Daring and the Duke (The Bareknuckle Bastards 3)

They’d made a pact when they were children—in the darkness after their father had tormented them. Whoever became duke would let the line end with him, refusing to give their sire the pleasure of heirs.

Ewan had never allowed himself the liberty of imagining children. But now—his brothers—they had children, and he wondered about them. If they had the amber eyes they all shared. If Devil’s daughter had a wide smile like her father. If she was as clever as her mother. If Whit’s child would grow as loyal as its father was.

And what Ewan’s would have been like, if he’d lost the dukedom instead of winning it.

He held all that back, however. “The point is, I came for what you loved because you came for what I loved,” he said. “You told me she was dead.”

“She might as well be for all the chance you have at winning her back.”

Let me see you again. His words from the gazebo.

No. Hers.

He pushed away the memory and the threat that his hope might be misplaced. “She’s not why you’re here.”

“No, she’s not,” Devil conceded. “We’re here because every time you return to London, people die. And that’s not happening this time.”

“Unless it’s you,” Whit added.

Ewan looked to him. “And what, you intend to do it?”

“I’ve been aching to gut a Duke of Marwick for my entire life,” Devil said from behind the desk.

“And yet, I live.” He’d always wondered why they’d never returned to take their revenge. God knew, he’d deserved it.

“Yeah, well, when we make promises, we keep them.”

Ewan did not misunderstand. He’d made them a promise when they were children. That they would run together. That they would protect each other. And he hadn’t been able to keep it. Still, he leveled Devil with a sharp look. “Promises to whom?”

Devil’s brows lifted. “I think you know.”

“Grace.” The word came unexpectedly, on a breath he should have held in. One that revealed too much.

She’d kept him alive.

Whit looked to Devil. “I told you.”

“Mmm,” Devil said. “We ain’t here about that, though.”

About what? What had she said?

He resisted the urge to ask the questions, instead settling on a frustrated, “What then? Get it over with.”

Devil tsked at the tone. “Just because we agreed not to kill you don’t mean we wouldn’t happily rough you up, bruv.”

Frustration flared into something else, and he worked to remain relaxed in the chair, despite itching for a fight. He’d been itching for one since he’d come to London. Since he’d vowed to be a different man.

Still, if anyone was to bring out the worst in him, it was these two. “I’m game if you are.”

Devil’s brows rose and he shot a wolfish smile to Whit, who pulled his fists—the size of hams—from his pockets. “Me first, if you’re offering. Or do we get the coward who met Grace in the ring last year—willing to take his licks like the toff he was trained to be?”

How he wanted to put a fist into his brothers’ faces. Instead, he stayed distant, playing the role they expected. “I owe her more than I owe you.”

Truth.

“Ah, so you gave her a gift? By not fighting her?”

“I’d never hurt her.”

The words froze the other two men, and Ewan felt their surprise, looking quickly from one to the other before Devil shook his head. “My God.”

“He doesn’t see it,” Whit said.

“See what?”

“That you’ve hurt her every day since we ran.”

Silence fell in the wake of the words, and he watched Devil’s jaw tighten, the scar that ran six inches down the side of Devil’s face—the one Ewan had put there decades earlier—went white with the movement, and no doubt with the memories of Ewan’s past actions. He’d a lifetime of threatening them. Their lives, their futures, their wives, their world.

And threatening them was the least of what he’d done.

Whit continued, the words hitting heavier because they came from the brother who so rarely spoke. “She’s never been safe. Never not been in hiding. Never had a day when she did not have to look over her shoulder. For you. You’ve been chasing her since the night you chased her from Burghsey.”

“Not chasing. Searching.”

“Aye, searching so you could finish what you started.” Devil, this time. “Eliminate the proof that you stole a dukedom and a life and a future.”

He’d never intended to steal it. He’d meant for her to have it with him. “That’s not true.”

“Nah. I know that, now. But she don’t and even if she did, it wouldn’t matter.”

Anger flared, irrational and full of indignation even as he heard the ring of truth in the words. “Tell me why you are here, or get the hell out of my house.”

Devil watched him for a long moment, and then said, “Careful, bruv, you’re starting to sound like a real Marwick.”

At the suggestion that he was like their father, the facade of ducal disdain was gone, Ewan’s vision clouding with rage as he moved with speed he hadn’t needed in two decades. He was out of his chair and at the desk, his hands flat on the wood as he faced down Devil. And then, clear and strong, like a bell, “Say it again. Give me a reason to rip you apart.”

Devil tapped that infernal stick against his boot again and again. When Ewan was ready to snap it in two, his brother asked, entirely casual, “Did you kill him?”

Their father.

For a heartbeat, he imagined that this was what it would be like if they’d stayed together. The three of them, late at night, with scotch and the past.

He swallowed back the hint of regret that came with the realization and lifted his glass. “Does it matter?” He knocked the whisky back.

Two sets of dark brows rose as his brothers shared a look—one Ewan could not read. The silent communication grated.

Devil replied. “Not really, no.”

“Then why don’t you two get the hell on with it?”

“No need to get angry.”

“We’re all angry,” Ewan spat. “Always have been. Three brothers, born beneath the same angry star.” On the same day, at the same hour, they’d been told. Cut from the same cloth, and somehow vastly different.

“Mmm.” Devil tilted his head. “But it wasn’t just us, was it?”

It wasn’t. Grace had been born that same day. That same hour. To a different man, but to the same fate.

Did they think he didn’t know? Did they think he didn’t think of that fate every damn day? That she wasn’t first in his mind in the morning and last in it at night and present in every dream that came in between?

Did they think he did not ache for her?

He wanted her. And he wanted them gone so he could go back to wanting her.

“Why are you here?”

For a moment, he thought this was why—to torment him. To force him to face the past and question the present and dread the future—alone. For a moment, he saw all of that in Devil’s eyes.

And then Whit spoke from immediately behind him. “We came to discuss the blunt.”