Daring and the Duke (The Bareknuckle Bastards 3)

“Mmmm. What’s the point in having an overbearing butler if not to ward off interlopers?”

Her eyes glittered in the candlelight. “Aren’t all ducal butlers overbearing? How else can one be sure there is always a starched shirt and a pressed cravat, ready for donning?”

“I don’t know. I don’t spend much time on ducal estates.” It wasn’t precisely true. He spent most of his time on the Burghsey estate, but he lived in a small cottage he’d built on the western edge of the land. It ran on a skeleton staff, just enough to keep the place from falling down around him.

“Hmm,” she said. “Well, either way, your butler failed in buttling when I arrived, to be sure.”

“I shall bring up your concerns with him at his next performance review. Did not stop strange woman from entering house: demerit.”

Those beautiful lips curled again. “I’m not sure it counts as a demerit. Truthfully, I’m very good at getting where I need to be without being noticed.”

He didn’t know how that was possible, considering how intensely he noticed her. How he knew the shift in a room when she was present. Twenty years, and he still noticed her like she was cannon fire.

“Would you like me to leave?” she asked.

“No.” He never wanted her to leave.

She poured a second glass and closed the distance between them, offering it to him.

He took it. “And so?”

She tilted her head in question.

“Have you decided?” he asked, hearing the frustration in his tone, the reveal that he was losing patience.

She took a step closer and he sucked in a breath, imagining what would happen if he caught her in his arms and carried her to the bed, and stripped her bare—and made love to her as he’d wanted to every night since he’d been old enough for such thoughts.

Would he be able to strip her of her mask then?

And what would she do?

She would run.

He knew it, because she’d run from him for years—every time he’d ever come close to finding her in the twenty years since they’d parted. She’d run from him, and he deserved it for the way he’d betrayed her, and broken her heart, and broken his own in the balance.

She would run, and he would do anything to stop that, so he remained statue-still, and let her come to him.

She stopped a heartbeat from him, and she pulled a sack off her shoulder—he hadn’t noticed it when she’d entered. He could not see her eyes, the hood low enough that it cast the upper half of her face in shadow. All he could see were her full, pink lips when she said, “They did a fair bit of damage to you.”

He did not hesitate. “I did plenty of my own.”

She smiled in that way that made her look like she had a secret—was it possible she was proud? Christ, he wanted her proud. He wanted her to have watched him fight and admired his skill. He knew it made him an animal, but he didn’t care. He wanted her to know he could destroy worlds at her bidding, if only she’d ask for it.

Whatever she needed.

“Why haven’t you called a doctor?” she asked, softly.

He couldn’t stop the little thread of offense he took at the question. “I don’t need a doctor.”

She lifted her chin, and the candlelight caught her face, washing it gold as she met his eyes with disbelieving amusement. “Men and their ridiculous rules regarding medical care. You go on and on about how you’re perfectly fine, despite the bruises blooming all over you—it looks like Patrick O’Malley broke your nose.”

“Are you here to nursemaid me?”

She did not reply, instead reaching up to lower her hood, letting her mass of red curls loose like an inferno. Christ, he loved her hair. It was a force of nature, threatening always to lay him low. Like the woman herself.

The darkness tightened around them. “Why are you here?”

She stilled.

He hated that stillness and the way it settled her mask once more. He’d miscalculated in the Garden. He’d lured her into showing him something of her truth, and then he’d left, and he might never get it back.

You can never have her back.

He couldn’t have the girl he’d known, but was he never to have even a glimpse of the woman she’d become? Was she to hide from him forever?

“Tell me the truth,” he whispered, and he couldn’t hide the urgency in the tone.

She stayed quiet, instead lifting her hand to his face, her fingers gentle as they traced the swollen skin beneath his eye, the yellowed bruising on his jaw. The line of his nose, somehow miraculously unbroken despite her suggestion.

“If I said I was here to mend you?”

He released a breath at the words, somehow filling him with more pleasure than her touch. “I would say you have a fair bit of work on your hands.”

He did not tell her he was not certain mending was an option.

She hovered on the edge of movement, as though she knew it.

Stay. Please.

It took everything he had to wait her out.

Choose this.

His heart threatened to beat from his chest until finally . . . finally, she reached for the linen strip he’d used in his attempt to bind his own ribs. He relinquished it without hesitation, standing so still he barely breathed as she circled him, investigating him, her touch soft and strong, sliding over his ribs and testing the damage that had been done.

He sucked in a breath as she traced over the muscles of his abdomen, and she looked up, her rich brown eyes inspecting his for pain. “Too much?”

Never enough.

He shook his head. “Go on.”

“This one could be broken,” she said softly.

“It’s not.”

“How do you know?” she asked.

“We both know I’ve broken them before.” The memory unfolded between them. Ewan had taken a boot to the rib and she’d mended him then, too.

“Whit was always better with his legs,” she whispered.

“And now?”

She smiled at the question, and jealousy flared at her clear adoration of the man Covent Garden called Beast. “Now he’s good with everything. He grew big and brutal. And he doesn’t lose.”

Something filled him at that—the fact that the smallest and weakest of them had become the strongest.

“The summer he grew—we were ten and five, maybe six,” she said, amusement in her words. “It was like witchcraft. We couldn’t keep him in shoes. One week, we were out of money and he put a toe through the front of one, and I had to steal a pair.”

“From where?”

She shrugged. “A cull in a brothel on Charles Street. Greasy git who liked to agree to one price and pay another. The sweaty bastard deserved it.”

“Was he—” He swallowed the rest of the question.

She tilted her head at him. “A customer? No. I was more use to Digger Knight as a fighter than I was as a moll.”

“I wouldn’t judge if he were.” Born in a brothel on Tavistock Row, Ewan knew better than most that women had few enough choices in life for men to decide they owned that one.

“I know you wouldn’t,” she said. And the truth in the words gave him pleasure.

She finished bandaging him, tucking the end of the linen in on itself, her lips flattened into a straight line as she inspected the rest of him—the bruises above the bandages and on his face, and his shoulder, rubbed raw from the ropes he’d used in the yard earlier that day.