Page 29 of Tremaine's True Love
Tremaine St. Michael had ventured into the music room, a pair of worn saddlebags over his shoulder. Nita brought the music to a cadence and folded the lid over the keys.
“Mr. St. Michael. I gather you’re leaving us.” Leaving her.
He took a seat on the piano bench, which left little room for Nita. “I honestly don’t want to, my lady. I looked forward to turning down the room with you, learning how you cheat at cards, or singing a few duets with you. ‘Green Grow the Rashes, O,’ comes to mind.”
“Mr. Burns again?”
“At his philosophical best. Will you walk with me to the stables, my dear?”
The door to the music room was open, which preserved Nita from an impulse to kiss Mr. St. Michael. She’d refrained the previous night—good manners, common sense, some inconvenient virtue or other had denied her a single instant of shared pleasure.
“I’ll need my cloak.”
Mr. St. Michael stayed right where he was, which meant Nita was more or less penned onto the piano bench.
“I told the earl the Chalmers boys would be useful in any effort to harvest timber from the home wood,” Mr. St. Michael said. “They’ll know where the deadfall is, where the saplings haven’t enough light. The girl, Mary, is plenty old enough to start in the scullery.”
Nita hadn’t dared make that suggestion, though many apprentices began work at age six. “Mary is needed at home, especially now that the new baby is here.”
“The baby has a mother.” Mr. St. Michael rose, his tone quite severe. “An infant that young ought to be in her mother’s care.”
Nita came to her feet before he could assist her. “Addy tries, but she can’t find honest work, and that leaves only what vice themenin the shire will indulge in, and she drinks.”
Such was the fate of women who did not preserve their virtue for marriage. Mr. St. Michael spared Nita that sermon, though Nicholas had alluded to it enough to disappoint Nita more than a little.
As if any of her brothers had preservedtheirvirtue for holy matrimony? As if they knew for a fact that Addy had cast her good name heedlessly aside, that it hadn’t been wheedled from her grasp by a predatory scoundrel—or worse?
Mr. St. Michael held Nita’s cloak for her when they reached the kitchen door, and when Nita would have closed the frogs herself, his hands were already at her throat, competent and brisk. He did up the fastenings exactly right—snug enough to be warm, loose enough to allow movement and breathing.
“Have you a bonnet, Lady Nita?”
So formal. If Nita had had a bonnet, she might have smacked him with it, surely the most childish impulse she’d felt in years.
“We’re only walking to the stable, Mr. St. Michael, and the sun has hardly graced the shire in days.” What would freckles on Nita’s nose matter, anyway? “I take it you couldn’t sleep?” she asked by way of small talk.
His eyes looked weary to her, like the gaze of a mother who’d been up through the night with a colicky infant.
“I did not sleep well; you’re right, my lady. I’m accustomed to waking up in strange beds, but I do worry for those sheep.”
Nita let him hold the door for her, though his observation was odd.
Mr. St. Michael bent near. “I meant I travel a great deal, and spend many nights in inns, lodging houses, and the homes of acquaintances. You have a naughty imagination, Lady Nita.”
She took his arm, though she was entirely capable of walking the gardens without a man’s escort. Nita did have a naughty imagination, about which she’d nearly forgotten.
“Will you send word when you reach Oxfordshire, Mr. St. Michael?”
“I’ll have your Mr. Belmont send a pigeon, but you mustn’t worry. I’m a seasoned traveler, William is an excellent fellow under saddle, and the distance isn’t that great.”
The distance was endless, because Mr. St. Michael, having failed to wrangle Nicholas’s sheep free, would never cross paths with Nita again.
“I wish you had taught me a few verses of that song, the one about Mr. Burns’s philosophy.” Nita wished this more dearly than she wished to study German medical treatises on surgical procedures.
“The song is a bit naughty too,” Mr. St. Michael replied. “The lyrics are at once profound and frivolous.” He paused among the shorn hedges and dead roses and offered Nita a mellow baritone serenade:
The sweetest hours that e’er I spend, Are spent among the lasses, O!
But gie me a cannie hour at e’en, My arms about my dearie,
