A queen.
Her brows rose in silent question as he went for her, unable to keep himself from it, from reaching for her, battle raging all around them, pulling her into his arms, and kissing her thoroughly, claiming her for his own—this Boadicea.
When he was through, she was loose in his arms, and when she opened her eyes, he said, “I’m going to marry you.” Another kiss, quick and lush. “I’m going to marry you, and we will keep this place safe, and you will never have to fight alone ever again. We shall fight together.”
Her eyes went wide, but before she could say anything, movement came at the outer edge of his vision, and they both turned. The attacker was already lowering his club, aiming for Grace.
Ewan went wild, blocking the blow with a roar of fury, catching the club with one strong hand and planting his fist in the man’s face once, twice. “No one touches her,” he said on the third hit.
And on the fourth, “No one touches this place.” He lifted the other man by the collar. “Do you understand?”
A nod.
“Who sent you?”
“Dunno. We was just told to make sure this place wasn’t fit for usin’ again.”
Frustration flared. “Fucking hired dogs. You go back into the gutter you climbed out of and you tell whoever it is who hired you that this place is under the protection of the Duke of Marwick. Do you understand?”
Grace sucked in a breath at his shoulder, but he didn’t look at her, too busy waiting for a reply.
“Y-yes.”
“Good.”
He lifted his fist to deliver another blow, but Grace stayed him with a touch, looking to the man. “Are you the same crew that went for Maggie O’Tiernen’s?”
The bleeding man’s eyes shifted around the room, and Ewan grew more irritated. “Tell the truth, bruv,” he said, the Garden seeping into his voice. “You won’t like the consequences of a lie.”
The man’s eyes widened. “Yeah. That were us.”
“And Satchell’s?”
Ewan looked to her. What did she know?
“Aye.”
“What’s your name?”
He hesitated, and Ewan shook him like a doll. “Mikey.”
“I never forget a face, Mikey. Stay out of the Garden. You won’t like it if we cross paths again.”
He nodded, fear and gratitude in his eyes.
She indicated the rest of the room, where the fighters of 72 Shelton Street had dispatched the interlopers. “Take your boys and get the hell out of my place.”
The man obeyed instantly—knowing with the keen sense of a hired gun that he had been bested. She watched the men as they left, looking far worse for wear.
And then she turned to him. “You proposed to me.”
“I did,” he acknowledged.
“You proposed to me in the middle of a brawl.”
His smile was full of chagrin. “We’ve never been conventional.”
She did not return the amusement.
“Shall I do it again, now that the brawling is over and we have emerged victorious?”
“No,” she said, instantly.
He tilted his head. “Grace . . .” he began.
“Dahlia,” she corrected.
“What?”
“I am not Grace here. I am Dahlia.”
The air grew heavy between them, and Ewan did not like it. Did not like the harbinger it appeared to be, considering the steel in her words. “I would have thought that right now, of all times, you’d be Grace.”
“Because you are proposing marriage?”
“Precisely.”
“Because you want me for duchess.”
“Yes.” He wanted it more than he could say. More than he’d ever wanted anything, ever. “Yes. Christ. Yes. That’s what I can do—I can make you duchess and make this place unbreakable. I can give you everything you have worked for. If you want this place? I want it for you. I want you safe in it. I want your employees safe in it.”
“They are. We are,” she said.
“Now, yes. But I can make you safe forever. You think those thugs were hired by Mayfair? By men terrified of their wives getting ideas about the queen? By men terrified of women having power?”
“I do,” she said.
“Then let me fix it. Marry me. I’m a duke. This was what we said we would do.” He reached for her, but she stepped away from him instead of toward him. “We said we would use the dukedom to win. This is how it begins. You marry me. And this place becomes untouchable.”
This was the beginning of their future. The next part of their life. Their happily-ever-after. But something was wrong.
“Not even you have the power to stop whatever this is, Duke.” He resisted the urge to flinch at the title—one she hadn’t used with him in weeks. “This threat is vanquished from below, not above. Stopped by me, not you.”
“Why shouldn’t it be stopped by us? Together?”
A pause, and she went still. “Together.”
“Yes,” he said, and he would have given his entire fortune to know what she was thinking. “Together.”
Grace watched him for a long moment, and there was something in her eyes, something he recognized from a long-ago night—twenty years gone.
Disappointment.
And then she said, softly, “You planned all this.”
The irony, of course, was that the only time Grace had ever allowed herself to linger on the idea of marriage, it had been marriage to him.
It had been marriage to that boy she’d loved a lifetime earlier, who had made plans to be duke, and made plans to return to London, triumphant and powerful, and change the world from which he’d come.
And he had made plans for her to be duchess, and change the world by his side.
But she was no longer that girl of twelve, of thirteen, of fourteen. She was no longer the fifteen-year-old who shivered in the cold and dreamed of him coming back to her.
She was a grown woman who had saved that world and herself, without title or privilege. She’d built power from nothing. An empire from nothing. And when it came under threat, she fought. And she triumphed.
Had he not just seen it?
And now he offered her a title, as though it were a gift. As though it weren’t the thing that had brought their whole world down around him.
And then that word—together.
The same word the Duchess of Trevescan had used earlier in the evening, when she’d been so delighted to see Grace and Ewan. Together.
Grace looked to him. “You sent her to me. The Duchess of Trevescan. That night. To tell me you were back.”
He looked away.
“You did. You sent her, and she, what, planted the conversation about you? The revelation that you were hosting a masque and looking for a wife?”
That got his attention. “I wasn’t looking for a wife. I’d already found her.”
She ignored the pounding of her heart at the words, and the truth of them, glittering in his gaze. “All you had to do was convince me you’d changed.”
“I had changed,” he said.
“I thought that was true,” she replied.
“It is!”
“No. I don’t want to be your duchess. I have no desire to be complicit in your world—the world that ruined us. That ruined our mothers. My brothers. The world that threatens the Garden every day and tonight came for women because God forbid they should have a moment of their own pleasure. Their own satisfaction. Their own joy . . .” She paused, hating the words. Hating the rest. “And all that, before we even discuss how it ruined you.”