“Miss Tanner,” Lady Fairly said. “Do you wish a moment of privacy with our Thomas?”
Our Thomas? “Yes, please.” A moment of privacy with a dyspeptic lion might pass more agreeably, so severe was Thomas’s expression.
“Thomas, you will listen first,” her ladyship said, descending the steps. “You will be a gentleman at all times, and you will not muck this up. Fairly accompanies me to London in the morning, and I can’t spare him for any more adventures with you just now.”
Lady Fairly kissed Thomas’s cheek, patted his chest, and left Loris alone with the man she loved—the man she’d nearly abandoned.
“Won’t you sit for a moment?” Loris asked, when Lady Fairly had disappeared down the path to the home wood.
Thomas took the place beside Loris, and the swing dipped on its chains.
“I wanted to kill him.” He tapped a folded document against his palm, slowly, deliberately, in the same rhythm an annoyed cat switched its tail. “I wanted to kill him by painful inches. Generally, I abhor violence.”
“I wanted to give Claudia Pettigrew a piece of my mind,” Loris said. “Has she left yet?”
“You think I meant Giles? He’s a puppy,” Thomas said. “An overwhelmed, arrogant, helpless puppy who’s lucky he rides well; and yes, his mother has been escorted to London. I’ve considered buying Giles a cavalry commission, but the only billets available are in India, and then I’d be left with a half-ruined horse farm to deal with.”
And me. You’d have me to deal with. “Papa will put the Pettigrew estate to rights—he’s the one you wanted to kill, isn’t he?” Loris could admit to the same impulse. That Thomas shared her sentiments was reassuring.
He gave the swing a push with his foot. “Yes, I meant your papa. He has much to answer for, leaving you to contend with his problems, leaving you to wonder, leaving you to make explanations. And then this business with Pettigrew.”
The swing was in nearly violent motion.
“Thomas, I suffered no ill effects,” Loris said. “I’m angry with Giles, and I’ll probably be angry with Papa for the rest of my life—we can be angry with the people we love, I know that now—but I’m fine. Nicholas has offered me the hospitality of his family’s estate, and I would like to get to know my cousins.”
That last was sheer fancy, for all Loris wanted to do was wrap her arms around Thomas and never leave his side.
“You’d abandon me then, after all?” His question was carefully neutral, and he let the swing slow.
“I would not want to leave you, but I can understand why you’d be upset with me.” Upset was a kind word for disappointed, disgusted, furious… Loris knew them all.
“I found the note,” Thomas said, leaning forward and bracing his elbows on his thighs. “The damned, conniving, sneaky note Tanner had passed to you in Trieshock. ‘Be ready,’ he warned, as if you were one of his raw recruits and he your commanding officer.”
Worse and worse. “I did not want to leave,” Loris said, though that sentiment would be paltry consolation to the man who, against every dictate of sense and convention, had given her a chance to prove her abilities. “I had decided not to go, in fact, and Papa’s idea of a reunion assured me that my decision was sound.”
Thomas rose and took up a position half-sitting, half-leaning on the porch railing. Loris wanted to haul him back, within kissing and cuddling range, but he was agitated, and rightly so.
“Explain yourself, Loris, for your situation has been much on my mind.” He tapped the letter against his palm again, or maybe not a letter, because the paper was velum rather than foolscap. Had he written her a character? A bank draft?
Loris knew not which would be worse.
“Papa expected me to do to you exactly what he had done to me,” Loris said. “To leave without explanation or notice. I know how that feels, to be abandoned, left to wonder and worry. I could not treat somebody I lo—”
Thomas ceased tapping the document. “Loris Tanner?”
Loris looked away from him, across her tidy back garden, to the overgrown home wood. A maple at the edge of the trees already had a few yellow leaves near the top, and the sight brought despair closer.
“I could not treat somebody I l-love the way Papa treated me,” Loris said. “I hadn’t figured out what to say to him, how to justify my decision, but when he behaved so, so… so thoughtlessly, all proud of himself and ready to drag me away from you, from Linden… He’s not a bad man, but he was a poor father. I’m grown now, and I have options I didn’t have as a child.”
Thomas snapped off a blue, blue pansy and held it out to her. “If you cry, I will want to break your papa’s head, and because it appears Tanner will be my neighbor, Belmont would likely get involved. I beg you, madam, please do not cry.”
Loris accepted the pansy, knowing she’d put it between the pages of the Bible she’d demanded back from her father.
“Do you love me, Loris?”
“Yes.”
“I believe you do,” Thomas said, resuming his place beside her. “I read your father’s presuming little epistle, though I had no overt intention to trespass against your privacy at the time. I wanted to tear his missive to bits. I still do.”
The sneaky, conniving note. Loris stopped twirling her pansy. “When did you read that message, Thomas?”
“The night before the assembly. I wanted to leave you a note, explaining that I was being gentlemanly by letting you rest without an uninvited baron in your bed. I opened your lap desk, and there Tanner’s summons sat. You were to pack immediately, leave everything you’d worked so hard for behind, and come at a dead gallop to your papa’s side the instant he crooked his presuming—I’m sorry. He’s your father, and he did the best he could.”
Loris took Thomas’s hand. He sounded mortally disgusted, though he at least grasped that Loris loved him.
“Papa’s note did tell me to pack and be ready. He was just being Papa.”
“He was being a self-absorbed, arrogant, high-handed… Yes, he was being your papa. Nicholas and Beckman are not in charity with him, I’ll have you know. If you visit Belle Maison, Micah Tanner will not accompany you.”
Loris had dreamed Thomas would accompany her. She let her head rest on his shoulder and put aside the pansy.
“So you knew that Papa had summoned me. What you must think of me, Thomas, to have spared Papa a single instant of my attention.”
“I think very highly of you,” Thomas said, kissing Loris’s knuckles, “but thoughts are of little moment compared to deeds. If I love you, then I will acknowledge that you have choices, and I will support your choices as best I can. Your father loves you, my sister loves me, I love her, I love you, you love Linden. All very lovely, but you deserve more than high-flown sentiments. You deserve to have a choice.”
Did Thomas realize he’d spoken in the present tense regarding his sister? Did he realize his thumb brushing over Loris’s knuckles was making her insides melt?
“Your declaration of love, Thomas, means the world to me. I understand if you can’t renew it.”
“I am renewing it, you hopeless gudgeon, but I wanted to give you time to recover your balance and make up your mind without somebody pointing a gun at you. I intend that you have options, though I warn you, I’m not playing fair.”
How stern he sounded. Loris lifted Thomas’s arm and settled it about her shoulders.
“If this is a further declaration of love, Thomas, you’re being rather indirect.”
“Oh, very well, I’ll be precipitous, because my next attempt at a declaration will be made in your bed, madam.” He tossed the paper into her lap. “Please marry me, and don’t run off with anybody else, even your poor, helpless idiot of a father, ever.”
Loris unfolded the paper and peered at it, despite her vision having gone blurry.
“I can’t make it out,” she said, though the words for her sole and separate use, notwithstanding any subsequent period of coverture leapt off the page. �
��Thomas, what is this?”
“It’s a trust document,” Thomas said. “I’m a man of business, and marriage settlements are business, but Loris, that trust goes into effect whether you marry me or not. You can choose Linden, and you can choose me, but you’ll not be forced to put up with me simply as the price for biding on the estate you clearly love.”
“Are you leaving me?” What did a deed of trust have to do with loving each other, if that’s what Thomas was saying?
And what did anything matter—land, crops, harvest, anything—if Thomas was leaving her?
“No, I’m not leaving you, and you weren’t leaving me. You hadn’t packed so much as a handkerchief, madam. I realized that, as I lay among your sheets, felled by the thought of all you’ve dealt with. A woman eager to leave packs her treasures herself. You hadn’t even a valise under your bed nor a satchel in your wardrobe.”
Thomas slid off the swing and went down on his knee, though he kept Loris’s hand in his.
“I’m proposing holy dratted matrimony and making a complete hash of it. That paper says you own Linden, more or less. You also own my heart, and I certainly hope I have a lifelong lease on yours. I had to get Nick and Beck involved as trustees, and your father will try to tell you what to do with land he nearly ruined, and maybe you don’t—hell. Please marry me. Linden is yours, whether you marry me or not. I’m yours regardless, too. Will you be my baroness?”
Thomas was proposing, again, despite Loris’s idiot father, despite notes in her lap desk, or ships leaving from Brighton. He was offering her wealth and freedom without benefit of matrimony—Linden would be hers—but he was offering her love and joy at his side, too, and that meant the world.
That meant everything.
Loris wrapped her arms around him, the paper crackling in her lap. “I don’t care two wilted weeds for being your baroness, but I will be your wife gladly, and your lover and your friend and your adviser on all matters agricultural. I love you, Thomas Jennings, Baron Sutcliffe, and I will always, always love you, and never, ever leave you.”
Thomas picked her up and carried her into the cottage, though Loris made him stop long enough for her to retrieve the pansy and set it in water. They were married within the week—Thomas had his suspicions about Loris’s recent tendency toward midday naps—and Lord and Lady Fairly stood up with them.
Loris’s father did not escort her up the church aisle. Loris bestowed that privilege on Nicholas, and the wedding breakfast included all of the Haddonfield sisters and brothers, Squire Belmont, and even Thomas’s sister, Theresa—also his charming, if somewhat rambunctious little niece, Priscilla.
Though the difficulty that dear child endured sorting out her mama and the squire is a tale for another day.
Acknowledgement:
Many years ago, I crossed paths with a man whose job was investigating all those awful transportation accidents we read about in the newspapers. While I was learning to be a child welfare attorney, and deal with families coming apart at the seams, my neighbor and friend, Dr. Merritt Birky, PhD, sorted through the wreckage of plane crashes, derailed trains, and burned out oil barges.
When Squire Belmont applies simple logic and knowledge of local conditions to get to the bottom of Linden’s stable fire, he’s relying indirectly on the experience of one of the world’s most experienced smoke and fire toxicologists. Merritt shares Matthew’s tolerant outlook toward the human condition, and his lively curiosity about the natural world, too.
Way leads on to way, and we don’t always get to stay in touch with the friends we make, but I do want to thank Merritt and his fellow accident investigators. They labor for long hours under trying conditions to keep us all safer as we go on about our lives, and surely that is the work of heroes and heroines.
To my dear Readers,
I hope you enjoyed Thomas and Loris’s tale! My next Regency romance, Tremaine’s True Love, the first in the True Gentlemen trilogy, comes out in August, and features Tremaine St. Michael and Lady Nita Haddonfield.
Tremaine St. Michael is firmly in trade, and seeks only to negotiate the sale of some fancy sheep with the Earl of Bellefonte. The earl’s sister, Lady Nita Haddonfield, is practical, selfless, and hard-working, though Tremaine senses she’s also tired of her charitable obligations, and envious of her siblings’ marital bliss.
Tremaine, having been raised among shepherds, can spot another lonely soul, no matter how easily Lady Nita fools her family. Neither Tremaine nor Nita is looking for love, but love comes looking for them!
You can order your copy of Tremaine’s True Love here.
Or start reading an excerpt from Tremaine and Nita’s story here:
* * *
Tremaine St. Michael’s visit with Lady Nita’s family has been cut short by illness affecting his flocks in Oxfordshire. Lady Nita knows how to treat all manner of illnesses and injuries, but she’s completely at a loss when it comes to her own heartache…
“Mr. St. Michael. I gather you’re leaving us.”
Leaving her.
He took a seat on the piano bench, which left little room for Nita. “I honestly don’t want to, my lady. I looked forward to turning down the room with you, learning how you cheat at chards, or singing a few verses of ‘Green Grow the Rashes, o.’”
“Mr. Burns again?”
“At his philosophical best. Will you walk with me to the stables, my dear?”
The door to the music room was open, which preserved Nita from an impulse to kiss Mr. St. Michael. She’d refrained the previous night—good manners, common sense, some inconvenient virtue had denied her a single instant of shared pleasure.
“I’ll need my cloak.”
Mr. St. Michael held Nita’s cloak for her when they reached the kitchen door, and when Nita would have closed the frogs herself, his hands were already at her throat, competent and brisk. He did up the fastenings exactly right—snug enough to be warm, not tight enough to constrain breathing or movement.
“Have you a bonnet, Lady Nita?”
So formal. If Nita had had a bonnet, she might have smacked him with it, surely the most childish impulse she’d felt in years.
“We’re only walking to the stables, Mr. St. Michael, and the sun has hardly graced the shire in the days.” What would freckles on Nita’s nose matter, anyway? “I take it you couldn’t sleep?” she asked, by way of small talk.
His eyes looked careworn to her, like the gaze of a mother who’d been up through the night with a colicky infant.
“I did not sleep well; you’re right, my lady. I’m accustomed to waking up in strange beds, but I do worry for those sheep.”
Nita let him hold the door for her, though his observation was odd.
Mr. St. Michael bent near. “I meant, I travel a great deal, and spend many nights in inns, lodging houses, and the homes of acquaintances. You have a naughty imagination, Lady Nita.”
She took his arm, though she was entirely capable of walking the gardens without a man’s escort. Nita did have a naughty imagination, about which she’d nearly forgotten.
“Will you send word when you reach Oxfordshire, Mr. St. Michael?”
“I’ll have your Mr. Belmont send a pigeon, but you mustn’t worry. I’m a seasoned traveler, William is an excellent fellow under saddle, and the distance isn’t that great.”
The distance was endless, for Mr. St. Michael, having failed to wrangle Nicholas’s sheep free, would never cross paths with Nita again.
Mr. St. Michael shifted, taking Nita’s hand as they traversed the cold, dormant garden. They hadn’t bothered with gloves, and his grip was warm.
“I will recall your hospitality fondly, my lady,” he said, his burr once again more in evidence.
While Nita would recall his departure with bitter regret. A gust of frigid wind blew down from the north, snowflakes slanting along it.
“Must you go, Mr. St. Michael?”
“I don’t like the look of those clouds either,” he said as they approache
d the stable, “but I’ll probably make London before the weather does anything serious. May I make a farewell to your Atlas, my lady?”
“Of course.” Despite her heavy cloak, Nita was chilled, and the barn would be relatively warm.
They walked into the stable, out of the wind, but into near darkness. In warmer months, the hay port doors, windows, and cupola would be opened to let in light and air, but in winter, warmth was more important than light.
Atlas lifted his head over the half door, a mouthful of hay munched to oblivion as Nita and Mr. St. Michael approached.
“You need a more elegant mount, my lady,” Mr. St. Michael said. “Just as you need a silly evening of cards, a waltz or two, and more poetry. I had hoped to give you that.”
Nita needed to kiss him. Tremaine St. Michael had offered her a rare glimpse of how male understanding could comfort and please, he’d offered her poetry, and he was leaving.
“Good-bye, Mr. St. Michael.”
Nita didn’t have to go up on her toes to kiss him, but she did have to stand tall. Despite the bitter wind outside, despite his lack of hat, scarf or gloves, Mr. St. Michael’s lips were warm.
He tasted of peppermint with a hint of ginger biscuit. Nita hadn’t planned more than to press her lips to his, but Mr. St. Michael was apparently willing to indulge her beyond those essentials.
His hands landed on her shoulders, gently but firmly, as he tucked her between himself and the wall of Atlas’s stall. He slid a hand into her hair, cradling the back of her head against his palm.
Soon, he’d gallop to off Oxford, but the way he held Nita said, for the moment, she wasn’t going anywhere.
Well, neither would he. Nita wrapped an arm around Mr. St. Michael’s waist—blast all winter clothing to perdition—and sank a hand into his dark locks.
“I’ll miss—” she managed before his mouth settled over hers and Nita’s worldly cares, her disgruntlement with her family, her concern for the Chalmers children, all went quite… tapsalteerie-o.
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