued even Kirsten’s mare.

“I don’t want to go back either.” Nita never wanted to go back, not to a home where babies had died, not to see that infection would soon take a man’s life if he were unwilling to part with his foot, not to offer useless tisanes to an aching old woman who longed for heaven.

“Then why do you do it?” Kirsten wailed, swiping at her cheek with the back of her glove. “Why do you make yourself stare at that mean, smelly cottage, those pinched faces, that dear little baby?”

Kirsten had barely glanced at the baby.

“I thought Addy’s drinking was what had taken the last child from her,” Nita said. “I couldn’t bear for that to happen to wee Annie.”

Kirsten sniffed. “Everybody knows Addy’s drinking cost that child her life.”

“Everybody’s wrong,” Nita said. “I was wrong too. The child’s death sent Addy back to the gin. Babies sometimes die for no reason, and this was apparently one of those times. I want Annie to live. Her mother wants that too.” Like any normal mother would want her child to live, thrive, and have a chance in life.

“While her father wanted to dip his wick,” Kirsten spat, “and then likely stand up with you or me at the assembly. I accompanied you to that household because I was curious, Nita, not because I’m prone to Christian charity. I wanted to see how low Addy Chalmers had fallen, wanted to see what became of a woman without virtue. I’m sorry.”

Nita steered her horse around a frozen puddle rather than observe that Kirsten had seen all of that on her first visit to the cottage.

“Frightening, isn’t it?” Nita said. Frightening and exhausting. “I’ve committed the same lapses in judgment Addy has, and so apparently has Suze. Suze and I suffer no consequences, while Addy has lost all.”

“Not all. She has those children, and—like half the ailing people in this shire—she has you.”

Nita urged Atlas to a trot, anxious to return to her intended. Kirsten was right though. The ailing people in the shire did have Nita, so rather than ride straight for home, first she’d pay brief calls on Alton Horst and Mary Eckhardt.

Tremaine liked Nita very much; he did not like having a fiancée. Old feelings, of hope and anxiety, pleasure and resentment, came with being engaged.

Also a little madness: What if Nita changed her mind? What if she went to the Chalmers cottage and never came back? What if she rode away, fluttering her handkerchief in farewell, and he never saw her again?

Fortunately, after Tremaine had spent a morning staring at correspondence, Lady Nita came striding across the snowy garden, Lady Kirsten beside her. The noon meal featured servings of good cheer along with the ham and mashed potatoes.

At table, Lady Nita had shown to excellent advantage in a gown of green velvet with a lavender fichu and matching shawl. The smiles she’d aimed at Tremaine had been soft and precious.

The hand she’d stroked over his thigh beneath the table had been pure devilment.

Dinner had been more of the same, the time spent with the ladies afterward even worse, until Tremaine had pled the beginnings of a genuine headache. He’d undressed, washed, and then repaired to bed with a treatise on foot rot that did nothing to soothe his tattered nerves.

When somebody tapped on his door, he snarled his response. “Come in.”

“Tremaine?” Nita slipped around the door, her hair in that single golden braid over her shoulder, her attire again a blue dressing gown and gray wool stockings.

He rose off the bed. “I was expecting a footman with a bucket of coal.” Or perhaps George Haddonfield come to flirt.

Nita locked the door, a definitive little snick of metal on metal that might have been a pistol shot, so loudly did Tremaine hear it.

“I’ve missed you, Tremaine St. Michael.”

She tossed that admission at his figurative, betrothed feet, a challenge and a concession all in one. The demented part of Tremaine that waited for her to abandon him was reassured by her words. The male part of him nearly pounced on her in reply.

“We shared two congenial meals today,” he said, prowling closer, “and sang a recognizable duet after dinner.” He stopped immediately before her. “You can’t possibly be missing me.”

Nita went up on her toes to kiss him, bringing Tremaine a whiff of lavender, lemons, and a different sort of madness altogether. With one hand, she cupped his jaw.

With the other, she gently squeezed his cock. “Tell me you missed me too, Tremaine. We’re engaged. Sentimental talk between us is permitted.”

This woman was not bent on talk. “You should not be here, my dear.”
Stay. Please stay.

Another squeeze, marvelously firm. “I agree. I should not be here. You should have come to my room. The corridors are chilly, and my feet are cold.”

As Tremaine’s mouth descended over Nita’s, his instincts tossed out a theory: Nita was also plagued by the fear that their vows would never be spoken, that Tremaine would abandon her to putrid sore throats and cursing Quakers, never to have babies or a family of her own.

When he might have plundered, his kiss instead cherished. “Will you allow us to be married by special license, my lady?”

“Stop negotiating, Tremaine. Nicholas told me he acceded to your terms, now you will accede to mine.”

Nita’s list of terms began with another prodigiously thorough kiss and a few sanity-robbing squeezes.

“
That
,” she said against his mouth, “is for spending the afternoon with your correspondence.”

Tremaine kissed her back, then scooped her off her cold feet and deposited her on the bed.

“
That
is for imperiling my limited skill with dinner conversation, Lady Nita. When we’re married, we will sit at opposite ends of a proper table.”

She hauled him closer by virtue of two fists snatching him by the lapels of his night robe. “Not at breakfast we won’t. Not when we’re dining in private. Not when we’re picnicking by the river.”

Tremaine loved her. Loved her courage and boldness, loved her compassion for those less fortunate, loved her ferocious desire for him.

“You will marry me by special license,” Tremaine said, untying the sash of her night robe, “or you will take pity on a poor, defenseless fiancé and leave my bed.”

The sad, lonely, disappointed part of him still expected her to do just that—to tease him to within an inch of his sanity, then flounce off into the night. The rest of him was glad she’d had the presence of mind to lock the door five minutes ago.

“Make love with me, Tremaine. I told Nicholas I’m insisting on a special license so as not to overshadow Della’s come-out this spring.”

Tremaine paused between untying bow number 884 and yanking open bow number 885.

“Do you have another reason for a special license, my lady?”

Nita ran her hand over his hair, the tenor of her caress shifting their discussion from the verbal battledore of mating adults to an exchange between lovers.

“I’m afraid when I wake up tomorrow, I’ll find that I dreamed you,” she said. “You never visited Belle Maison, or if you did, you rode on your way, having bargained Nicholas’s sheep away from him. I’m nobody’s fiancée, I’ll be nobody’s wife. I’m plain, dependable Lady Nita, and always will be.”

Tremaine curled down to press his cheek against Nita’s, and when he should have confided in her about a small boy with a huge heartache, his orphaned courage dodged behind the prudence of a self-sufficient adult male.

“I’m here, Nita. I’m real, and I’m your fiancé. We will marry whenever you please. The license should be delivered on Monday.”

Words were in short supply after that. They undressed each other slowly, between kisses, caresses, smiles, and whispers. Threats alternated with promises until Tremaine was poised over his intended, skin to skin beneath the covers.

“Do you still fear I’m a figment of your dreams, my lady?”

“Part of me will likely always fear that,” she said, her fingers laced with his on the pillow. “Somewhere along the way, between my parents’ funerals and my brothers’ weddings, I lost a part of myself, Tremaine, and you’ve found it for me.”

Nita had lost the courage to hope, and how well Tremaine knew that poverty. Life became a matter of tackling challenges, of focusing always ahead, never behind.

And never inward.

“When shall we be married?” he asked as he began their intimate joining. “We haven’t chosen a property for our own, and that might take some time.”

In Nita’s arms, Tremaine had chosen all the home he’d ever need, and yet he held off the completion of their union.

“I don’t care where we live, Tremaine, provided the place is free of creeping damp and drafts.
Stop
negotiating
.” Nita lunged up with her hips and took the initiative from him.

“Tuesday,” he rasped as he set up a deliberate rhythm despite the desire rioting through him. “Tuesday morning.”

“Early,” she whispered, locking her ankles at the small of his back. “Maybe even Monday evening.”

They were to be wed within the week, and this was not their first anticipation of those vows. Tremaine should have treated his lady to a leisurely coupling, letting anticipation build, exploring her responses and his own.

Urgency rode him mercilessly, robbed him of finesse, and left him desperate. Nita came apart beneath him, keening softly against his throat, shuddering through her pleasure. When her grip on Tremaine’s hands slackened and he was sure she was sated, Tremaine gave himself permission to follow her into satisfaction.

Pleasures stormed through him, dissolving plans, thoughts, and even most of Tremaine’s fears.

But not all. Though it contradicted Tremaine’s most passionate desire, at the last instant he lunged back and spilled his seed between their bodies.

* * *

“Are you nervous?” Della asked.

“Not about another assembly,” Nita replied, slipping a simple gold bracelet that had been her mother’s around the wrist of her right evening glove. Tremaine had told her the previous night that a ring would arrive with the special license. “Are
you
nervous?”

Della admired herself in the cheval mirror, though she had to tilt it first, for it was angled for Nita’s height.

“Nervous about another interminable evening country-dancing with the same fellows I’ve been dancing with since I put up my hair? Swilling the same tepid punch, nibbling the same stale sandwiches?”

Older sister’s instinct told Nita that Della was nervous, though not about the assembly.

“London is no different, Della. A lot of boredom punctuated by the occasional passable dancer or clever verbal exchange. You look over the fellows, they look you over. The only differences between a London ballroom and the Haddondale assembly rooms are the quality of the tailoring and the fact that, at some point, you’ll be permitted to waltz.”

“The only difference,” Della said, tossing herself onto Nita’s bed, “is that I’ll come home this summer more disenchanted than I am now. I understand why you look after all the sick babies and doughty elders, besides the fact that it keeps Mama’s memory closer for you.”

Nita tugged at her glove beneath the bracelet, for the jewelry had bunched up the leather below her wrist.

“Honor Mama’s memory?” she muttered. “By sending Mr. Clackengeld his headache powders and thumping Dora Angelsey’s chest?” Mama had never set bones, never courted the vicar’s ire with her charity, never read Paracelsus or Galen.

Never tried to revive a baby who’d departed the earthly realm, felt the very heat leaving the infant’s body while the mother sobbed uselessly across a cold, barren cottage.

The dratted bracelet had been a bad idea, for now the clasp was caught on the glove.

“You use Mama’s recipe for your headache powder,” Della said. “Her very recipe in her handwriting. You now ride the horse who used to pull Mama’s gig. That’s a step in the direction of eccentricity, you know. Atlas is a fine fellow, but he’s not saddle stock, and Nicholas only broke him to saddle on a whim.”

Atlas was a fine mount for a tall rider. Mama had doted on him and Mama had loved this stupid gold—

“Get this blasted thing off me,” Nita said, shoving her wrist under Della’s nose. “Atlas was going to waste, and this bracelet is too small for my wrist. You should have it.”

Della scrambled to the edge of the bed and took Nita’s wrist in her hands. “You’re giving me Mama’s bracelet? This was her great-grandmama’s, Nita. Are you sure?”

Great-Grandmama had been the original healer in Nita’s family, a formidable German lady who’d famously advised the present King’s governors on his health many decades ago.

The King had fallen quite ill in later years, nonetheless.

“The bracelet is yours,” Nita said as Della worked the clasp open. “I tend to those Dr. Horton either cannot or will not treat properly. Mama has been gone for years now, and her memory has nothing to do with anything. If you remain lounging on my bed, you’ll wrinkle that dress, Della.”

Della held up the bracelet like a prize pelt. “I’ve loved this bracelet,” she said, draping the length of gold around her wrist. “It’s simple and elegant, and even a debutante might wear it in the evening. Thank you, Nita.”

Nita fastened the clasp for Della, on whom the bracelet was elegantly loose. Della remained sitting on the bed, holding up her arm so the bracelet caught the light of a dozen candles.

“I shouldn’t wrinkle my dress, my brow, my gloves…You tend to babies so you don’t go mad worrying over—heaven spare us!—wrinkles. Silk will wrinkle, but we wear it because it feels divine and is both light and warm, even when wrinkled. You heal people because it warms your heart in a way having a dress free of wrinkles never will.”

Sometimes, caring for the sick warmed Nita’s heart, more often it broke her heart.

George stuck his head into Nita’s room, rapping his knuckles on her door. “Fifteen minutes, you two. Nicholas says he’ll open the dancing with Leah, and he’s already pacing the library. Kirsten and Suze are down there tormenting him while Leah makes a final stop in the nursery.”

“And Mr. St. Michael?” Nita asked, stealing a glance at her image in the mirror. Even saying his name pleased her and banished some of the upset Della’s comment had caused. Nita would soon be Mrs. St. Michael. Very soon.

“St. Michael’s my next stop,” George said, “though may I say, you both look delicious and will be the envy of all, save our sisters, who are also very nicely turned out.”

George withdrew, and Della bounced off the bed. “George should be married. He’s too dear to wander around the Continent pretending he’s debauched.”

Excellent point. “George is not debauched,” Nita said, “but his more unconventional tastes are problematic.”

“Byron had the same tastes,” Della retorted, “and he didn’t depart for the Continent until his creditors took exception to his debts. He married.”

“Byron married miserably by all accounts.” Though Byron was also a father at least twice over. “Shouldn’t you be fetching your boots, Della?”

“I’ll fetch my boots,” Della said, “but you needn’t feel guilty just because you and Mr. St. Michael are besotted while George remains lonely.”

Della was formidable when hurling insights. Nita folded a shawl over her arm and gave Della a one-armed, possibly even dress-wrinkling, hug.

“You’ll make new friends in London,” Nita said, recalling all too well the same false platitudes flung at her as she prepared for her come-out. “And you will always be welcome in my home. Mr. St. Michael is in want of family. I think that’s one reason he’s attracted to me, because I bring a large and loving family to the union.”

“A large and loud family,” Della said, smiling. “You look lovely, Neets. Mr. St. Michael’s regard has brought a sparkle to your eye. I’m envious.”

Della was also sweet, as George was sweet. Della’s envy was a cheerful gift, laughingly tossed into Nita’s lap.

“I love you, Della Haddonfield, and I will miss you when I leave this household.”

Della hugged her back, the embrace leaving Nita unaccountably melancholy. Della skipped off in search of her boots, and Nita grabbed a beaded reticule from the vanity. She was to be married, the plainest, oldest, least romantic of the Haddonfield sisters, and married to a dear, handsome man of means.