Untamed by Anna Cowan Page B

sow and her hammy legs kicked her bulk against the walls as she struggled up.
    The wall broke with a sound that drowned out the rain.
    Darlington had heard women compared to bedraggled kittens before, when they’d been caught in a downpour. Miss Sutherland, when she entered the shed pushing a barrow full of decomposing food scraps, her hair hanging long and plastered to her head, looked nothing like a kitten. Her dress and smock clung to her, and the hair was slick beside her face. She was pared back – all that might have been floss or sugar about her had melted away and left the hard, uncompromising core. Only her lashes became poetic when wet, conceding some relationship to stars.
    ‘What the hell is going on here?’ She let the barrow fall with that casual, wiry strength of hers. The neck of her jacket and shirt were open, so that he could see the water running down thick strands of hair, plastered to her skin.
    ‘You need a better shed,’ he said, gesturing to the gaping corner, where water was already spilling through.
    She stared at the hole as if it had been made in her own person.
    ‘It’s unfortunate, but you can have someone fix it.’
    ‘Who?’ she said. ‘The pigs? You? ’ She closed her eyes and he heard one decisive breath in, one out. Her shoulders straightened, her face cleared. It was an exhausted kind of strength. He wondered if one day she would reach for it and it would be all gone. ‘You go back inside. Get out of my way.’ She didn’t even look at him. She pressed her already muddied knees into the filth of the sty floor and inspected the hole.
    ‘Fuck,’ she said, and he felt it from his scalp to his toes. He was not a prude, but he’d never heard a woman say it.
    He would not be sent away from her.
    She shooed the curious pigs out of her way, then picked up the small axe back from where she’d left it by the door. He caught her wrist before she could leave.
    She rounded on him, and there was none of the something-unsaid that was normally there between them, even when she was short with him. There was just impatience, and a mind preoccupied with a matter in which he had no part.
    ‘Use me,’ he said, letting her go. ‘Surely I can help.’
    She hesitated. ‘Bring me five logs from the pile against the back wall of the house. Can you manage that?’ No time for more than a nod in reply. No time for something witty, ironic, self-deprecating. ‘Good. Make sure you wear the blanket. I don’t have time to nurse you, too.’
    He wrapped himself in the still-sodden blanket and made his way through the garden. Paths through the muddy mess were hard to find, and he could hardly see through the rain. When the kitchen window appeared in the gloom he longed, coward that he was, to be inside where it was warm and dry. He didn’t need Miss Sutherland to think well of him, he just needed her.
    ‘Bugger,’ he said, resting his forehead against the kitchen door.
    He found the woodpile with its sagging straw roof. From nowhere, he thought of BenRuin. In his place, the Scottish earl would have ripped trees apart with his bare hands and nailed a sound structure together with nothing more than a few pieces of iron and his thick skull. He’d probably do it stripped down to the waist, too, and intermittently beat his chest and roar at the skies, in defiance of the weather.
    Darlington gave a gleeful cackle that was entirely lost on the rain-drenched garden. Wrapping the blanket around his hands, he carefully selected five fine logs, piled them into his arms, then made his way back to the pigsty.
    Miss Sutherland had staked out a temporary pen to keep the pigs in one corner of the already cramped shed. ‘Quickly,’ she said.
    He spilt the logs at her feet, and received neither praise nor thanks. Where he saw form and symmetry she apparently saw only a log.
    She stood the first of them on its end, and split it down the middle with the axe. There was a frightening strength in her. And she had not