Untamed by Anna Cowan Page A

rain. The shed was only small, and it housed three pigs; their grunting breath and the sweet-rot smell of their feed filled the air.
    The Duke came in after her, dragging his waterlogged skirts. He looked so miserable huddling under the old blanket from the parlour that she relented and stepped forward to lift it off his shoulders. His eyes followed her movements, and she was close enough to see how his long black lashes were slicked together into clusters. His skin was white, with patches of fierce-blooded red.
    She wondered what it would feel like to lean in and kiss him. It was, at her best guess, what he wanted.
    He would be cold, instinct said. He would flinch away from you.
    She hung the blanket beside her hat. ‘My pigs, as requested.’
    ‘H-have you n-named them?’
    She turned, clutching the pitchfork. She still had to bring the firewood in so that it would dry by this evening – and she should already be in the kitchen helping Liza with supper. But she had to feed up the pigs because Angus was coming on Monday, and now —
    ‘Do you feel a chill, Your Grace? I don’t like having you here, and I don’t feel that I need hide my feelings, but I can’t let you get sick. I could hang for that sort of thing.’
    ‘Absurd g-girl. No one’s going to hang you. I’m f-fine. Just need to be out of the rain. Does it alw-ways rain in the country?’
    She looked him over critically in the dim light, and his shivers seemed to be subsiding. ‘You should go back into the house.’
    ‘All there is f-for me to do in the house is misunderstand your cataloguing system. Let me s-stay. Tell me the names of your pigs.’
    ‘I don’t name’em,’ she said, getting the tines of the fork right under the straw and rotting food and mulch closest to her. She turned it and started on the next part, working quickly. She was going to feel it in her back and arms tomorrow. Tom was right, she had grown soft in London.
    ‘Why not?’
    The biggest sow nudged Kit’s legs with her blunt nose. ‘Get out of it,’ she said, shooing her off with the flat of the fork. ‘They’re not pets, Your Grace. That one,’ she pointed to the young boar, ‘is going to be butchered on Monday.’
    ‘Good God, why?’
    ‘He’s almost two months old and we don’t have room to house him elsewhere through winter, or the time to train him to service the sows if he turns out randy.’
    A choking sound, over the din of the rain and the movement of her pigs.
    ‘Sorry, Your Grace, I’m out of the London habit. You did ask, though.’
    ‘I’m not embarrassed by your speech. I was thinking that some young men of my acquaintance could use lessons on how to properly service a woman.’
    She dropped the pitchfork.
    ‘We may talk of pigs servicing one another, but not humans?’
    ‘No!’
    ‘Why not?’
    She looked up into his laughing face, and almost said it: Because you and I are humans, and there is something complicated between us.
    ‘I need to bring in more compost from outside,’ she said, and stalked out, forgetting to put her hat and shawl back on.
    Darlington and the pigs considered each other. The sow who’d been nosing around Miss Sutherland settled herself in the corner against groaning slats of wood. She was enormous. A beast. Her hide looked like something you would clean your boots on, and her teats sagged, misshapen, onto the newly turned muck. It seemed impossible, but at thirty-one years of age he had never seen a pig like her. A real pig. He had a vague memory of petting a pretty little pink creature wearing a lace collar when he was a child – a manicured thing brought out to please the small Viscount d’Auton.
    This sow’s head was almost the size of his torso, and her . . . piggy eyes watched him, her ears like sails testing the wind. Had he heard a rumour once that pigs ate human flesh?
    He had forgotten the other large pig, which appeared suddenly and snuffled his skirts.
    The noise he made, leaping aside, startled the