Untamed

by Anna Cowan

  He grimaced, looked up at her quick and unsure. ‘I near drowned myself,’ he said, then cleared his throat. ‘Father had taken me fishing. I still don’t understand it – why that day he came to find me, and spend time with me, just the two of us.’

  There was enough of a small boy’s awe of his father in Jude’s voice to break her heart.

  ‘He barely spoke to me, and I was out of my mind, half mad. I remember so clearly the feeling – this was my last chance. The world would end if he didn’t acknowledge me with his touch. Claim me, the way animals claim their young. So I threw myself into the lake, though I could not swim.’

  He stopped speaking, and Kit knew she didn’t have it in her to ask him to continue. He drew shapes on the back of her hand, his fingertips gliding between her fingers and pressing at the place her fingers met so that she felt unaccountably exposed.

  ‘He wouldn’t come in after me. The under-gardener took minutes to arrive after my father began yelling. In a way though, it was one of the best moments of my childhood. The gardener thumped my back and my chest. I had never been touched with such force. He even attempted to breathe for me, when my lungs refused to do it on their own, and it was the first time I had felt another person’s lips on my face. The first kiss I ever received.’

  She couldn’t help herself. She leaned forward and pressed her lips to his, trying to imprint her wanting, her affection on him.

  He pushed her gently away.

  ‘As a young man, I realised I could have almost anyone I wanted. I attempted to gorge myself on touch. But there was something so wrong in it. I was already formed – malformed.’

  ‘Ridiculous man,’ she muttered, holding tightly to his hand.

  ‘I found a kitten when I was twelve years old,’ he said.

  He was warm and naked with her, in their shared bed. He stretched himself out on his back, and pulled her hand so that it lay flat on his chest. Jude made soft by trust. This was the part of him she couldn’t be sure of, that could remove itself from her at any moment.

  ‘The stable boy had been feeding the kitten, but he’d kept it in a box, and hadn’t let anything or anyone near it. Malicious bastard. I beat him when I found out, and scooped the kitten straight up into my bloody hands. So that we could give each other what we both craved. But the kitten didn’t survive.’

  He looked intently at her, and she tried desperately to understand.

  ‘A creature cannot live without touch,’ he said gently. ‘It was too late for that kitten – no matter what affection I lavished on him, he couldn’t recover. It may be too late for me, Katherine.’

  ‘I never heard such a lot of bullshit in my life.’ She’d seen it over and over. The small creatures whose mothers didn’t take to them for one reason or another. You could feed them, but nine times out of ten they didn’t survive infancy. Like all the piglets from their sow, save one.

  ‘But you survived,’ she said. ‘You’re so alive it hurts me sometimes.’

  ‘I am a strange sort of alive. I cannot help but feel that I will die when I am touched.’

  Kit thought for a moment. ‘What is it the French call it? The little death? Perhaps I will make you die by touching you.’ She came closer to him. ‘Over, and over, and over again.’

  She reached for him slowly, so that he could tell her to stop. He didn’t. She pulled the covers away, so that she could see every pale, perfect inch of him.

  His breathing came short and quick and she let her face speak her desire.

  ‘I did want you,’ she said, running marvelling fingertips down his chest. ‘All those nights we lay side by side.’

  She stroked his stomach until he was used to her, and his muscles didn’t ripple and flinch under her hand.

  ‘So lovely,’ she said, burning up.

  She came close, eased herself carefully over his thighs and pulled him up into her embrace. His arms went around her as well and he crushed her to him, his head buried in her neck. They were skin against skin, her small-breasted chest lying flush against his. She had never imagined it would feel like this with a man – this meeting of two bodies, each holding and being held. They were the same height, equally strong. Her eyes drank in the sight of her rough skin against his flawless white.

  She stroked his back in time with her breath – long, languorous strokes. The flat of her hand. The warmth of her human blood. He was strange to her like this – unseen, only felt, not speaking. This was what it meant, also, to come close to him.

  He lifted her suddenly and threw her on her back. She covered her chest – not from modesty, but from the sudden absence of him.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said, in low command, and stopped still, watching her, until she had laid her arms down by her sides, baring herself entirely to him.

  She pushed her hands above her head and stretched out her long limbs. Felt the flare of his eyes like a touch. He came to her, hands spread wide and warm on her thighs, over her stomach, holding her ribcage within his long, pale fingers. He pressed his thumbs up into the soft fur under her arms, and kissed her.

  This was different to the other times they’d kissed. The wet, endless beauty of his mouth dissolved her from the inside out. He sobbed and it sounded like he was crying, or singing, or both. The sound seemed to startle him. He jerked away from her touch then came back again, holding his face against hers, shaking.

  ‘I love touching you,’ she whispered, and kissed his temple, his ear. ‘Jude. I love that you let me near.’

  ‘This should not be soul-shattering,’ he said, and came up onto his elbows so that he could glare at her. She was glad of the chance to see his face – and indulge in the freedom to touch it. Most dear of men.

  ‘People would kill to have you like this, wouldn’t they.’

  ‘No one is allowed this,’ he said simply.

  She scratched her nails lazily down his back, and his eyes slid shut. She took her time. Let him relax back into her touch, and gave herself over to it when it became more. The pull of hands in hair. The bite of teeth into soft flesh. The slide of her body against his.

  His mouth opened, hot and wet, against her sternum, his hands pulling her up into his hungry embrace. Passionate, scorching kisses down her stomach; a hand around her knee, spreading her leg wide.

  Then his tongue – that speaking instrument – licked the length of her sex. She hadn’t even begun to recover from the shock of it when he licked her again, and she thought of the way he’d licked marmalade from his lips at breakfast days ago, and she cried, ‘Stop, for God’s sake, stop!’

  She looked down at him – at Jude’s hair, his face, lifted from her. His hands remained insistent, drew circles around her hip bones. He didn’t look away – bent and kissed her tender skin.

  ‘That,’ she said, ‘is too much. Don’t do that.’

  ‘Pleasure, Katherine,’ he said, his words slurring a little the way they hadn’t when he was drunk.

  ‘Not that,’ she repeated, fear obscure and deep in her.

  He brought his body up over hers.

  ‘As you wish,’ he whispered. So different to last night. This was Jude holding her, his fingers deep and generous inside her, the mess of his hair smothering her cheek, his mouth seeking hers, blind.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Tom knew he should be the head of this family. He looked around the parlour, where they’d gone to recline in a lazy heap after dinner and let himself think, tentatively, that it might not matter that he wasn’t.

  Mother had a book laid down across her lap – Tom tried to repress the wince that poor cracked spine provoked in him – and was laughing at the impromptu rendition of Twelfth Night Lady Rose was putting on with only her fingers for players. It was, admittedly, a rather good performance.

  Lady Rose was lying with her head in Kit’s lap, and Kit was laughing down at her and providing props when she demanded them. The Duke was autocratic and spoilt, and Tom wished he didn’t understand quite so well why Kit would smile at him like
that, no matter who he pretended to be.

  He wished there had been anything he could do to stop it.

  Lydia lounged against the window, looking out into the dreary day. She had been unusually silent today. Not that posh silence she affected – something more thoughtful and sad. But she was here.

  And Crispin was sitting leaning against Tom’s knee, adding laughing commentary to the Duke’s performance. His warm weight, Tom thought, was the linchpin that held this moment together. It meant Tom could see that right now, everyone he loved and needed was here. And they were all right.

  Of course, there was the way Kit and the Duke couldn’t seem to look away from each other, or stop smiling. The way they always seemed to be touching, as though touching was necessary. That was . . . not so good.

  ‘I am all the daughters of my father’s house, and all the brothers, too,’ the Duke was saying, when Kit tipped his head off her lap and got up to ring the bell. The Duke scowled up at her with a dark, sensual promise that made Tom grip Crispin’s shoulder too hard.

  ‘Never mind,’ Crispin murmured, and patted Tom’s hand. ‘He doesn’t mean to do it.’

  Last night, when the Duke had gone to Katherine despite all of Tom’s threats, Crispin had held him and said, We cannot risk what he might do, if you stop him. It had been so hard to think, pressed close to Crispin.

  But as lovely as Crispin was – and Christ, he was lovely – he didn’t understand the magnitude of the last few weeks. He didn’t feel, as Tom did, how painful it was to have the Manor brought back to life, like blood rushing back into a numb limb. Tom watched how casually Kit rang the bell, how she ordered them tea, and – at the Duke’s loud urging – white bread sprinkled with sugar, without thinking about it. A few weeks ago an order like that would have meant: bread baked with Kit’s own hands; sugar so rationed that you had to imagine sweetness; butter only if they’d managed to buy milk that week; tea that was three times diluted; another trip to the trough to replenish the water pail. He wondered if even Kit understood the pain of their world coming alive again. And now that it was alive —

  ‘I’m going to sell the Manor,’ Tom said, very quietly.

  Crispin looked back at him.

  ‘All right,’ he said. As though it were as simple as that.

  Tom owed Kit everything, and this was her home. He owed her the time he’d had, and the space he’d had. He owed her for not being too poor to write, and for doing all the hard, menial work he should have done. He owed her for the way she had utterly refused to consider that they could give up.

  He watched Kit’s fingers on the back of the Duke’s neck. The unconscious entitlement of the gesture.

  She had acted against Tom’s advice and made her choice.

  Now that the Manor had come alive, Tom could finally see it. He wanted to leave and never come back. This house belonged to his father’s restless ghost. A huge, looming man who had been a kind of god to Tom. The line between his brows when he would look at Tom – that expression that said, I try, but I cannot understand you. The loud, painful man who had been so reckless with decades of their lives. The gun smoke that had seemed to fill the taproom before the trigger had even been pulled, it was so, so quick. And the weeks of pain, before the bullet killed him.

  Tom would go to London with Crispin, he would sell the Manor, and he would never have to come back.

  ‘Kit,’ said Lydia from the window, ‘d’you fancy walking up the bluff?’ She sounded young – but nothing like the girl she’d been, who would simply take your hand and drag you behind her until you acquiesced.

  Kit was lounging against the back of the sofa, sticking pencils and flowers and one precarious teaspoon into the Duke’s wig. Her eyes thinned when she looked up at Lydia.

  ‘It’s done, Lydia,’ she said. Then, ‘Besides, it’s been raining.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Lydia, sounding rather more like herself. ‘I’ve given up trying to separate you. Rose can come, too, I don’t care, I just . . . It’s been years since I saw the view from the bluff.’

  The Duke stretched his legs out the full length of the sofa, skirts up about his knees, and through his aquamarine stockings every muscle was clear. The corset bound his body so tightly that Tom could imagine how he would look stretching just so, if he were naked. His face was all lazy pleasure beneath the golden-tipped wig.

  ‘Sorry,’ Tom muttered, when Crispin winced. He was gripping him too hard again.

  The Duke wriggled his aquamarine-clad toes and said, ‘I will not go wading through mud like a pig.’

  At which impossible juncture one of the footmen brought Porkie in, dressed in another outrageous jacket, and placed him on the Duke’s stomach with a bow and a murmured, ‘My lady.’

  ‘Porkie!’ the Duke cooed, his voice sweet, soft, a caress. ‘How I love thee, little pig.’

  Porkie took a couple of experimental steps across the Duke’s stomach, and snuffled with sharp huffs and grunts at his chin. The Duke grinned back, as though Porkie had done something miraculous, and began rubbing him behind the ears.

  ‘Not even Porkie would go tramping out in that mud,’ he said smugly.

  Lydia turned back to Kit – a painful mixture of hope and nonchalance on her face. Kit was looking down at the Duke and his pig, and wasn’t aware that anyone else on earth existed.

  Lydia threw up her arms and turned back to the window.

  Relative quiet settled on them. Mother turned back to her book, and her face was instantly absorbed. Tom loved this about her – how she lost herself utterly to the written word. He had known few pleasures like seeing her devour a Beaumaris novel, and her annoyed expression when anything external tried to intrude.

  A few ruined spines were worth that.

  When the tea arrived, Crispin paid court to Kit and insisted on giving her the best of everything. From the minute Kit had emerged this morning it had been like this – from the courtly bow Crispin had paid her, to holding doors open and complimenting her outrageously.

  Kit and the Duke took up playing a game of Snap on the sofa between them, legs curled up so they could face each other. The Duke cheated, but Kit cheated better, and when she laughed like that Tom felt the jealous pain of never having made her this happy.

  The Duke was an undeniably beautiful man. Even in a dress and stockings, cross-legged with a pig in his lap, unholy concentration on his face. But Tom didn’t understand how the Duke – that awful, dangerous combination of volatile and sharp – could make anyone happy.

  Another footman brought in the mail, which had just been delivered from London by the Duke’s man. Lydia watched while Tom sorted it, and her face closed hard when there was nothing for her. She pretended unconcern when Tom looked a question at her.

  The largest packet was for the Duke; Mother would want him to read the papers, of course.

  Tom opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again. Kit had won another round, and the Duke growled at her and grabbed her by the nape, bringing her forehead against his. They stayed like that, a still life. He murmured something to Kit, brushed his thumb across her cheek. She flushed, nodded. Kissed the inside of his wrist and pulled away.

  ‘The post has arrived,’ Tom said, and it didn’t come out loud enough from his parched throat.

  ‘Allow me,’ said Crispin, and winked.

  Crispin came easily to his feet and shoved the mail unceremoniously in the Duke’s face. ‘Shall I read your mail to you, Rose?’

  The Duke glanced sharply at the packet and said, ‘No. Not today. Just put it on the floor there.’

  ‘Oh, the papers have arrived?’ Mother loved the Duke’s impressions even more than she loved to read. ‘You’ll read to us, won’t you, Rose?’

  It made Tom hot and helpless, to hear his mother address the Duke with such affection and know he would hurt her worse if he told her the truth.

  ‘Would I deny you anything, Sophie?’ said the Duke, who apparently had no facility for shame. ‘Let’s
not bother with the serious papers today. I’m in far too good a mood.’

  Kit rolled her eyes at him, and plucked the Times from the floor before he could stop her. Something apprehensive crossed his face, but Kit, biting into a piece of sugared bread, didn’t see it.

  ‘I wonder that the broadsheets don’t mention BenRuin more often,’ Lydia said, apropos of nothing. ‘He’s bad-mannered enough to cause a fuss at just about any social occasion.’

  ‘He’ll write eventually, dumpling,’ the Duke murmured. Then, ‘Oh, listen to this!’

  He gleefully recounted a story from the paper about some lady or other who had disgraced herself with her husband’s best jockey. He was irresistible when he was so full of mischief, and Lydia lounged over the back of the sofa, adding snide comments that made the Duke snicker. Mother scolded them. Kit read to herself, a smile about her mouth.

  ‘Their source appears to be Miss Trent,’ the Duke said. ‘The elderly sister-in-law. She pretends outrage of course, but I’ll wager she hadn’t expected such a windfall to come her way so late in life. I just know she’s receiving invitations left and right, and will recount the whole sorry tale in horrified whispers for a cream bun and a glass of sherry.’

  Lydia laughed again. ‘Perhaps we can lure her out here for three buns and a bottle.’

  The Duke launched into an impression of Miss Trent, clutching Porkie to him the way elderly women tended to clutch their reticules to them in company. He was wicked, and accurate, and Tom was laughing despite himself.

  ‘Jude,’ Kit said, and something in her voice stopped all the noise in the room dead. ‘The accountant from Leeds has publicly declared that you’re illegitimate.’ She looked up, as if she had been looking at the moon and had to focus again on the room before her. Tom and Lydia both looked at their mother, then quickly away. Her face showed anxious concern, but not the horrified comprehension they feared.

  ‘I meant your cousin,’ Kit said. ‘He has declared that your cousin is illegitimate, Rose. The Committee is stacked heavily in the accountant’s favour. It’s that woman, isn’t it. It’s Lady Marmotte.’