Daring and the Duke (The Bareknuckle Bastards 3)

Tonight, of all nights, he chose to resist orders? “I shan’t need you for the rest of the evening.”

O’Clair didn’t seem convinced, but still, he collected himself. “Of course.” He bowed, shortly, and moved to leave the room, stopping when he reached Beast in the doorway. “I beg your pardon, sir.”

Beast grunted and moved just enough to let him past.

“I’ll thank you not to torment my servants,” Ewan said.

“Beast ain’t good wiv manners.” It was a lie. They were all impeccable at manners. Their father had made sure of it. He’d delighted in playing abusive Pygmalion before he’d found other ways to entertain himself. Beast grunted as Devil rounded the desk and sat. “Was this the old man’s desk?”

“Yes,” Ewan said, moving to pour more whisky. He sensed he was going to need it.

“Good,” Devil said, the word punctuated with the thunk of his great heavy boots, muddy and full of whatever filth he’d brought in from Covent Garden.

Ewan couldn’t blame him. He fucking hated that desk, and everything else in the house that had belonged to their father. But he’d be damned if he’d show as much.

Had Grace sent them? Had she discovered the truth of the night in his gardens, in the gazebo, and decided to send her brothers to finish the job she’d begun a year earlier? Had he miscalculated?

His heart began to pound. No. She wouldn’t send them to do her dirty work. She was not one to turn away from a fight. Certainly not one from him.

Why hadn’t she come to confront him herself?

He willed himself calm and filled his glass in silence. “What then, are you here for another round of Who Shall Kill the Duke?”

Every time he’d faced these two in the last two years, it had ended in battle. Every time he’d faced them in the last twenty years. And he’d always laid them out. But somehow, they were the ones who had won. They had homes and families and a whole world to bring them purpose and pleasure.

And they had Grace.

“It isn’t the worst idea, innit?” Devil said, the sound of the Garden so thick that Ewan knew it was meant to grate when he added, “Come now, bruv, we ain’t monsters.”

It did grate.

He refused to let it show. “Are you not?”

“No,” came the reply from the doorway. “That’s always been your specialty.”

Ewan did not look up, even as Devil whistled his admiration and tapped his walking stick on his filthy boots, ever the showman. “Look at that. You’ve got Beast out here giving soliloquies.”

“What do you want, Devon?”

The name was a calculated risk, one that paid off with the silence that came in reply. Ewan turned to face his brother, who was staring directly at him. The lightness was gone from Devil’s voice when he said, “I remind you that only one of us has a given name that sees him to the gallows.”

Ewan did not respond. They’d had the means to reveal him an imposter duke for decades, and somehow had never used them. He didn’t worry about it now.

Some days, he wished for it.

Devil tapped his walking stick on his boots again. Once, twice in slow succession, his gaze tracking Ewan from head to toe. “You’ve changed.”

He knew what they’d seen in the ring a year ago—when he’d met Grace after an eternity of thinking she was dead. When he’d taken her hits. And when she’d laid him low with the worst of it—the knowledge that he would never be worthy of the girl he’d once loved.

That that girl no longer existed.

These men had watched his destruction.

He knew what they saw now. He was bigger than he’d been when he’d seen them last. Broader and more muscular. His cheeks shaven, less hollow. His body healthier—and his mind, as well.

Not always, but mostly.

He’d prepared for this, the biggest battle of his life.

“Told you,” Beast growled from the doorway.

“Mmm,” said Devil, thoughtfully.

Beast grunted his reply.

Irritation flared. “Did the two of you come here to converse without me, or . . .”

“Have you seen her?”

He stilled at the question, a thrill coursing through him at the words. She had not told them. They did not know that she’d masked herself and come to the ball. They did not know she’d danced in his arms. They did not know about the gardens. About the gazebo.

About the fantasy.

Which meant she’d wanted to keep it to herself.

He sat, hiding his thoughts, spreading his arms wide along the back of the chair that faced Devil on the other side of his desk. He drank, slow and steady. And he lied. “No.”

A grunt, behind him, from Beast.

Devil watched him carefully, that infernal walking stick tapping like water on stone. “I don’t believe you.”

“I haven’t seen her,” he said, ignoring how the words conjured all the ways he had seen her—the way her lips curved in a smile just for him, the way her voice washed over him after so many years, the soft skin of her breasts in his hands, her thighs tightening around him, the taste of her.

“You mean to tell us that you haven’t returned for her?” Devil said.

He didn’t reply. He couldn’t. The words refused to form. Of course he was back for her. He would always come back for her.

Another grunt in the silence.

He shot a look at the door. “Do you have trouble speaking? Too many blows to the head?”

“I think you might refrain from giving him too many ideas about blows to the head, Duke,” Devil said. “He’s itching to have a go at you.”

Ewan narrowed his gaze on Beast. “That didn’t go so well for you last time.”

“You fucking bastard,” Beast said, coming off the doorjamb. “You nearly killed my wife; I won’t pull the punch this time.”

Ewan resisted the flinch that threatened at the words. He hadn’t intentionally harmed the lady—she’d been on the docks when the fool he’d been paying to punish his brothers had destroyed a shipment the Bareknuckle Bastards were moving under cover of darkness. The Bastards ran myriad businesses throughout London, some aboveboard and many below, but their income was largely through smuggled goods, and Ewan had set his sights on that business, knowing that its destruction would in turn destroy them.

“She was not my target.”

“No, we were,” Devil said from behind the desk.

Ewan turned to face him. “I had a score to settle.” They’d told him Grace was dead, and it destroyed him. Turned him wild. Filled him with anger and vengeance. And he’d been willing to do anything to destroy them, in return.

But she was alive.

And with her, his hope.

He looked to Whit. “I quite like Lady Henrietta.” He paused. “Not Lady Henrietta anymore, is she? Mrs. Whittington.” He ignored the twist in his gut. “I am told you’ve a babe on the way. Felicitations.”

“You stay the fuck away from my family.” Whit came into the room, approaching him, but Ewan did not move, knowing he could not flinch.

“I’ve no interest in your family,” he said. It was a lie. He was immensely interested in his brothers’ families—something that had always seemed as likely to him as owning a unicorn or discovering a mermaid in the stream on his country estate.