Daring and the Duke (The Bareknuckle Bastards 3)

The woman known as Dahlia stilled at the bottom of the central staircase, taking in the massive space, already packed with club members and guests despite the early hour. She offered the assembly a wide, glittering smile. “Drink up, my lovelies, you’ve a night to remember ahead of you!”

“Or to forget!” came a boisterous retort from the far end of the room. Dahlia recognized the voice instantly as that of one of London’s merriest widows—a marchioness who had invested in 72 Shelton Street from the earliest days, and loved it more than her own home. Here, a merry marchioness was afforded the privacy she never received in Grosvenor Square. Her lovers, too, received that privacy.

The masked crowd laughed in unison, and Dahlia was freed from their collective attention just long enough for her lieutenant, Zeva, to appear at her side. The tall, willowy, dark-haired beauty had been with her since the earliest days of the club and managed the ins and outs of the membership—ensuring that whatever they wished was theirs for the taking.

“Already a crush,” Zeva said.

Dahlia checked the watch at her waist. “About to be more of one.”

It was early, just past eleven; much of London only now able to sneak away from their boring dinners and dances, making their excuses with megrims and delicate constitutions. Dahlia smirked at the thought, knowing the way the club’s membership used the perceived weakness of the fairer sex to take what they wished beneath the notice of society.

They would claim that weakness and play to it: all while summoning their coachmen to the rear exits of their homes; while changing from their respectable fashions to something more exciting; while peeling off the masks they wore in their world and donning different ones, different names, different desires—whatever they wished, out of Mayfair.

Soon, they would arrive, filling 72 Shelton Street to the gills, to revel in what the club could provide on any given night of the year—companionship, pleasure, and power—and specifically for what it delivered on the third Thursday of every month, when women from across London and the world were welcome to explore their deepest desires.

The standing event—known only as Dominion—was part masked ball, part wild revelry, part casino, and entirely confidential. Designed to provide club membership and trusted companions with an evening catering entirely to their pleasure . . . whatever that pleasure might be.

Dominion had a single, driving purpose: Ladies’ choice.

There was nothing Dahlia liked more than providing women access to their pleasure. The fairer sex was not treated fairly in the slightest, and her club was built to change that.

Since arriving in London twenty years earlier, she had made money in scores of ways. She’d sculleried in dingy pubs and dank theaters. She’d minced meat in pie shops and bent metal into spoons, and never for more than a penny or two for the work. She’d quickly discovered that daytime work didn’t pay.

Which was fine with her, as she had never been suited to daytime work. After chamber pots and meat pies turned her stomach and metalwork left her palms sliced to ribbons, she’d found a job as a flower girl, racing to empty a basket of fast-wilting posies before dark. She’d lasted two days before a hawker in the Covent Garden market had seen her keen eye for a customer and offered her work selling fruit.

That had lasted less than a week, until he’d backhanded her for accidentally dropping a bright red apple in the sawdust. When she’d come to her feet, she’d put him into the sawdust himself, before sprinting from the market, three apples in her skirts—worth more than her pay for a week.

But the event had been surprising enough to attract the attention of one of the Garden’s biggest fight men. Digger Knight had been on a constant hunt for tall girls with pretty faces and powerful fists. Brutes are one thing, he used to say, but the belles win the crowd. Dahlia turned out to be both.

She’d been taught well.

Fighting wasn’t daytime work. It was nighttime work, and it paid like it.

It paid well. And it felt better—especially for a girl from nowhere who was full of betrayal and anger. She didn’t mind the sting of the blows and she quickly found her sea legs from the dizziness that came the morning after a bout . . . and once she learned how to see a blow coming, and how to avoid the ones that would do real damage? She never looked back.

Turning her back on flowers and fruit, Dahlia sold her fists instead, in fair fights and dirty ones. And when she’d seen the kind of money that the latter could earn her, she sold her hair to a wigmaker in Mayfair who shopped the Garden wholesale. Long hair was weakness . . . and bad for business for a bareknuckle girl.

The short-haired, long-legged nearly fifteen-year-old had become a legend in Covent Garden’s darkest corners. A girl with a lean, sinewy form and, somehow, a punch like oak, whom no man wished to meet on a darkened street, especially when flanked by the two boys who came with her, who fought with a young, feral rage that brought ruin to anyone who faced it.

Together, they made money hands over those fists, building an empire, Dahlia and those boys who quickly became men—her brothers in heart and soul if not in blood—the Bareknuckle Bastards. And the trio sold their fists until they no longer had to . . . until, eventually, they were unbeatable. Unbreakable.

Royal.

And only then did Queen Dahlia build her castle and claim her place, no longer in the business of flowers or apples or hair or fights.

And to her subjects, she offered a single magnificent thing: choice. Not the kind she’d been afforded—lesser of multiple evils—but the kind that let women have access to their dreams. Fantasies and pleasure, made good.

What women wanted, Dahlia provided.

And Dominion was her celebration.

“You dressed for the occasion, I see,” Zeva said.

“Did I?” Dahlia replied with a raised brow. The scarlet corset she wore above perfectly fitted black trousers skimmed her lush curves beneath a long, elaborately embroidered topcoat in black and gold, lined with a rich golden silk.

She rarely wore skirts, finding the freedom of trousers more useful while working—not to mention, a valuable reminder of her role as proprietress of one of London’s best kept secrets and queen of Covent Garden.

Her lieutenant slid her a look. “Coy does not become you. I know where you’ve been for the last four days. And you haven’t been wearing velvet and silk.”

A raucous cheer came from the roulette wheel nearby, saving Dahlia from a reply. She turned to watch the crowd, taking in the wide, delighted smile of a masked woman, anonymous to all but the owner of the club, as she pulled Tomas, her companion for the evening, in for a celebratory kiss. Tomas was nothing if not a willing participant, and the embrace ended to whistles and huzzahs.

No one would believe that to all of Mayfair, she was a shelf-bound wallflower who lost her voice with men. Masks were infinite power when they were chosen.

“The lady is running hot?” Dahlia asked.

“Third win in a row.” Of course Zeva was keeping track. “And Tomas isn’t exactly a cooling influence.”

Dahlia offered a half smile. “Nothing escapes your notice.”

“You pay me very well for that to be the case. I notice everything,” the other woman said. “Including your whereabouts.”

Dahlia looked to her factotum and friend and said, quietly, “Not tonight.”