Daring and the Duke (The Bareknuckle Bastards 3)

She didn’t care. She had a perfectly functional ruler in her office.

He swallowed. “I don’t see how anyone could worry about crumbs with such a delicious bite in hand.” He dipped his head and gave the full force of his smile to Alice, who flushed under the brilliance of it. Not that Grace could blame her. She’d flushed beneath the weight of that smile herself countless times. Jested and danced for it.

Spent ages trying to remember the exact curve of it. The precise way his eyes warmed with it. The way it felt against her skin.

She inhaled, and he turned to look at her. Alice’s attention lingered on him, as she said, “It’s nuffin’, really. Just my mum’s scones. Another?”

He rubbed his hands together like an excited boy. “You know, I believe I will, thank you.”

Alice looked over at Grace. “And you, Dahlia? Will you ’ave one?”

She looked behind her, to the wall she should scale. To the rooftops that would lead her to 72 Shelton, far from this place and this man and whatever this new trap he laid was.

But before Grace could offer Alice a polite refusal, before she could head for the wall—she looked to him first. And she saw the dare in his eyes, clear as day.

Why shouldn’t she accept the treat? This was her place as well as his. More than his. And that made the scones more hers than his, too.

She approached, and Jenny moved to one side of the low block upon which she was perched, making room for Grace as she selected a scone and sat down across from him, making sure the washtub was between them, as though a metal drum of tepid, dirty water would protect her.

Not that she needed protection.

She didn’t. Not even when the man who sat across from her was nothing of what she expected—he was neither the boy she’d loved for too long, nor the madman she’d feared for longer, nor the lover she’d given herself over to some evenings earlier . . . for not long enough.

But it didn’t matter that she didn’t recognize him. Grace was an expert at disguises, and she knew without question that the man before her was ephemera. He remained the Duke of Marwick, and didn’t Grace make a living giving aristocrats a chance at playing pretend?

So this duke had chosen a Covent Garden fighter.

So he had the fists to back it up, and the heroic smile to win ladies as well as bouts.

It didn’t make it true. It made it fantasy. Not even his eyes, on hers, glowing like amber, could change that.

“Your shirt is covered in blood,” she said.

He licked crumbs from the corner of his mouth and she worked not to look. “Badge of honor.”

“That wound on your face won’t be when it goes bad. It’s time for you to head back to Grosvenor Square and send for your toff surgeon to come ’round and mend you.”

“If ye need help mendin’, I’ve some balm for ye, Duke,” Alice said.

“Oho!” another crowed. “Careful! Alice ain’t usually so generous!”

Alice laughed. “Any excuse to get a closer look!”

Grace expected Ewan to recoil from the bawdy jokes—the Garden was too harsh and too changeable for anyone to have time or inclination for the delicate sensibilities of the aristocracy. But instead, he grinned, the look sheepish and young. She ignored the way her stomach flipped with recognition of the boy she could glimpse in that look.

She didn’t want to recognize that boy.

Didn’t want to remember that there had been a time when she’d loved him.

When he loved her, and he’d held her in his arms and whispered about this place—his place—the place where they would one day reign together . . . until he’d changed his mind and decided to turn his back on it.

“Thank you for the offer, Miss Alice”—Grace resisted the urge to roll her eyes at the way the women fawned over the use of the polite title—“but I’ve other plans than mending right now. After all”—he rolled his shoulders back all long and lazy—“Dahlia promised me a fight.”

Their audience turned in unison, to where she sat. Four separate sets of eyes going wide. Grace bit back a curse—there was no way this interaction wouldn’t get back to her brothers.

“You’re done with cake,” she said.

His eyes went wide. “Am I?”

“You are,” she said. “You’ve interrupted these women’s work. And they’ve lives that extend far beyond this place and you.”

“Nah, miss,” Alice protested. “The two of you are more excitement than we’ve seen in ages.”

“Truth. My girls won’t ever believe a duke came and sat with me while I did the wash,” Jenny said, shaking her head and leaning over to collect more of her wash from the basket at her feet. Tossing the grey linen waistcoat into the tub, she bent to fish a rock from the bottom and used it to rub the dirt from the clothing.

“Would they be more likely to believe it if you told them I helped?” Ewan looked down at the basket between them and lifted another clump of fabric from within, shaking it out to reveal a large billowing shirt before he plunged his own hands into the tub and came up with a rock of his own.

Grace’s eyes went wide.

The women around the tub froze, and truly, it felt like the whole Garden did—the children in the street, the clock at the market hall.

“Your Grace.” Jenny found her voice first, and it was full of shock. “You can’t.”

He looked to her. “I can, in fact. I wasn’t always a duke.”

He was mad. Grace’s eyes grew wider at the words—a revelation and a confession and a threat to everything he held dear. She couldn’t stop herself. “You were an earl before that.”

He met her gaze and she heard his words as though he’d spoken them aloud. I didn’t mean that.

She raised a brow. “Earls don’t do the wash, either, Your Grace.”

“I do,” he said, simply, turning back to his work, rubbing the stains on the shirt with his rock as the entire world gaped at him.

Finally, Jenny spoke again. “Please, Your Grace. Don’t. It’s terribly . . .” She trailed off and looked to Grace as if to say, Help, please?

She moved to stand. To call him off. But instead, he said, “Do you always travel by rooftop?”

She stiffened instantly at the question. She did not answer.

“Since she was a girl,” Alice replied instead of her, with a deep, rich laugh. “My boy was the one who taught her to climb.”

“She needed to learn, did she?”

She hadn’t needed to learn.

Ewan tilted his head at that, his eyes on Grace as he continued to work the stone over the fabric he washed in quick, practiced movements, like he’d done it before.

And he had. He’d done it here. In an alley much like this. After all, he’d been a Covent Garden boy long before he’d been an Eton man.

Though the muscles of his arms did not seem very Etonian to Grace.

Thankfully, he interrupted her thoughts before she could linger on them. “Tell me about the boy who taught you to climb.”

You taught me to climb. She couldn’t count the number of times they’d sat in the treetops together.

But she wasn’t about to say that, and so, instead, she said, “Asriel,” refusing to look at him. She collected a pair of trousers from Alice’s basket and dunked them in the basin. She smiled at the older woman as she grabbed a broad brush from the water and began to scrub. “He showed us all the footholds in the Garden.”