Daring and the Duke (The Bareknuckle Bastards 3)

Grace was close enough to touch, and if his hands were untied, he would have touched her. He wouldn’t have been able to stop himself when she was there, tall and towering above him. “We climbed out of the muck and built ourselves a kingdom here in the Garden, this place that had been yours.”

She remembered. “I thought about that as I learned the curve of Wild Street. As I scrambled over the rooftops, out of reach of thugs and Bow Street. As I cut purses on Drury Lane and fought for blood in the moving rings of the Rookery.”

He worked at the bindings again, too well-tied for freedom.

And then freedom was impossible, because she was reaching for him. She was going to touch him, her fingertips stroking down his cheek, leaving fire in their wake. He inhaled sharply as her nails raked over the several days’ growth of beard, tracing over the rough stubble, toward his chin. He stilled, afraid that if he moved, she’d stop.

Don’t stop.

She didn’t, her fingers curling beneath his chin, tilting his face up to her, her own now shadowed by angles and curls. She stared deep into his eyes, her gaze holding him in thrall. “How you look at me,” she said softly, the sound barely there and filled with disbelief.

But she had to believe. Hadn’t he always looked at her this way?

Christ, she was moving in closer, leaning over him, blocking out the light. Becoming the light.

Her eyes saw every inch of him, laying him bare with their investigation. And he couldn’t stop himself as she drew closer and closer, setting his pulse pounding, until the room fell away, and it was nothing but the two of them, and then he fell away, and it was nothing but her. “They hid you from me.”

She shook her head, the movement wrapping him in the scent of her, like a sweet he’d had once and could both remember perfectly and somehow never find again.

“No one hides me,” she said. God, she was close. She was right there, her lips full and perfect, a hairsbreadth from his. “I take care of myself.”

He strained at the bonds, straight as steel. Hard as it. Desperate to close the distance between them. How long had it been since he touched her? How long had he dreamed of it?

A lifetime.

Her eyes were black with desire, on his mouth, and he licked his lower lip, knowing she wanted him like he knew his own breath. She wanted him as much as he wanted her.

Impossible. No one could want anything the way he wanted her.

Take it, he willed.

Please, God. Kiss me.

“I found you,” he said, the words like a prayer.

“No,” she corrected him, softly. “I found you, Ewan.”

His name—the name no one ever used anymore—shattered through him. He couldn’t stop himself from whispering her name in reply.

Her eyes lifted to his again, like a gift.

Yes.

“Take it,” he said. Whatever you need.

Everything you need.

“What do you need, Grace?” he whispered.

She leaned in, and he ached beyond reason.

Two taps, sharp and insistent, from the darkness, instantly recognizable as Devil, his brother by blood.

Hers by something much stronger.

Grace was gone instantly, as though drawn by a string, and the loss of her touch made him wild. Ewan turned toward the sound, a low growl in his throat, like a dog who’d been promised a meal and had it snatched away at the last second.

“He told me you were dead,” he said, turning back to her—keen for her nearness. “But you’re not dead. You’re alive,” he said once. Then again, unable to hide the relief from his voice. The reverence. “You’re alive.”

She narrowed her gaze, unmoved. “You tried to kill him.”

“He told me you were dead!” Did she not understand?

“You nearly killed Beast’s love.”

“I thought they’d let you die!” He’d nearly gone mad with the knowledge of it.

Not nearly.

She shook her head. “That’s not enough of a reason.”

He lifted his chin, a raw laugh pulled from him at the idea that he might not have torn London apart to avenge her death. “You’re right. It wasn’t enough. It was everything.” He met her gaze, warm and brown—a gaze that had aged like the rest of her. Full of knowledge and power. “I would do it again. Untie me.”

She watched him for a long moment in silence. “You know, I thought about you as I walked those cobblestones and learned to love them. As I learned to protect them, as though it had been me born in a Covent Garden drainpipe, and not you.”

“Untie me. Let me—”

Let me hold you.

Let me touch you.

She ignored the words. “I thought about you . . . until I stopped thinking of you.” She let the words wash over him. “Because you were no longer one of us. Were you, Duke?”

Grace wielded the title like a knife, carving deep enough to strike bone, but he did not show it.

Instead, Ewan did the only thing he could think to do. The only thing he could imagine would keep her with him.

The only gift she would take from him.

He leveled her with his most direct gaze and said, “Untie me, and I’ll give you the fight you want.”

Chapter Six

A fight was what she wanted.

She’d stood on the highest floor of this building she owned, in the world over which she reigned—a world that had once been his—looked her brothers in the eyes, and told them that she longed for vengeance.

It was the only thing she longed for, if she was honest. Everything else—everything she had and everything she was, was a means to that end. It was, after all, the only thing that was fully hers. All else—her home, her business, her brothers, the people of the Rookery, they were all shared. But vengeance was hers alone.

From the moment she was born, nothing had been hers. Her name had been stolen. Her future. A mother who loved her. A father she’d never know. And then, as she’d found the good in the world, those things, too. Happiness. Love. Comfort. Security. Every bit of it, gone. Taken from her.

By the only person she’d ever loved, because the idea of a life with her hadn’t been enough. Not when he might have a dukedom.

That had been the promise the boys’ father had made when he’d summoned his sons, half brothers, to his estate in the country. They would compete, like dogs, for a title that did not belong to any of them. A title that would bring with it fortune and power beyond measure—enough to change lives.

At first, the competition had been easy. Dancing and conversation. Geography and Latin. The trappings of aristocracy, with only the duke and an endless line of servants and tutors aware of their presence. And then it had taken a turn for the worse, and the challenges had become less about learning and more about suffering. About what the duke called “mental fortitude.”

The boys had been separated from her then . . . kept in dark rooms. In the cold. In isolation.

And then they’d been forced to fight each other. All for the promise of power. Of fortune. Of future. Of a name that had been hers, at baptism: Robert Matthew Carrick, Earl Sumner. Future Duke of Marwick.

Few had known that the babe in the nursemaid’s arms was a girl—and those who had . . . they were too terrified of the duke to say anything as he broke the laws of God and country.