Untamed by Anna Cowan Page A

awfully undone, though she didn’t understand the cause, or how deep his shaking went. She took her time plaiting her hair, and he was more composed when she turned back. Which didn’t make the enormity of him in her room any less overwhelming.
    ‘Are you coming to bed?’ he asked, getting under the covers.
    Her fingers gripped the edge of the dresser. She’d tried not to think too hard about how exactly she would climb into bed beside him, knowing the whole night long he might reach out for her. Behind her she could hear him . . . moving about. Making himself comfortable. His messy black hair on her pillow.
    ‘I will write a book of bad ideas,’ she said, pulling viciously at the buttons on her sleeve, ‘and the final chapter will be dedicated to this epic, gravity-defying feat of stupidity. And in hundreds of years a celebrated English wordsmith will come across it and write a poetic tribute to the very bad idea that malformed in the brain of one demented duke. His work will run to eleven volumes before his vocabulary has even begun to do justice to how extremely bad this idea is.’
    She could hear him smiling in the dark, and she knew she was showing off. Just a bit.
    Idiot.
    She bent to blow the candle out before she took off her dress; she’d have to sleep in her shift and stockings.
    ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Don’t blow it out.’
    ‘I’m not leaving it lit so you can gawk at me.’
    ‘But I’m so terribly curious, Miss Sutherland.’
    His eyes were on the candle, not on her.
    ‘Oh, my God,’ she said, ‘You’re scared of the dark.’
    He said nothing, and she took a step closer. ‘The Duke of Darlington. Quaking like a small boy. Well, well. If there isn’t a silver lining to every cloud.’ She sat on the edge of the bed, and tutted like a concerned aunt. ‘You can tell Kit everything, lovey. Let it all out.’
    If her bed was to be a battlefield, let this be the first sally. Let him attempt seduction in the same bed where she had pitied and judged him.
    ‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘For myself I’m not particularly interested, only I’m sure there are some London papermen who will be. It would be some neat insurance should you try anything against me and mine. Did the little duke wet his bed, too?’
    ‘Stop,’ he said quietly. ‘You’re not nearly unkind enough to want to do this. You imagine you will enjoy my humiliation. You won’t.’
    ‘Do you have any idea what it took to keep this house? Do you suppose for a second that I’d have managed it if I’d been nice ?’
    He said nothing.
    ‘Tell me, you condescending prick.’
    They were silent for a long time, but she wouldn’t look away. His neck was rigid, and he didn’t move under the covers. The candle guttered; his eyes flicked involuntarily towards it.
    She laughed, a mean sound, and turned away from him. ‘Forget it.’
    ‘You may not have noticed this,’ he said, ‘but I’m not exactly the manly variety of man. My father was a keen observer of the fact, and his response was to lock me into a particular room under the house with no windows. Would that be the Grosvenor Square house? you are about to ask me, or the Hartsfield estate? To save you the arduous task of naming all twenty-one of my houses, I can tell you now, Miss Sutherland, that my father had a room just like it built in every one. And I needn’t point out that they all seemed very much the same to me, given that I couldn’t see what a single one of them looked like. What? No witty rejoinders? I would have thought at the very least a gleeful chuckle would be in order.’
    ‘I don’t.’
    He waited patiently, but when nothing else would emerge from her mouth he said, ‘Tut, Miss Sutherland, I won’t let you give up nearly so easily. What I have told you is idle chit-chat that would barely cover one cup of tea. What you’re after is something truly horrific. Something that would bring the newspapermen to your very door.’
    ‘I don’t want to hear