Daring and the Duke (The Bareknuckle Bastards 3)

And then he realized he could hear what he could not see.

A cacophony of muffled sound, shouting and laughing nearby—just beyond the room?—and a roaring din from farther away—outside the building? Inside, but at a distance? The low rumble of a crowd—something he never heard in the places he usually woke. Something he barely remembered. But memory came with the sound, from a similar distance—from farther away, from a lifetime ago.

And for the first time in twenty years, the man known to all the world as Robert Matthew Carrick, twelfth Duke of Marwick, was afraid. Because what he heard was not the world in which he’d grown.

It was the one into which he’d been born.

Ewan, son of a high-priced courtesan come down a notch—or a thousand—with a babe in her belly, made one of Covent Garden’s finest molls.

He stood, crossing the darkness, feeling along the wall until he found a door. A handle.

Locked.

The angels had rescued him and brought him to a locked room in Covent Garden.

He did not have to cross the room to know what he would find outside, the rooftops filled with angled slate and crooked chimneys. A boy born in the Garden did not forget the sounds of it, no matter how hard he’d tried. He stumbled to the window nonetheless, pushing back the curtain. It rained, the clouds blocking the light of the moon, refusing to let him see the world outside. Denying him sight, so he might hear sound.

A key in the lock.

He turned, muscles taut, prepared for an enemy. For two of them. For battle. He’d been locked in war for months, years, a lifetime with the men who ruled Covent Garden, where dukes were not welcome. At least not dukes who’d threatened their lives.

It did not matter that he was their brother.

Not to him, either, as they had broken his trust—unable to keep the only woman he’d ever loved safe.

And for that, he would do battle until the end of time.

The door opened, and his fists balled, his thigh stinging as he came to the balls of his feet, prepared for the blow that would come. Prepared to deliver a matching one in kind. Strong enough for it.

He froze. The hallway beyond was barely brighter than the room where he stood—just bright enough to reveal a figure. Not outside. But inside. Not coming. Leaving.

There had been someone in the room when he’d awoken. In the shadows. He’d been right, but it was not his brothers.

His heart began to pound, wild and violent in his chest. He shook his head, willing it clear.

A woman in shadow. Tall. Lean and strong, wearing trousers that clung tight to impossibly long legs. Leather boots that ended above the knee. And a topcoat that could easily have been a man’s, if not for the gold lining, somehow gleaming in the darkness.

Gold thread.

The touch hadn’t been a ghost. The voice hadn’t been imagined.

He took a step toward her, already reaching for her, aching for her. Her name wrenched from him, coming like wheels on broken cobblestones. “Grace.”

A tiny inhale. Barely sound. Barely there.

But enough.

Like that, he knew.

She was alive.

The door slammed shut, and she was gone.

His roar shook the rafters.

Chapter Four

Grace turned the key in the lock with lightning speed, barely able to pull it from its seat when the handle vibrated—an attempt of escape from within. No. Not escape. Pursuit.

A shout came, angry and wounded. And something more.

The sound was punctuated by a wicked thud, instantly recognizable. A fist against wood, hard enough to terrify.

She wasn’t scared. Instead, she pressed a hand to the door, her palm flat against it, holding her breath, waiting.

Nothing.

And if he had struck it again, what then?

She pulled her hand back as the thought seared through her.

He wasn’t intended to be awake. He was intended to have been dosed with enough laudanum to down a bear. Enough to keep him abed until his shoulder and leg were ready for strain. Until he was ready for the fight she planned to give him.

But she’d seen him stand without hesitation, an indication that his wounds were healing quickly. That his muscles were as strong as ever.

She knew those muscles well. Even as she shouldn’t.

She’d meant to be as clinical as possible. To tend to his wounds and mend him enough to send him packing—to give him the punishing he’d deserved since that day, two decades earlier, when he’d destroyed all of their lives, and hers the most of all.

She’d planned this revenge with years of skill and rage, and she was ready to mete it out.

Except she’d made a mistake. She’d touched him.

He’d been so still, and so strong, and so different from the boy she’d left, and yet—in the angles of his face, in the way his too-long hair lay on his forehead, in the curve of his lips and the slash of his brows—so much the same. And she hadn’t had a choice.

On the first night, she’d told herself she was looking for injuries, counting the ribs beneath the flat planes of his torso, the ridges and valleys of muscle there. Too lean for his frame, as though he barely ate, barely slept.

As though he had been too busy looking for her.

She didn’t have an excuse for the way she’d explored his face, stroking over his brows, marveling at the smooth skin of his cheek, testing the roughness of the new growth of beard on his jaw.

She couldn’t say why she’d catalogued the changes in him, the way the boy she’d loved had become a man, strong and angled and dangerous.

And fascinating.

He shouldn’t be fascinating. She shouldn’t be curious.

She hated him.

For two decades he’d loomed, hunting her. Threatening her brothers. Ultimately hurting them and the men and women of Covent Garden, whom the Bareknuckle Bastards had sworn to protect.

And that had made him her enemy.

So he shouldn’t be fascinating.

And she shouldn’t have wished to touch him.

Shouldn’t have touched him, either, shouldn’t have been riveted to the planes of him, the even rise and fall of his breath, the roughness of the stubble at his jaw, the curve of his lips—the softness of them—

The floorboards of the locked room creaked as he crouched.

She backed away, pressing herself to the wall on the opposite side of the hallway, far enough out of view to ensure that the man within could not see her when he looked through the keyhole. He was the one who had taught her about keyholes, when she was young enough to believe that a closed door was the end of the story.

She stared at the tiny black void beneath the door handle, consumed with the wild memory of another door. Of the bite of another handle in her palm, of cool mahogany against her forehead as she leaned close to it, a lifetime earlier, peering within.

The inky blackness inside.

The feel of the metal casing of the lock against her lips as she whispered into the room beyond. Are you there?

Two decades later, she could still feel her heart pounding as she pressed her ear to the mysterious opening, searching for sound where she could not use sight. She could still feel the fear. The panic. The desperation.

And then, from the void . . .

I’m here.

The hope. The relief. The joy as she’d repeated his words.

I’m here, as well.

Silence. And then . . .

You shouldn’t be.