Untamed by Anna Cowan Read Free Book Online Page A

said a lot of nonsense that sounded very naughty but meant nothing if you parsed it down. If Lady Isley had only condescended to speak with Lady BenRuin’s unfashionable sister, she could have had more details than was polite.
    Kit waited to be introduced to him, though she supposed that in a strictly theoretical sense she had met him already. Twice over. Lydia appeared to have forgotten she existed – she’d even gone so far as to put her back between Kit and any clear sight of the Duke. Lady Isley left them to greet another acquaintance who was waving from a barouche farther ahead. As soon as she was out of earshot, Lydia and Darlington’s friends began swapping gossip in bright, earnest voices.
    Darlington looked away over the park and said nothing. He seemed blank – merely a body inhabiting a space. It bothered Kit, more than she liked. She leaned around Lydia and said to him, ‘I’m Miss Sutherland. How lovely to make your acquaintance for the very first time.’
    That made him smile – a smile as if he were coming back to life. He shouldn’t smile at her like that. She shouldn’t have tried, despite herself, to amuse him. It had been as instinctive as the desire to run a finger through the grime on a window to let some light shine through. He manoeuvred his horse to her side of the carriage and made to take her hand.
    ‘Let’s not do any of that,’ she said in a low voice. His sudden closeness was sobering. ‘I know what you are.’
    ‘Have you been reading the papers, Miss Sutherland?’
    And then she wanted to pull him off his horse and pummel him into the ground. She would spit on him for approaching her last night when he knew who she was, and what she wanted from him.
    She would be home soon, she reminded herself. All of this would be done, soon.
    The carriage lurched briefly forward, and she saw the workings of his knee from the corner of her eye, as he urged his horse to keep pace. The beast was pale and large – almost too large for the man who sat astride it. It was kept perfectly in control, but showed its desire to be unrestrained more clearly than its master did.
    ‘Just do me the courtesy,’ she said, ‘of hearing what I have to say.’
    He nodded. ‘Would you walk with me?’
    ‘Kit.’ Lydia turned from her lively conversation. ‘You cannot leave me alone in the carriage, that simply won’t do.’
    Kit had no way of knowing whether this was true or not.
    The Duke laughed. Different to that single, precious laugh Kit had longed to keep, before she knew the kind of man he was. ‘My dear Countess, you are a married woman. Though I must forgive you for forgetting it, when I so often forget it myself.’
    They were careless words. Kit looked at her sister, the married woman who was supposed to fend for herself. Behind the fortune’s worth of material she wore, behind her icy posture and her mocking smile, behind her knowing eyes, she glimpsed the tiny girl with thistledown hair who had once been the most precious thing in her world, and Tom’s.
    ‘I won’t be long,’ she said, and touched Lydia’s hand.
    Lydia recoiled from her. ‘Go, go.’
    The Duke dismounted and threw the reins to one of his hangers-on. Kit didn’t look at his sad eyes, which had no doubt missed nothing, and she refused his hand out of the carriage. She walked out ahead of him. He came up beside her and offered his arm. She didn’t take it.
    ‘You want something from me,’ he said, ‘yet so far you offer nothing in return. Your negotiation is somewhat lacking, Mistress Pig Farmer.’
    Kit watched a flock of girls walking down by the water, their parasols waving white and lazy in the breeze. When she and the Duke had walked far enough from the carriage she said, ‘I want you to leave my sister alone.’
    ‘Why?’
    She faltered a step. How could he even ask? She searched his face for sympathy, though she knew better. ‘She is married. She is young and impressionable. When you chew her up and spit her