Daring and the Duke (The Bareknuckle Bastards 3)

Alice laughed. “That child stopped my heart weekly, with the way he climbed.”

“Like a cat,” Grace said. How long had it been since she’d thought of that? “How is he, Alice?”

The black woman smiled, and Grace recognized a mother’s content. “Oh, he’s very well. Very well. Still with that casino over on St. James’s, but he finds his way home for supper now and then.” Asriel had been one of the few to leave the Garden for work, finding it as security detail at the Fallen Angel, one of the most desirable men’s clubs in London.

“You tell him Dahlia sends her gratitude for those long-ago lessons.”

Alice nodded. “I will.”

She looked to Ewan, not liking the way he watched her. Or, perhaps, liking it too much. “Don’t. Don’t look at me like that.”

His brows rose. “Like what?”

“Like you like me,” she said, returning her attention to her work.

“I’ve always liked you,” he said, simply, and she couldn’t help but peek up at him, finding his bruised and bloody face open and unsettling.

They weren’t supposed to like each other.

Her eyes flickered across the circle to rest on Ewan. “And you, milord—who taught you your skill?”

One side of his mouth kicked up. “I don’t expect you’re referring to laundry.”

All the women laughed, and Jenny crowed, “I wouldn’t mind hearing that story, too!”

“My mother taught me,” he said, simply.

She couldn’t keep herself from looking at him at that, knowing that there was nothing simple about it. His mother, once mistress to one of the most venerated dukes in Britain, then cast off, with child, here.

“Your mam!” Alice said, eyes going wide. “A duchess, doin’ the wash?”

“Not just the wash,” he said, deftly manipulating the conversation. “What would you say if I told you she taught me to throw a punch, too?”

“Cor!” the third woman said. “I’d say she sounded like a proper Garden duchess!”

“She was that,” he said with a smile, and everyone laughed. Everyone except Grace, who couldn’t stop watching him. And when he looked at her, she saw everything he was not saying, and hated it.

But then he said the rest. “Maybe I ought to find myself another Garden duchess.”

The laughter stopped immediately, silence opening up in the washing circle like a secret. Grace’s chest tightened with something close to panic.

It was panic, wasn’t it?

Whatever it was, this ended now.

Grace set the wet trousers she’d washed on the pile of clean laundry, cleared her throat, and stood. “That’s enough.”

He looked up. “Is it? Why?”

She studied him for a long moment. Did he really not know?

Perhaps he was the madman he’d once been. But he wasn’t dangerous.

Wrong. Like this, covered in blood and doing the wash, he was more dangerous than he’d ever been.

“Because you don’t belong here, Marwick.”

He flinched at the words before he stood, moving with a hint of stiffness that he tried to hide, but she saw anyway. When her eyes met his, something flashed there, and she recognized it from their youth. Defiance.

He knew the score—knew that if he showed weakness here, the Garden would eat him for supper. He’d been weaned on that lesson, in this very place. He did belong here, he would argue if given the chance. Had he not been born here? Had he not learned the maze of streets to the east of Drury Lane before the rest of them had even known Drury Lane existed?

But he’d left it. And she’d come and taken it.

And now it was hers and she understood it—and the pride of the people who lived there—better than he ever would. And he made them all feel like fools when he brought his fine cloth and his pristine speech and his manicured hands here.

And Grace, most of all.

“You’re awful deep in the Garden to be headed for Mayfair, Duke,” she said, tilting her chin to the west. “Follow the sun and find yourself home, before you meet a dangerous someone on the streets.”

She forced herself to turn away, to head back to the wall, to climb to the rooftops and get back to work. She’d be damned if she’d watch him leave.

“I am safe on these streets now, aren’t I, Dahlia?” he called out, and she couldn’t help it. She turned back, the name on his lips, where it didn’t belong.

He wasn’t leaving. He was coming for her, slow and easy, as though his thigh wasn’t aching and his shoulder wasn’t aflame and bruises weren’t blooming all over his smug face—how was it possible it was still so handsome? No one should be handsome as they turned black and blue.

“Haven’t you just claimed my protection your own?”

She came off the wall to her full height as he neared. “I wouldn’t say protection, no.”

“No? I heard it quite clearly,” he said, his voice lowering so it went liquid and dark, but not quiet enough to exclude their audience. “I heard you say I was yours.”

She ignored the way the words curled through her, narrowing her gaze as the women watching vibrated with excitement. He was performing, and she didn’t like it. “The blows to the head addled your brain then, because I said nothing of the sort.”

“No?”

“No. I said your fight was mine.”

“And if I told you that I was all fight?”

A little sigh came from beyond, and Grace ignored it. Ignored, too, the way the words wanted her sigh, as well. “I would tell you that you’ve been a toff too long for that to be true.”

He watched her for a long moment. “And what if being a toff has made me a fighter? What if it has filled me with anger and venom and made me into the kind of bruiser you would have?”

She stilled.

“What if I’m all fight?” he whispered. “What if that’s all I have to give?”

The sun was low now, nearly over the rooftops, casting golden light through the alley, turning his golden hair, dusted with soot and mud from the Rookery, to the same color as his eyes, burning into hers. Those eyes that she knew as well as her own. Better.

The ones that haunted her in her dreams—the only place she could allow herself to remember them.

He lowered his voice. “What if you cannot claim my fight without claiming me?”

She couldn’t breathe for the images the words wrought. For the memories that came with them.

She didn’t want it. She didn’t want the whispers of their past. Didn’t want the confusion of the present. She didn’t want the taste of him on her lips or the memory of the way he unraveled her with his touch and his mouth.

He was close enough to touch. “Are you going to eat that?”

What?

He nodded between them, and she followed the line of his attention to the scone, still in her hand, half eaten. “The cake,” he said. “Do you intend to eat it?”

She clasped it to her breast. “Are you asking me for it?”

“’Twould be a pity for it to go to waste.”

She narrowed her gaze on him. “Are you deprived of treats, Duke?”

The question wrought an instant change. “Yes.” His voice was suddenly low and dark. “Christ, yes. I’ve had a lifetime of treat deprivation.”