Nine

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 flask. Somebody would get out a fiddle, somebody else would tell a tale or get started on a rendition of “Willie Brew’d a Peck o’ Maut,” and the laughter would crest higher and higher until Tremaine’s sides ached with it. 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 expecting you.” 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 laughter attracted him.

Even her medical preoccupation, in its place, had some 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 want to discuss marriage?”

“I believe I did just open that topic. Allow me to elaborate on my thesis: Lady Bernita Haddonfield, will you do me the honor of becoming my wife? I think we would suit, and I can promise you would know no want in my care.”

A proper swain would have been on his damn bended knee, the lady’s hand in his. Lady Nita would probably laugh herself to tears if Tremaine attempted that nonsense. He’d seen her laugh that hard earlier in the evening, over Lady Kirsten’s rendition of the parson’s sermon on women keeping silent in the church.

Lady Nita picked up her pamphlet, which Tremaine could now see was written in German.

“Why, Mr. St. Michael?”

“I beg your pardon?” Tremaine was about to pitch the damned pamphlet in the fire, until he recalled that Nita Haddonfield excelled at obscuring her stronger emotions.

“Why should you marry me, Tremaine St. Michael? Why should I marry you? I’ve had other offers; you’ve made other offers. You haven’t known me long enough to form an opinion of my character beyond the superficial.”

This ability to take a situation apart, into causes, effects, symptoms, and prognosis, was part of the reason she was successful as a healer. Tremaine applied the same skills to commercial situations, thus he didn’t dismiss her questions as dithering or manipulation.

Neither was she rejecting him.

“My appraisal of your character goes beyond the superficial, my dear. You can be shy, but you haven’t a coy bone in your body,” he said, propping his feet beside hers on the brass fender. “Your heart is inconveniently tender, but you are so fierce and so disciplined, few suspect this about you. I do not pretend my offer is that of a passionate young swain for a lady he has long loved, but I will guard your heart with my life, my lady.”

She folded the pamphlet but didn’t set it aside. “Will you entrust your heart into my keeping?”

Did Tremaine even have a heart to entrust? His parents had shown him the folly of allowing that organ to overstep its biological functions, and yet he liked Nita Haddonfield, he desired her, and her regard for him mattered very much.

“I will entrust my heart to no other.” Tremaine could give her that assurance. He sealed his promise with a kiss to her knuckles and kept her hand in his.

“Interesting reply, Mr. St. Michael. I’m happy with my life as it is, though. Marriage has always struck me as a poor bargain for the lady. She ceases to enjoy any sort of independence and must endure her husband’s pawings and beatings without recourse to the church or the law. She risks her life in childbirth, repeatedly, and should her husband die, she’s best advised to get another as soon as possible.”

Lady Nita’s objection was to marriage in theory, not to Tremaine personally. He took courage from that.

“You are slow to trust,” he said. “I’m not exactly atremble with confidence in the institution myself. Marriage means my wife’s entire health, happiness, and safety lie exclusively in my hands, and all my wit, my meager store of charm, my plowman’s poetry, and my coin may be inadequate to keep her safe from the foxes and wolves.”

Tremaine should probably not have likened a husband’s responsibilities to those of a shepherd, but the sentiments were similar. Nita would be his exclusively, her welfare his responsibility.

“I like kissing you,” she said, regarding their joined hands. “Will you come to bed with me?”

Tremaine’s breeding organs offered an immediate, unequivocal yes. The stakes were too high to indulge in such folly, however.

“Why, my lady? Are you anticipating vows with me?”

“I’m making up my mind,” she said. “I like you, Mr. St. Michael, but I would not be a biddable or easy wife any more than you’ll be a biddable or doting husband. We both must be very sure of this decision.”

Lady Nita would be a loyal wife, one who never compromised Tremaine’s interests or countermanded his decisions—not the important ones. As for the doting, a man could learn new skills when sufficiently motivated.

Tremaine had ever enjoyed a worthy challenge, after all.

“Would it help to know I’ll happily purchase a house here in Kent?” he asked, a bid in the direction of doting such as he understood it. “There are several possibilities in this vicinity—I’ve inquired—and I’d happily make our Kent property an addition to your dowry portion.”

Some part of Tremaine—the prudent businessman or possibly the awkward suitor—did not want to join Lady Nita in bed unless and until she’d accepted him as a spouse.

“You are thorough about your campaign, Mr. St. Michael, but I cannot take a house to bed. I cannot, with any hope of enjoyment, kiss a house or hold its hand. I cannot fall asleep with the arms of a house about me, and a house cannot recite Scottish poetry about a shepherd boy’s heart breaking because he’s been banished for loving his shepherd girl.”

The “Broom of the Cowdenknowes.” Earlier in the evening, Tremaine had offered up a simple lament as an antidote to the indecipherable subtlety of old Shakespeare.

Tremaine’s heart would not break were he banished from Lady Nita’s boudoir, which pragmatism was part of why he could offer the lady marriage.

And yet…what she wanted was understandable.

“I can be those things you ask for, Lady Nita. I can be the man who holds you as you sleep, who gives you all the kisses you want, who indulges your appreciation for poetry, and whose hand is always yours to hold.”

Tremaine had Lady Nita’s attention now. The pamphlet lay forgotten in her lap, so Tremaine gathered his courage and leaped. “I can be the man who takes you to bed and indulges your every intimate passion as often and as wantonly as you please.”

* * *

Tremaine St. Michael had traveled the Continent in times of war, he moved nimbly between cultures, rattled off poetry in broad Scots and French, taught letters to children among the ashes, and turned pages for Kirsten as she raced through Scarlatti at the pianoforte.

Such a man commanded hordes and warehouses of aplomb—Nita’s bold proposition had failed utterly to scare him away—and yet something was off.

Nita considered the translation of Paracelsus sitting in her lap and made another grab for logic, reason, common sense, for anything that would keep her from dragging her visitor to her bed.

“How do you know I’m capable of wantonness?” she asked. Nita certainly suffered doubts.

Mr. St. Michael slid from his chair with the ease of a cat hopping to the carpet. He arranged himself before Nita, his arms loosely about her hips.

“Anybody who defies her family as easily as you do, who takes on the worst of winter’s weather, who challenges death itself, has a capacity for considerable passion. Stop diagnosing a simple case of attraction between healthy adults and kiss me.”

He moved closer, close enough that Nita caught a whiff of mint on his breath. She cupped his cheek, finding it shaved smooth. He’d prepared for his campaign while she’d read medical wisdom written hundreds of years ago.

Nita was tempted. Tempted by the flesh-and-blood man before her, tempted by his assurance that passion and pleasure could be hers. She set her pamphlet aside, leaned forward, and touched her lips to Mr. St. Michael’s. His shoulders relaxed, but he did not assume control of the kiss, a point in his favor.

For Nita would allow no man to assume control of her, marriage be damned, attraction be double damned.

“More,” he whispered. “Again.”

As she leaned forward and anchored her hands in his hair, Nita shifted, so Mr. St. Michael knelt between her legs. His arms snugged around her waist, and tension seemed to drain from him.

“I’m not saying yes,” she muttered against his mouth.

His reply was rendered with more kisses, delicate, entreating, fascinating kisses to which Nita most assuredly assented.

And then she wasn’t saying anything. She was kissing him back like a woman who might never have another kiss, who might die, with all her passion spent on other people’s colicky babies and gouty grandparents.

Mr. St. Michael shifted up so he embraced Nita as she sat before the fire. The contours of his body were more evident than in any of their previous encounters, because Nita wore only her nightgown and robe while he wore only breeches, waistcoat, and shirt.

Nita knew the names of the muscles—pectoralis, subclavius, serratus—but she was frantic to learn the feel of them, of him. Without breaking the kiss, Nita went after the buttons of Mr. St. Michael’s waistcoat.

“You will take me to bed,” she said as a button went flying.

“You like giving orders.” He smiled against her mouth and brushed her hands away. “Like being in charge. Maybe this is part of the appeal of the sickroom.”

Nita hated sickrooms. “How can you think of such matters at a time—?”

Mr. St. Michael rose away from Nita and she wanted to roar at him to get back to their kissing, except he yanked his shirttails out of his waistband and hauled his shirt over his head, waistcoat and all.

Firelight turned his skin golden, and the dratted man must have had some sense of the picture he made, half-naked and all gloriously healthy male, dark hair whorling down the midline of his flat belly.

“I think to please you,” he said, extending a hand to Nita.

She regarded that callused, masculine hand, stretched across the marital equivalent of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling.

“I would not be a biddable wife. I would be headstrong and difficult. I am not very sociable. I do not hold my opinions lightly.”

“You will not hold your vows lightly either,” Mr. St. Michael said, his hand steady. “You would protect our children with your life, and you’d manage easily when I’m traveling for extended periods. You’d enjoy your independence, in fact, and be neither impressed with our wealth nor heedless of it.”

Our wealth. Her independence. Nita loved the sound of that, though as for Mr. St. Michael’s extended travel… Nita’s brothers had traveled. She’d tolerated their absence with an abundance of prayer and activity.

People would still fall ill, suffer injuries, and have babies, regardless of Mr. St. Michael’s traveling. She’d stay busy. Nita put her hand in his and let him draw her to her feet.

“You will give me time to consider your proposal, sir.”

He scooped her up against his chest. “You are magnificently stubborn, which only attracts me more. I will give you something to think about then, besides a few tame kisses.”

Tame kisses?

He settled Nita on the bed, and while she tried to decide if she liked being handled like a sack of flour—albeit a precious sack of flour—Mr. St. Michael toed off his boots and peeled away stockings and breeches.

“We didn’t bank the fire,” Nita said, gaze glued to the middle of his chest. Sternum, rectus abdominis. Do-not-look-down-imus.

Wearing nothing but a smile the likes of which would set every female heart in the shire pounding, Mr. St. Michael crossed the room and took up the poker.

Trapezius, latissimus dorsi, gluteus…

Gluteus God-help-me-us. A giggle threatened, a very pleased giggle as Mr. St. Michael returned to the bed.

“Do you typically wear your robe and stockings under the covers?” Mr. St. Michael asked. His voice was different in the lower light, maybe more French or more Scottish, but definitely less English.

And certainly more naughty. Nita shifted back, swinging her legs into the bed. “I do not. Aren’t you cold, sir?”

Mr. St. Michael took Nita’s foot in his hands and drew her stocking off slowly, so the soft wool caressed her calf, ankle, and arch. Nita gave him her other foot, assailed by the certainty that anatomical labels and stubbornness would not see her through what came next.

“Your robe, my lady?” He folded her stockings on the night table casually, as if women’s clothing were familiar to him—though they were wool stockings.

Nita shrugged out of her robe, an awkward undertaking that involved scooting her hips and rocking from side to side. Mr. St. Michael waited patiently, his nudity a visual lure immediately to Nita’s left.

“My guess is you’ve seen the male body before,” he said, folding the robe across the foot of the bed. “Are these maidenly vapors for my benefit?”

He sauntered around to the other side of the bed, the meager light of the banked fire revealing only outlines and shadows.

“I’m not a maiden,” Nita said, flipping the covers back so he could join her between the sheets.

He stopped, one knee on the mattress. “Do I have a rival for your hand?”

His tone was merely curious, as if a rival might be an interesting twist to a tricky negotiation, though Nita also had the sense a wrong answer might send him right back into his boots and breeches.

“No rival. You’re not disappointed?” Had she hoped he would be?

He settled on the bed. “We have a word in English to describe a woman without sexual experience—she is a maiden. We have no word for a man in a similar untried state. The general term—virgin—sits awkwardly on the male, and he has no specific term of his own. I’ve found this curious.”

Mr. St. Michael was comfortable sharing a bed, lounging on his side as if he and Nita shared a blanket in a meadow.

“You’re curious about the terminology?” Nita was curious about his anatomy, but also about the passion he’d seen in her—and she sensed in him.

“That too. Come here, please. Some discussions are better undertaken in close quarters.”

Nita scooted under the covers—the room would soon grow chilled—and wished she’d kept a candle lit.

“What are we to discuss, sir?”

He arranged himself around her, so Nita was on her back, Tremaine St. Michael draped along her side.

“Were you disappointed, my lady?”

A lump rose in Nita’s throat, inappropriate, inconvenient, and unwelcome. The question was insightful and quietly tendered.

“I was young. He was a dashing fellow in his regimentals, handsome, charming, and newly down from university. I’d known him most of my life, but he’d gone away a boy and come back a man.”

Or so she’d thought. He’d gone away a boy and come back a scoundrel, in truth.

Mr. St. Michael pulled Nita closer and kissed her cheek. “Did your handsome cavalier have the bad grace to die in service to King and Country?”

Nita turned, tangling her legs with Mr. St. Michael’s. “He did, of dysentery. Disease carried off nearly as many soldiers as enemy fire on the Peninsula, and he was one of the casualties.”

How cozy and comforting to drop her forehead to Mr. St. Michael’s sturdy shoulder and share a regret with somebody who would not judge her for her indiscretion.

“Did his death inspire your campaign against illness and injury?” Mr. St. Michael’s hand settled on Nita’s nape, fingers massaging away tension, regret, and even self-consciousness.

“My mother trained me regarding herbs and nursing. That feels good.” Nita’s mother had also trained her to endure an unrelenting sense of responsibility. Would marriage offer a cure for that affliction or make it worse?

Mr. St. Michael said nothing for a long, sweet moment, while the sheets warmed, and Nita relaxed into the novel comfort of sharing a bed with a man who knew his way around the female body.

“Are you still in love with your young soldier?” Such was Mr. St. Michael’s sophistication that he wouldn’t have begrudged Nita a sprig of willow for a young man long dead.

“You are not as pragmatic and unsentimental as you want the world to think,” Nita said, kissing his shoulder. “I’ve since realized I was not in love with Norton. I was in love with romance, with the notion of my own household, of a place where my brothers weren’t always leaving and my mother’s ill health wasn’t increasingly obvious.”

Norton Nash would have made a very indifferent spouse. Nita had long since admitted that. He’d been shallow, vain, and without higher principles that might have inspired him to make something of himself. Part of her antipathy toward Edward was a result of the same attributes, allowed to flourish in expectation of a baronetcy.

“Gloomy talk,” Mr. St. Michael said, kissing Nita’s temple. “What say we relieve you of this shroud you’re wearing? Conversation will grow more cheerful as a result, I promise.”

This was how he teased, with a bit of a dare in his silliness. Nita hiked up on her elbows and reached beneath the bedclothes for the hem of her nightgown.

“A moment, please,” Mr. St. Michael said. He sat up, cross-legged, beside her, and untied the three bows holding the nightgown closed at Nita’s throat.

“You are very competent with ladies’ attire, Mr. St. Michael.”

“Do you know, when you scold me like that,” he replied, easing Nita’s nightgown over her head, “all vinegar and starch, it makes my cock twitch?”

However he might have ended his sentence, Nita could not have anticipated that. She ducked back under the covers, which had become agreeably toasty.

“You have a hidden streak of naughtiness,” she said. “I like that about you. As for the twitching, a tisane of valerian taken regularly might provide some relief.”

“More starch and vinegar,” he said. “You’re not helping. ‘First do no harm,’ isn’t that the highest canon of a physician? You’re dealing mortal blows to my self-restraint.”

“I’m not a—” Gracious saints. Without clothing, the business of cuddling beneath the blankets was an altogether less innocent undertaking. “You’re very warm, Mr. St. Michael.”

“If you don’t start calling me by my name, I’ll come before I’ve so much as kissed you.”

“But you’ve already kissed—”

He kissed Nita again, silencing her retort, pushing the warm, hair-dusted expanse of his chest against Nita’s breast and arm.

“My name is Tremaine. When I had more family, some of them referred to me as Maine. In spoken English, this likens me to a part of a horse. In French, I’m part of the human anatomy.”

La main, a feminine noun for the hand.

Nita ran her hand over the wondrous texture of his chest. “Are you babbling? I’d like it if you babbled a little.”

“I will sing ‘God Save the King’ in any one of five languages, if you’ll just keep touching me.” A heavily burred growl more than a babble. She liked that even better.

“I’ll enjoy your serenades some other time,” Nita said. “My brothers would kill you did they find you here, and my sisters would never allow me to live down my disgrace.”

“Dammit, Nita, if we’re to be married—”

She drew her fingertip around his nipple lightly, clockwise, counterclockwise. “Interesting.”

“Heaven defend me from an anatomist in siren’s clothing—or lack thereof.”

Tremaine had the ability to make Nita smile with his complaining, also to inspire her. She licked that same nipple and inhaled a hint of heather and flowers.

“Do that again at your peril,” he hissed, making no move to dodge out of licking range.

“Are you threatening me in my own bed, Mr. St—?”

He pinned Nita’s hands above her head, his grip loose but implacable. “You like my naughty streak, may God help you. I didn’t even know I possessed one, sober man of commerce that I am, but I hope you come to adore it.”

His mouth descended on Nita’s breast, a hot, delicate onslaught of sensations that made her want to both squirm and hold very, very still.

“She desists,” he muttered, his tongue moving in a slow circle. “And she tastes of lemon.”

He drew on Nita gently, but that single overture had Nita’s back arching and grip on his hands becoming desperate.

“I like that.” Assuming Mr. St. Michael did not slay Nita utterly with his attentions in the next five minutes, she’d thank Kirsten for the lemon soap. He moved to the second breast, and Nita did squirm.

“Shall I dose you with valerian?” he muttered against her heart.

“Dose me with your kisses, or I’ll scold you for the next hour straight. I have five brothers and three younger sisters. I am a prodigious scold when inspired.”

He left off tormenting Nita’s breasts and loomed over her, his dark hair in considerable disarray.

“For an hour straight?”

Straight, as in the hard column of flesh pressing against Nita’s hip. She wiggled a hand free of his grip and shifted, so she had room enough to grasp him. His shaft was surprisingly warm and, from what she could recall, of considerably more generous proportions than Norton had been so proud of.

“You are the boldest lady I’ve ever met.” His tone said he approved of her boldness.

Nita traced the contours of his arousal, from the thatch of down at the base, along the shaft, to the peculiar configuration of the business end.

“Why are you holding your breath, sir?”

He spoke through his teeth. “I’m trying not to spend, you lemon-scented witch.”

“I thought spending was the part men liked best.” Norton certainly had. All three times, he’d assured Nita he wouldn’t, and then… Had he thought she’d not grasped why her handkerchief had been needed while he’d done up his falls?

Mr. St—Tremaine nuzzled Nita’s throat. “I’ll show you the part this man likes best—with your permission.”

Nita let him go, because the time for teasing and giggling had passed. Maybe it had passed years ago, and she’d been too busy delivering babies and brewing tisanes to notice.

“Show me, then,” she said, giving him permission to become her lover.

But not her husband—not yet.

* * *

Tremaine enthusiastically immersed himself in the pleasures of trading in art, Holland bulbs, Italian wines, wool, and livestock. The pleasures of the flesh—when they intruded upon his immediate notice—usually struck him as a needlessly complicated road to comparable satisfaction.

He’d traveled that road many a time nonetheless.

Wooing Lady Nita was complicated indeed, involving pursuit of her intimate favors, appreciation for her tireless mind, and enticement of her trust.

What perplexed Tremaine, as he arranged himself over his intended, was how all that effort added up to fun.

“How long has it been since anybody tickled you, my lady?”

“Your chest hair might be said to be tickling me at this very moment.”

Or Nita’s nipples might be said to be tickling Tremaine’s sanity. He kissed her, for his conversational gambit had lead straight to folly. She was a fine kisser, having the ability to make a discussion out of what some turned into an excuse for oral aggression.

“You taste sweet,” he said. “One wonders…” How would Nita’s intimate parts taste? She’d probably allow him to find out, eventually. Maybe on their wedding night.

“You taste like mint and male.” She framed his face with soft hands and kissed his brow. “Your hair bears the scent of heather.”

Tremaine hoped he tasted like a husband. Nita hadn’t capitulated yet though, not entirely, and that was only fair. When a woman surrendered control of her entire future, a man ought to work for the privilege of becoming her spouse.

“Nita, love, we cannot risk a child.”

Her hands went still, and the minute undulations of her hips—when had she started that torment?—ceased.

“I haven’t vinegar and sponges,” she said. “Had not known I might ever need them.”

While Tremaine’s nearest sheath was in Oxfordshire. He cursed in Gaelic, a language Nita was unlikely to know.

“Do you trust me, my lady?” Her answer mattered, and not simply because the urge to mate had ambushed Tremaine with a ferocity that characterized healthy animals in spring. “The Latin term is coitus interruptus, and while it’s a distant second to the pleasure you’re owed, it will minimize the prospect of a child.”

And this approach might allow Tremaine to survive the next hour.

Nita brushed his hair back from his forehead. “You put a choice before me: an assured moment’s pleasure, but at the risk of a lifetime of obligation to you.”

At least Nita trusted him to provide that moment’s pleasure. To give himself time to think, Tremaine indulged in another spree of kissing, which plan backfired horrendously.

When Nita let him up for air, he was crouched over his lady, though his wits had also decamped for Oxfordshire.

“If you understand that marriage is a partnership,” Nita said, tracing his eyebrows with her thumb, “if you accept that you have no dominion over me save what I yield willingly, and that my dominion over you is on the same terms”—now she traced his lips with that same thumb—“if you can trust me, Mr. St. Michael, then I am willing to take this risk with you now—but only this risk.”

Still not an acceptance of his proposal, but progress.

“I can honor those terms,” Tremaine said, for he’d never intrude on Nita’s domestic territory, never overrule her common sense as she applied it to the nursery or household matters, never question her social instincts when moving in circles where she was welcomed and Tremaine merely tolerated.

She traced his ear, a peculiarly arousing touch, when Tremaine was already painfully aroused.

“You promise to withdraw?”

“On my honor, I promise to withdraw.”

Tremaine had enough practice at it that he could make that vow, though he had no experience with Nita, and thus he resisted the screaming imperative from his cock to plunge into her willing heat.

“Doesn’t one need to”—her caresses slowed—“that is, in order to withdraw from a location, oughtn’t one to be in that location in the first place?” Nita sounded curious and worried, as if trusting Tremaine were the most difficult boon he could have asked of her.

“You have the right of it,” he said, nudging forward. She would frequently have the right of a situation, and he’d learn to rely on her judgment in the years to come.

The thought of those years steadied Tremaine, gave him some purchase against lust, and allowed him to love Nita with honest affection, with a cherishing respect that was no less passionate for being of the mind as well as the body.

“I like this,” she whispered as he progressed languidly toward a complete joining. “This is better.”

Better than her soldier boy? Tremaine gathered Nita closer, hoping he could soon make their union better than her wildest imaginings.

“Am I pleasing you?” Was he making her see him as her husband?

“If you could move just a shade more—mmf.” Nita bit his earlobe as he added a hint of power to his thrusting. “Like that.”

She locked her heels at the small of Tremaine’s back, adding her undulations to his, and Tremaine was forced to think of…sheep succumbing to coe, foot rot, scours…

“Tremaine…”

His name, full of wonder and maybe a bit of terror, as Nita Haddonfield’s passion found its gratification. He drove her through it, though she hardly needed herding. Nita went after her pleasure at a pounding gallop, bucking into him, clutching at his backside with a ferocious, delightful strength.

“Gracious, merciful, never-ending…” She unhooked her ankles and purely hugged Tremaine as he went still above her. “I had no idea.”

That she’d had no idea clearly bewildered her, while her befuddlement delighted Tremaine.

He kissed her shoulder. “Then you’d best have another go, don’t you think? You can confirm your first impression, investigate the matter further.” Make a thorough study of what was on offer, because irrespective of any marriage proposals, she was owed that.

Damn her soldier boy for a selfish bumbler anyway.

“We can do that again?” she asked. “I thought you said you’d withdraw?”

“I will withdraw before I spend, but I needn’t spend just yet.” Much to Tremaine’s surprise.

He pleasured Nita again, and just when he thought she’d had her fill, she got to experimenting with angle and speed, and had a jolly good time without Tremaine having to do much besides mentally attempt the Lord’s Prayer in Latin backward.

When his lady lay panting and pleased with herself—and with him—Tremaine gently slid from her body, for she would be sore come morning.

Also engaged to be married, Tremaine hoped.

He braced himself on one arm and used his free hand to stroke himself exactly three times, before his self-control joined other valuable assets somewhere in the wilds of Oxfordshire. The pleasure was glorious, while the mess went all over Nita’s belly, for which Tremaine would apologize, just as soon as he could speak.

“You withdrew,” Nita said, petting his hair. “You said you would.”

She was relieved and pleased and capable of speech. Marriage to this woman would require great reserves of sexual stamina, God be thanked.

“Flannel?” he managed.

While Tremaine hung over Nita, breathing like a spent steeplechaser, she fished on the night table and then passed him a cloth. He tended to her, then tended to himself and tossed the cloth toward the hearth.

“Let me hold you,” Tremaine said. Nita would soon learn what he really meant was, “Would you please hold me?” For he needed her embrace, needed her sweet kisses and surprisingly affectionate nature.

Tremaine pitched onto his back and tucked Nita against his side. “You should take a soaking bath in the morning, madam.”

“Will you need a soaking bath too?” Nita was either genuinely curious, or his lovemaking had put her very much on her mettle.

“I shall. You’ve worn me to flinders.” He kissed her temple and tucked her leg across his thighs. “I will need the assistance of at least two stout footmen to get down to breakfast, I’m sure.”

Nita’s damnably inquisitive fingers toyed with his nipple, and so thoroughly had Tremaine spent his passion that her touch was only eleven times more distracting than a tickle and only fourteen times harder to ignore than a stampeding herd of cattle.

“How does one manage that breakfast table encounter?” Nita asked. “I’m accustomed to dealing with patients in extremis—you’d be surprised the curses a Quaker lady knows when delivering her first child—but this is…”

Mercifully, her fingers went still.

“This is different,” Tremaine said, as close as he could come to describing an intimacy entirely without precedent in his experience.

What fool would go haring off to Germany to buy sheep in the dead of winter when travel would mean leaving Nita Haddonfield’s side for weeks? Tremaine could take her with him, of course, but why spoil a wedding journey with commerce?

Commerce, his faithful mistress since he’d sold his first crop of wool nearly twenty years ago.

Nita patted his nipple. “We shall contrive. Nicholas and his countess manage, and they’re shamelessly besotted, not merely investigating possibilities with each other.”

If Nita had investigated Tremaine’s possibilities any more thoroughly, he’d be—

We shall contrive. Together, they would in the future, as a couple, contrive. The sense of her words penetrated the lingering haze of erotic pleasure.

“What conclusion have you come to after all this dedicated inquiry, Lady Nita?”

She snuggled closer. “About?”

“About marrying me. About becoming my wife, or my countess. The title hasn’t been an asset on the Continent, so I’ve not used it, but I’m a French comte, a circumstance my grandfather delights in. I have holdings in Provence, Portugal, Wales—sheep do quite well there—Scotland, Ireland, and I’m thinking of buying land in Germany. I have residences in Edinburgh, Aberdeenshire, Paris, London, Oxfordshire, Avignon, Florence, Venice—I like art; have I mentioned that?—and York.”

Tremaine liked her, liked her exceedingly, and she apparently liked him rather a lot too. The pleasure of that happy coincidence warmed him from the inside out.

“Some of my properties are modest,” he went on, “mere town houses, but my holdings in the Midlands are considerable, and I’m more than happy to purchase you a dower property in the vicinity of Haddondale.”

He probably didn’t need to remind her of that.

Tremaine paused to kiss Nita’s temple, wondering what else he had to offer his intended. Her hand on his chest was a slack weight over his heart, her breathing even.

“We’ll live wherever you please,” he said. “The Oxford estate is commodious, a good place to bring up children, and not that far from your family. Summers there are wonderful.”

Tremaine fell asleep amid a vision of Nita organizing a family picnic for their brood of children. Sheep would dot the nearby meadow, the children would enjoy the chance to gambol out-of-doors. Tremaine’s wife would love him and their family, and forget she’d ever been reduced to dealing with the unfortunate, the unwell, and the injured.