Page 51 of Tremaine's True Love
“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 toseethe epistle St. Michael had penned with such dispatch?
CHAPTERNINE
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 the flasks. Somebody would get out a fiddle, somebody else would tell a tale or start on a rendition of “Willie Brew’d a Peck o’ Maut,” and the laughter would crest higher and higher until Tremaine’s sides ached.
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 expectingyou.” 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 laughterattractedhim. Even her medical preoccupation, in its place, had 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 seek to discuss marriage?”
