Page 75 of Tremaine's True Love
“I’ve already decided I can’t ask for the sheep to be included in Lady Nita’s dowry,” Tremaine said, finishing a scrumptious lavender-flavored biscuit. Why he should share his decision with Lady Della was a mystery. Perhaps one spoke thus with siblings, even when they were acquired by marriage.
“So you’ll buy them in a separate transaction six months hence,” she retorted, “and Nicholas will be the soul of accommodation in this scheme because he’s another dunderheaded male. I’m telling you, Susannah needs those sheep.”
“If I could find the earl,” Tremaine said, “I’d cheerfully negotiate settlements with him that will preclude me from ever owning those damned sheep, but he’s eluding my notice. Given his size, this suggests he doesn’t want to be found.”
Given the earl’s besottedness with his countess, it suggested his lordship was elsewhere in the family wing, perhaps using a snowy morning to further secure the succession.
“Nicholas makes birdhouses when he’s wrestling with a problem.” Lady Della offered the biscuits again. “Leah sometimes helps him or joins him in his workshop simply to bear him company and get away from the rest of us.”
Her comment brought a memory to light, of Beckman Haddonfield hanging a fantastical birdhouse in the lower branches of an oak at Three Springs. The miniature chalet, complete with a tiny carved goat on the roof—a bearded, horned male—had been a wedding present from the earl.
“Bellefontemakesthose birdhouses?” The workmanship had been exquisite, far too fine to hang in a tree. “Those birdhouses could fetch a pretty penny as parlor ornaments.”
Tremaine betrayed his mercantile soul with that comment, and the look Lady Della sent him—eyes dancing, lips threatening to turn up—said she knew it. He stuffed half another biscuit in his mouth before he could utter more ridiculousness.
“Nicholas will be cheered to hear that his woodworking passes muster,” Lady Della said. “He’s also quite skilled with a muck fork, which I’m sure his countess took into consideration when he asked for her hand. His workshop is at the back of the stable. Go into the saddle room and you’ll find a small door on the back wall. Nobody ever thinks to look for Nicholas behind a small door.”
Nor would they think to find a small sister guarding his welfare.
“My thanks,” Tremaine said, rising. “Shall I have a footman bring more coals for your brazier?”
“And have the staff know I’ve been closeted with you? No, thank you.”
She dismissed Tremaine by the simple expedient of resuming her study ofA Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
Like all the Haddonfields, Lady Della was clever, but she wasn’t restless with it the way Nita and Kirsten were, nor did she enjoy Susannah’s domestic inclinations.
Lady Della was lonely though, Tremaine would have bet William on that. That’s what her announcement of her age, size, and bastard status had been about. She was lonely and expecting to be overlooked by her newest sibling-by-marriage.
Tremaine would not overlook her—or underestimate her. By supper at the latest, she’d figure out that an agreement preventing him from owning the sheep would pose no bar to hisleasingthe same animals.
Which left Tremaine to puzzle over why Nita had neither told him she was paying one last call on the Chalmers family nor invited him to escort her.
CHAPTERTHIRTEEN
Susannah’s birdhouse had been easy. Nick had devised a structure that looked like a set of shelves holding various volumes—Fordyce’sSermons, Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, Wordsworth’s latest poems. These, Nick fashioned into a home for birds, two stories of books high, the finished product fooling the eye from only a few feet away.
“Nita took me by surprise,” Nick informed a fat, white tomcat tending to its ablutions on the work bench. “One hardly knows what to give her, she’s so damned independent.”
The sketchbook in front of Nick was open to a blank page, the same blank page he’d been staring at for an hour.
“Sheep, maybe, because she’s attached the affections of the Sheep Count, but what if she disdains his suit?”
Nick drew the pencil from behind his ear and tried a few lines in the direction of a woolly merino.
“Sheep don’t typically hang about in trees.” Neither did books, come to that. “Cats do.” Kirsten might like a cat-shaped birdhouse if ever she found a man she couldn’t demolish with feminine indifference.
Fifteen minutes later, Nick tossed down his pencil, disgusted. His birdhouse sheep all looked like clouds with cloven hooves.
“Nita might have cornered St. Michael in some cozy parlor and made him recite more poetry to her, might have dragged him into the village to get the gossips excited, might have gone off to count lambs with him, but no. She must deal with some colicky infant or worse.”
The cat stropped its head on Nick’s chin and left a trail of brown paw prints on the white page.
A tap on the door interrupted Nick’s musings, while the cat switched directions and made another pass beneath Nick’s chin. Nick’s countess had doubtless come to rescue him at last from his doleful musings.
“Come in, lovey,” Nick said without turning. “I’ve missed you sorely and need some kisses to cheer me up.”
“I’d be happy to indulge you, Bellefonte,” said an accented male voice, “but your brother George might become jealous, to say nothing of your countess’s consternation.”
