Daring and the Duke (The Bareknuckle Bastards 3)

His brows shot up. “And how do you know these things?”

She lifted a chin toward the square. “You toffs think the whole world is built inside the buildings of this perfectly manicured square, where no one with less than ten thousand a year is welcome, but the truth is, the world is built on trade, and trade, while banal, bourgeois, and boring to the aristocracy, is a business worth being in.”

“What kind of trade?”

“Information and pleasure. Sometimes both. Never neither.”

“And you deal in those commodities?”

She shrugged one shoulder and looked toward Westminster House. “The point is, Westminster isn’t interested in our location or the state of our dress, or lack thereof. It’s dark, Ewan. No one can see us. And if they do, they shall simply think that Mad Marwick has found his way to the roof with his most recent paramour.”

“The paramour shall be the most surprising part of that story,” he said, dryly.

She stilled, and he cursed himself, not wanting this conversation. Not now, just when he’d convinced her to unlock for him. Turning to him, she said, softly, “No mistress, waiting in the wings at Burghsey?”

Was she jealous?

“I’m barely in the wings at Burghsey.”

“That doesn’t mean you can’t find pleasure there.”

“There is no pleasure there.” The words came out colder than he intended. Harsher. He cleared his throat, not wanting that place here, between them. Not wanting it close to her ever again. He cleared his throat and said, “Honestly, pleasure is not something with which I have experience.”

She turned back to him. “How very sad. What is the point of title and money and power and privilege if not to use it in nightly ducal bacchanal?”

He laughed. “I’m afraid I have never received an invitation to a ducal bacchanal.”

“Hmm,” she said. “I think you should count yourself lucky on that front. I know a number of duchesses, and their husbands are largely deadly dull or absolutely disgusting; neither quality makes for a good party.”

“I shall endeavor to avoid both, in that case, and leave all my bacchanals to you.”

She smiled at that. “I am very good at them.”

“I have no trouble believing that,” he said, wanting to return to her life.

She inclined her head. “My business is pleasure, as I said.”

“And information.”

“You would be amazed what flows along with pleasure.”

“I think I can imagine.” He paused, then said, “What have you learned about me?”

“Who says I’ve asked about you?”

He smirked. “You have asked about me.”

A moment, then, “No one knows you.”

You know me. He didn’t say it.

“The most anyone can tell me about you is that you have a grey horse. And you like to ride in the park.”

“I don’t like to ride in the park, as a matter of fact.”

“Of course, you don’t,” she said, as though everyone knew that. “You like to ride in places where you can ride far and fast.”

He looked to her. “And pretend I never have to return.”

“But you always have to, don’t you? Return?”

He always had, tied to his father and the dukedom like he’d been on a chain. Tethered to Burghsey House. To this one.

“And no one can tell me where you’ve been for the last year,” she said, softly, to the night.

He looked to her. “No one knows.”

She waited. “And so?”

“You told me to leave,” he replied, looking away, back to the rooftops, shadowed in moonlight.

“And yet, you returned,” she said.

“A different man than I left,” he confessed. “A better one.”

Silence, the autumn wind the only movement between them. “I think you might be,” she said.

“The man who left didn’t have a purpose.”

“And now you do?”

He looked directly at her. “I do.”

The words should have scared her and sent her running over the rooftops, back to the Garden. And perhaps they would have done in the past. But tonight, here—Ewan had the distinct feeling that he was not the only one who had changed.

As though she’d heard the thought, she swallowed and looked away. He followed her gaze, looking down into the square, where the tops of the trees were barely visible in the moonlight. “It never occurred to me that I had a roof.”

“That’s what comes of never having to worry about having one.”

He looked down at her. “I have had to worry, you know.”

Worrying about a roof was what had thrown them together in the first place. Fear of loss. Fear of uncertainty. Fear of hunger and want.

“I know,” she said, softly. “We all have.”

He didn’t think she meant it as a barb, but it struck true as she pulled on her coat and turned away from the edge, moving to the chimney stacks at the center of the roof. She perched herself on the brick step that led to the chimney block, extending her booted legs, watching him.

“Christ.” He shook his head, turning back to the darkness. “Grosvenor Square. It still feels impossible.”

He felt this way every time he came to London to this house that had never felt like his, in this city that no longer felt like his, in this world where he had never felt like he belonged—it did not matter how many tutors, and years at Eton and Oxford, and dancing lessons and land management tutorials he’d had. It did not matter the tailors and valets and butlers and cooks he’d had. When he walked the hallways of Marwick House, he always felt like the fraud he was.

“It shouldn’t.” She pulled him from his thoughts. “We always said you’d end up here, Duke.”

He gritted his teeth. “I wish you wouldn’t call me that.”

“It is your title, is it not?” When he didn’t reply, she said, “Would you prefer Your Grace?”

“No,” he said instantly. “Christ. No. I’ve always hated that.” It was a never-ending memory of her, like torture, ensuring that she was always with him and still never there.

She tilted her head. “So you don’t like the name, you don’t like the title, you don’t like the honorific. You don’t like the butler or the neighbors or the house or the attire or the privilege.” She paused. “Is there anything about the dukedom that you do like?”

Instead of answering, Ewan turned to look over the dark roofs, the light from the waning moon barely enough to see the next house, let alone across the square. “I don’t see how it’s possible for you to travel London like this.”

She flashed him a grin. “You mean by sky?”

“Is that what you call it?”

“I’ve always rather liked the poetry of it,” she said. “The truth is, the sky would be easier. But when the moon is out and the street lamps are lit? I know the way.”

The words echoed through him, something strange about them. He met her eyes. “You know the way?”

The air between them thickened with the question. It didn’t make sense that she would know the way. It didn’t make sense that the girl who had been raised on the streets and become Covent Garden royalty, running information and spies and pleasure like she did, would have the time, interest, or inclination to learn the way from the Rookery to the northern edge of Grosvenor Square.