Page 33 of Tremaine's True Love
“Whatever it was, it flew straight to your dovecote,” Tremaine said, stepping off his horse. “Perhaps I won’t be journeying to Oxford just yet.”
For the first time, his obligations to his livestock, his employees, and their families felt not like an anchor, not like the enviable result of commercial success, but like a burden.
“I’ll hold William,” Lady Nita said, lifting the reins over the horse’s head. “Alfrydd was in the saddle room. You’d best fetch him.”
A ladylike version of an order, with which Tremaine complied. Alfrydd tottered up the ladder to the mow, leaving Tremaine in the gloom of the stable, surrounded by horses munching hay and shifting in their stalls.
He was worried for his sheep, of course he was. He was worried for Lady Nita too.
Heoughtto worry for himself. Nita Haddonfield was decent, a lady to the bone, and an innocent, despite her ill-advised medical adventuring. Tremaine’s dealings with her should be either polite, gentlemanly distance or matrimonial overtures.
Lady Nita wouldn’t understand the first, and she’d laugh at the second.
“From Mr. Belmont,” Alfrydd said, advancing down the ladder by lowering his left leg, pausing, then the right. Left, pause, right. Tremaine’s grandfather had moved in the same fashion when his hip had been predicting a winter storm.
“I expect it’s for you, sir,” Alfrydd said, passing over a tiny rolled cylinder of paper. Outside, under the sullen winter sky, Lady Nita stood waiting beside William, while in the shadows of the stable, Tremaine wrestled with a choice.
He could tell her ladyship, regardless of what the note truly said, that he was needed in Oxford. Leave the sheep, the sisters,and the kissesbehind, climb onto his horse, and tend to business.
Atlas hung his head over his stall door, as if to inquire of any news.
“Thank you, Alfrydd.” Tremaine took the note out into the light.
Tups coming right. Will feed only regular fodder. No news is good news. MacNeill
The writing was tiny; Tremaine’s relief was enormous, while Lady Nita patted his horse and asked nothing of him save that he travel safely. She was so calm, so alone.
She was also a delight to challenge over a hot, spicy, late-night mug of cider.
And to kiss.
“You were right, my lady,” Tremaine said. “You were exactly, absolutely, one hundred percent right. My boys are rallying.”
He expected one of her ladyship’s sweet, beaming smiles. He was certainly smiling, smiling like a shepherd boy smitten with the goose girl. What greater gift could any shepherd have than his flock returned to well-being?
Lady Nita peered at the sky, she fiddled with William’s reins, she stroked the horse’s hairy shoulder.
“I’m glad.” Another lingering pat, this one to the beast’s neck. “Will you be staying then, Mr. St. Michael?” Nita Haddonfield was the least presuming woman Tremaine had met, or perhaps the most disappointed.
“I will tarry another few days,” Tremaine said. “Isn’t there an assembly next week?”
NowLady Nita smiled—at the cold, hard ground, true, but a happy smile nonetheless, one that whispered of mulled cider and midnight ginger biscuits.
“We do have an assembly in the offing,” she said. “Leah will be in alt to present you to the neighbors. You must practice your dancing and flirting.”
Tremaine and Lady Nita could practice dancing and flirting with each other, though flirting had ever been beyond him. Strategy, however, was in his gift. He took the reins from her ladyship and passed them to Alfrydd.
“Lady Nita, might you accompany me on a call to Mr. Nash?”
Her bashful, endearing smile winked out like a star fallen from a December night sky. “I think not, Mr. St. Michael. Susannah is on better terms with Mr. Nash than I am. She, Della, or Kirsten would happily accompany you. All of them together, in fact, and likely the countess as well.”
She named a flock of curious ewes, climbing all over Tremaine’s attempts to gather information—and not only information about Nash.
“Your company will be the more discerning,” Tremaine said. “Nash is competing with my attempts to acquire your brother’s sheep. My call will not be entirely social, and I think you might have planned an errand or two for this afternoon.”
Alfrydd hovered in the doorway to the barn with William, out of the wind but within earshot. He was very much the earl’s man, of course, while Tremaine was…
In trouble.
