Page 70 of Tremaine's True Love
“Tell me Digby’s symptoms,” Nita said, drawing Elsie over to the window and away from the menfolk. Elsie was deep in a mother’s recounting of her son’s every woe and feebleness when from behind them, Nita heard Mr. St. Michael murmur to George.
“Mr. Haddonfield, shall we fetch the horses? I do believe it’s beginning to snow and I would like to look in on the herd’s new arrivals on our way home.”
CHAPTERTWELVE
As a very young man, Tremaine’s fascination with, and devotion to, the gratification of his breeding organs had bordered on an obsession. Life had been a procession of frustrated urges, fantasies, frequent occasions of self-gratification, and the rare, much-anticipated interlude with a willing female who knew what she was about.
Such females became more readily available as Tremaine’s circumstances improved, while his preoccupation with erotic gratification had curiously ebbed. And thus the first of many adult insights had befallen him: he excelled at wanting what he could not have, and the roots of that dubious talent twisted around childhood memories best left unexamined.
Those roots yet held life, apparently, because as Tremaine assisted Nita to dismount outside the sheep byre, he wanted to swive her all over again, but more than that, he wanted her formal acceptance of his marriage proposal.
“We shouldn’t linger,” she said, her hands remaining on his shoulders. “We’re apparently in for some weather.”
Nita was lovely, with the snow dusting her scarf and lashes, when by rights she should be chin deep in a hot, scented bath. Instead, she was paying a call with Tremaine on a flock of woolly beldames.
I love you.The words sounded in his mind—only in his mind, thank God—as startling as they were heartfelt. “Let me take the horses around back,” he said, “out of the wind. Go inside. You’ll be warmer.”
He kissed her on the lips, George having had the great good sense to look in on Kinser. A capital fellow, George, if somewhat given to scolds. Tremaine tied the horses to the rowan growing at the back of the byre and sent a prayer skyward that the damned snow let up.
So he and his lady couldlinger.
“How do you tell the sheep apart?” Nita asked when Tremaine joined her inside the byre. While not cozy, the little stone structure was appreciably warmer than the out-of-doors and full of fat, milling sheep. Some reclined on the straw, chewing their cud, some sniffed at Nita’s hems, two were nursing lambs, and one napped with a lamb—Tremaine’s little ram—curled at her side.
‘“You tell them apart the same way you do people,” Tremaine said. “By their facial expressions, their general appearance, their voices, the way they move. Shall we look in on our young friend?”
As they approached the sleeping pair, the ewe awoke but remained curled in the straw.
“I’m glad I wore my old habit now,” Nita said, drawing off her gloves and kneeling. “He’s painfully dear.”
She meant that, meant that the sight of the lamb cuddled against his mama made her heart ache. Tremaine’s damned heart ached too, at the sight of Nita petting the little fellow and blinking hard.
“Will wee Annie be well?” he asked.
Nita used her gloves to swipe at her eyes. “She should be. Croup is common and needn’t be serious. Shall we give him a name? Something gallant and brave?”
How brave did a fellow have to be to curl up against a warm female and drift into dreams?
“Call him anything you like, my lady. He’ll be honored among all the other rams of the herd to have been given a name.”
Marry me. Let me give you my name.
The ewe was a tolerant sort, or perhaps she recalled the scent of the humans intruding on her afternoon slumbers. She sniffed at Nita’s hand, then gave her baby a few licks around his ears.
“Don’t wake him,” Nita told the ewe. “Little ones need their rest.”
Tremaine drew Nita to her feet and straight into his arms. She went willingly and the simple feel of her against him, even through layers of winter clothes, settled his nerves a sorely needed degree.
“Have you considered my proposal?”’
Nita nodded against his shoulder and remained right where she was. Not well done of him, to raise the topic here, among the beasts, with the scents of straw and livestock thick in the air. And yet the location was appropriate too. Tremaine had first noticed Nita—truly noticedher—when she’d been so concerned with a newborn lamb shivering on the frozen earth.
“I want to be sensible,” she said.
‘“You’ve been sensible until you’re sick with it,” Tremaine said, though ironically, Nita’s selfless, tireless, pragmatic medical skills made others well.
He could spare her that paradox and would, gladly.
‘Not sick with it,” Nita said, “but lonely, certainly. With you, I need not pretend to be someone I’m not.”
