Untamed by Anna Cowan Read Free Book Online Page B

out two or six or even ten months from now, you’ll still be a duke, and she will be fair game for any man who wants her.’
    His eyes moved over her, thinking, calculating. She didn’t like watching the speed at which he worked; she suspected nothing he did was by accident, and he’d meant her to see it. He walked on.
    ‘A young, impressionable woman comes to town from the country,’ he said. ‘She marries to satisfy her family, but the man she marries is altogether too much for her, and so every day is a battle to keep him at bay. She does not understand the rules of this world where she has landed, nor the people in it who look down on her from their castle walls. She is alone and drowning.’
    Drowning.
    ‘Then a man takes pity on her, and he fashions her a suit of armour. He teaches her to demolish castle walls with a single word. With his help, she learns to bring the world around her to its knees in worship. She is a queen. But her family, who sent her from the country as a young, impressionable woman, demand that she give that man, that single ally, up.’
    She counted sixty whole seconds of silence. Her father had rearranged reality with words, too, and she had discovered that if she allowed some time to lapse she could begin to pick through his fancy for the pieces she knew to be true.
    Oh, God, had Lydia really been so alone?
    ‘She doesn’t need to be worshipped. She needs to be esteemed and liked and respected.’
    He made a graceful bow then continued walking. ‘All of those things, I feel for your sister.’
    ‘She needs those things from her husband and her peers, not from a lover.’
    ‘And her family? What does she deserve from them?’
    The shot pierced her clean through. She stopped to allow for the curious pain of it and looked up at him. ‘I want you to stay away.’
    His eyes met hers and it hit her, forcefully, that he was right – she had nothing to offer him in return for what she asked.
    She saw with excruciating clarity that all those years she’d been turning Lydia into the kind of woman who could marry well above her station, she’d been turning herself into a narrow kind of woman with no power. Not of the sort she desperately needed now. Why hadn’t she tried to make an ally of her uncle after Father died, no matter how hopeless it seemed? A relation like Lord Barton might at least have made the Duke pause.
    He watched her steadily, waiting, because they both knew he could demand anything he liked of her.
    ‘If there is anything I can give in return, name it,’ she said, and each word was pulled painfully to her will, like arrows knocked to the taut string of a longbow.
    He looked away across the park. ‘I want you to leave London,’ he said.
    She couldn’t believe it. She wanted nothing more. She would comply in a heartbeat.
    ‘And I want to come with you.’
    Darlington watched, but he couldn’t detect any particular change in her. She was perhaps a little paler, but it was hard to tell beneath the bonnet and with the mottled shade of leaves across her face.
    He did not feel so composed as she. What fate had put her so wholly within his power, when he needed her so very much?
    ‘You cannot,’ she said. The sunshine in her voice surprised him, as it did every time she opened her mouth. There was, still, nothing sunny about her. ‘You cannot come with me.’
    ‘Do you have no proper chaperone at home? That will not be a problem.’
    ‘I have no proper home for a duke.’
    They stood not too far from Lydia’s carriage. He was aware that Lydia and the Dandies watched them, as did half the ton , it seemed. The Dastardly Duke of Darlington, not content to rest after last night’s efforts, already seducing an innocent.
    It was difficult to say whether she was innocent or not.
    He waved to Lydia, one graceful swish of his hand through the air. He knew already that he would desert her. He would put his needs above hers, and prove himself irredeemable.
    ‘I do not need a