Page 95 of Tremaine's True Love
“Well, no, actually. I’ll be leaving later today, assuming the weather cooperates. Lady Nita has declined my offer of marriage.”
St. Michael munched at his toast as if he’d reported a slight dip in the value of some shares he held on the Exchange.
“You are related to me by marriage, St. Michael, and I mostly like you,” Nick said. “If you’ve broken my sister’s heart, you had nonetheless best have your affairs in order. Nita’s besotted with you—my own countess has confirmed my opinion on the matter.”
Leah usually confirmed Nick’s opinions, except when he was dead wrong on an issue of importance, and Nita’s engagement was of utmost importance.
“I am besotted with her as well,” St. Michael said in that same pass-the-butter tone of voice, “though you do the lady no favors if you bring that up in her hearing. She has stated terms I cannot accept, so I’m leaving the field. You will not chastise her, you will not bully her, you will barely notice my absence, Bellefonte, oryouraffairs had best be in order.”
The earldom was seven kinds of a mess, but Nick’s marriage was in order and that was what mattered most. St. Michael stared at his toast as if he’d no idea how it had arrived in his hand.
Nita truly had turned down the poor sod, and St. Michael hadn’t seen that coming.
“Nita adores you, St. Michael, and she is not a woman prone to adoration. What happened?”
A simple question shifted the discussion from a tense negotiation to a session of shared male bewilderment. St. Michael returned his toast to its plate and helped himself to a ginger biscuit from the crock on the desk.
“I didn’t pay attention to what matters,” he said. “I know better. I paid attention to Nita’s sweet smiles, brandished my own version of same, made a few ringing pronouncements about guarding my wife’s welfare, and congratulated myself on being a shrewd, bold, lucky fellow. But the devil’s in the details, right? Except a woman’s passion is not a detail.”
Nick nudged the biscuit crock closer to his guest. “I am Oxford educated and a belted earl. If you speak slowly and use small words, this time you might make sense.” A biscuit went down to defeat at the hands of St. Michael’s limited vocabulary.
“Lady Nita’s passion is healing,” he said, dusting his palms. “I thought I was her passion, or marriage to me and a family of her own. I was wrong.”
Those last three words were painful to hear.
Nick crunched a strip of bacon into oblivion. “I’m frequently wrong. One survives the indignity somehow. Have another biscuit.”
St. Michael took the lid off the crock and peered at the contents. “I thought it reasonable to expect that a mother would keep her children safe from illness—and herself too, of course.”
Nick quite agreed, but he was Nita’s older brother and the head of her family. Nita had scoffed at his pretensions to authority for years.
“Maybe a marriage needs to be built on more than reason?” Nick pushed his plate away and took a biscuit.
“Duty, certainly, should play a role,” St. Michael replied. “I tend to my business because I’ll not follow in my father’s footsteps, living off my ancestors’ wealth and a rank I did nothing to gain. A man must guard his honor as he sees fit, and for me that means commercial industry.”
Nick silently admitted to having been wrong himself: Tremaine St. Michael was not greedy, not amassing coin for the power it afforded him. He worked because it was all he knew to do, just as Nita needed her bilious spinsters and teething babies to give her life meaning.
“I’m sorry, St. Michael. My door will always be open to you. Women have been known to change their minds.”
Though not Nita Haddonfield. She was a female monument to dearly held convictions, and her stubbornness alone had probably routed death more than once.
“I don’t know how to convey this without inspiring you to violence,” St. Michael said, “but your sister might find herself forced to wed me.”
No wonder the miserable blighter looked as if he’d had too much punch.
“Nita is a Haddonfield, and allowances must be made,” Nick said. “I have reason to believe—”
“If you say I was not her first, I shall kill you, Bellefonte. Nita’s decisions are not subject to your judgment.” St. Michael broke a biscuit in half and offered Nick the larger portion, which, being a prudent older brother and a belted earl—also a man who’d known heartbreak—Nick accepted.
“I have reason to believe,” Nick went on, “Nita has tisanes and potions that will prevent any untoward consequences of your visit here.”
St. Michael’s expression went from fierce to stricken, and his half of the biscuit hit the desk, leaving crumbs all about.
“Am I to thank you for that disclosure, Bellefonte?”
Nick swept the crumbs into his palm and deposited them in the dustbin. “I suppose not. What will you do?”
What was Nick to do with the sheep he’d intended to provide St. Michael as a wedding gift? Bloody beasts were eating a prodigious amount of good hay, and old Difty Kinser said a record crop of lambs was on the way.
