Untamed Read Online Free

watching a prize thoroughbred trip over a twig.
    ‘Don’t ask about my hand,’ she said. ‘Don’t ask about my nose. Don’t ask about my mother or my damn pigs.’ There. She was curt and spare, like the countryside where she had carved herself a home.
    He hesitated – she feared he wouldn’t let it go – then he shrugged. It had been mere idle curiosity, then.
    ‘And so you leave us with only two topics of conversation,’ he said. ‘Your sister’s dress and how desperately we are dying for love of the Duke of Darlington.’
    The Duke of Darlington. She had all but forgotten. She strained for a sight of him through the crowds and saw he was still standing by the giant mirror where he’d stopped earlier.
    ‘A newly minted duke is a spectacle, is it not?’ the man beside her said. ‘It’s rather sad, really, how he tries to fill his late father’s shoes. He’s too weak and silly by half – a mewling runt of a man. Even the simple task of properly acquiring his title seems beyond him.’
    ‘But . . . his father died a month or so ago. I walked past St George’s the day they buried him.’ The pavement had been washed out in black, the ton ’s finest gathered together to mourn the passing of one of their own.
    ‘Even a duke’s son must make a claim for his title, and this man’s claim has gone to the Committee for Privileges. Perhaps they see him as clearly as I do, and hesitate to confer such power on him, though it is his by right.’
    The men and women of London did not agree, then, when it came to the Duke of Darlington. Kit rather thought she sided with the men. If she truly must confront a duke, she would prefer that he be a weak and silly duke.
    ‘You may lean on me, if you want to go up on your toes for another look. Are they your pigs, Miss Sutherland?’
    She almost told him, because she suspected he would enjoy it. But he wouldn’t understand the desperate pride you could feel in a couple of pigs that were yours .
    ‘What’s your name?’ she asked.
    He tipped his head and watched her. She felt in those heartbeats as though he drew somehow closer to her, though he didn’t move. She flushed and looked away.
    He said, ‘You won’t spare the Duke, will you, when you tell him to stay away from your sister? I would give much to be there.’
    ‘He is generally admired – but you do not admire him?’
    His mouth kicked up again at the corner. ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘there’s no one alive who loathes him like I do.’ His eyes unshuttered, and she saw something she knew she should not have seen.
    Until that moment she had thought she had his complete attention – had felt, in fact, like something pinned open on a dissecting dish. He gazed at the dancers and she realised only the smallest part of him was even here, in this room. The rest of him was off somewhere, and she couldn’t help wanting to follow, to find out where. To bring him into focus and see him clearly.
    The dancers seemed distant, the music indistinct, the voices around them a constant hum from which a laugh or exclamation occasionally surfaced. It was such a long time since she’d focused on anything but her family. She felt tentative, taking that first step into curiosity. She, whose body was strong enough for anything.
    ‘What did he do to make your dislike so violent?’ she asked.
    He turned his shoulders to the wall and tipped his head back against it. ‘We have a long history, he and I. It is quite, quite gruesome. Are you sure you want to hear the sorry tale?’
    Her skin shivered like nervy horse-hide. ‘I live to hear the Duke slandered.’
    ‘I grew up on the Northumberland estate, where the family spends their summers.’
    ‘Were you and he boyhood friends, then?’
    ‘Ah, me. I feel sometimes the only thing worse than being interrupted is having someone break into your tale and guess what comes next. It makes one feel so very predictable. May I continue, or have you divined the whole story