Untamed Read Online Free PDF

then another that told her the deep ocean tide had not given up. It still yearned. Across from an open door she stopped.
    And there he was, the man in black. His profile was to her, his fingers as clever over the keys as his tongue was over words. But less . . . restrained. His music was lit at the edges.
    She stayed very still and watched him, and told herself that she would be well. She had survived worse. He looked up suddenly, and the music broke, stopped. She thought at first he had seen her, and was almost sure she would step into the room.
    A woman walked into Kit’s view. A round bottom sheathed in silk, an exposed nape, ostrich feathers bobbing down and covering their faces. Snatches of him like sky through leaves on a windy day.
    He began to kiss the woman’s shoulder, and Kit’s mouth opened. His fingers spread themselves across the woman’s arm, down her back. They unlaced her with his personal brand of grace.
    Kit couldn’t move away. She couldn’t stop herself from watching what bruised her. He had wound her in so much tighter than she could ever have imagined, and she could not shrug this away – the truth that some part of her had reached for him, and he was squandering himself on this woman.
    He had the woman unlaced, and he turned her, sat her on the piano with a jarring clash of notes.
    Another shock went through Kit. It was Lady Marmotte, their hostess.
    Lady Marmotte giggled, then gasped. The man in black had pulled her corset down, and pressed her against the instrument so that it must bite into her back. She didn’t seem to mind. Her large breasts were exposed to him, and the very worst part was that Kit could see his face.
    She could see that he was not engaged at all. He did not feel passion. His expression was calculated. His smiles, his voice, were deliberate. He used his body with as much dispassionate skill as the carpenter at Millcross used his lathe. He pushed her further back still, and then he leaned forward and licked her breasts, first one then the other. Methodical, contained.
    Kit wondered, before she could stop herself, what he would be like if he unleashed himself.
    Lady Marmotte threw her head back and thrust her hands greedily into his hair, which seemed very foolish to Kit, who could see how he flinched. He came upright and took the woman’s wrists hard enough to make her gasp again. He pinned her hands to the piano. She gasped in pleasure, and seemed neither to notice nor care that she could no longer touch him.
    Every part of Kit felt cold. That was a flesh-and-blood woman in his arms, who feared age and spilled tea on her letters when she read them at the breakfast table and lived for moments like these.
    Watching him pull her apart, Kit thought she would rather embrace a corpse.
    She turned and walked down the hall. She strode. She would not run, but she would not be sedate. She found Lydia and pulled her out of a dance set, just to prove once and for all how very uncivilised Lady BenRuin’s sister was.
    ‘We need to leave,’ she said. ‘We need to leave.’
    Lydia looked at her oddly, then nodded and took her arm. Kit’s cold flesh drank in the warmth of Lydia’s. She let her sister steer her through the crowd.
    ‘What happened?’ Lydia asked in a low voice. What have you done now? did not need to be said aloud.
    ‘Lady BenRuin,’ said a man in smooth tones, stepping into their path, ‘do not say you are leaving us already. You had promised me the quadrille, and I am afraid life will hold no savour for me if —’
    ‘Get out of my way, Richard,’ said Lydia, and pushed past him.
    Then she had Kit in the carriage and they were alone. ‘There, there,’ she said in her London voice that dripped with ennui. ‘There, there.’ She patted Kit awkwardly on the shoulder and then said nothing else all the way home.
    When Darlington arrived home, it was still dark outside, though he wasn’t sure how that could be. Perhaps the sun had been extinguished. Perhaps