Daring and the Duke (The Bareknuckle Bastards 3)

And that meant letting her choose him. Come to him.

Take him.

So, he’d left, instead of pulling her into his arms and keeping her there until she revealed all of it.

Come see me when you know.

He growled his irritation at the memory, frustration making him yank his trousers up and button the falls with a roughness that sent pain shooting over his ribs. “You fucking deserve that,” he muttered to himself, stopping before he finished buttoning, and turned to the looking glass on the far side of the room, still in shadow, despite the candles lit all around it to give him the best look at the damage he’d taken earlier in the day.

If he hadn’t left her, would he be with her still? Would she have tended his wounds? The question came with the memory of her fingers on his chest earlier, sliding down, over his ribs, gentling when he’d sucked in a breath at the pain. The first indication that she hadn’t liked him hurt.

As though her touch could ever hurt him. Even as she’d delivered his punishment in the boxing ring, even as he’d taken her fists and then the silken scarf at her waist that a lesser man would have underestimated, he’d reveled in her touch.

She was alive.

A year later, and the revelation still threatened to break him.

She was alive, and if he was right, she wanted him, so he’d taken the risk and left her wanting, leaving her there, in the Garden, and returning to the house in Mayfair, his attempt to sneak through the kitchens failing the moment the cook saw his battered face and screamed for O’Clair, who immediately transformed into a mother hen, insisting they call a doctor, Scotland Yard, and the butler’s brother—who was a priest, apparently.

After convincing the butler that he was bruised but not broken, that no crimes had been committed, and that he had no need for last rites, Ewan had called for a bath, a bottle of whisky, and a basket of bandages.

He made liberal use of the first two items before settling in with the third, wincing as he inspected the spots that mottled his torso. It was dark, and the candlelight in the room was not ideal for wound care, but he wasn’t about to ask O’Clair for more candles, lest the butler return to panic, so Ewan was left with what he had—a looking glass and a dozen flames casting shadows across his skin as he gingerly tested the ribs within.

He didn’t think anything required a surgeon, but the pain was considerable—scotch notwithstanding.

Cursing roundly, he worked to wrap the bandages around his midsection, irritation making the task more difficult than it should have been. He was tired and in pain, and tied in knots from the events of the afternoon—the bout as much as the chase she’d led him on, through the crowd and deep into the Garden. And from the control he’d had to hold tight.

Christ, he’d wanted her. He’d wanted to toss her over his shoulder and take her to the nearest private corner to give her the opportunity to give him the fight she promised.

But when he’d found her, halfway up a wall, headed for the rooftops, returning to dominion over this world he’d loved so well, he had realized that he didn’t want her in private. He wanted her in public.

He wanted to be the one who knew her secrets and her stories. He wanted her to show him all the ways they could take to the rooftops together.

He’d hated that there’d been another boy, teaching her to climb. Hated that he’d never realized she would need to know more than trees to survive. Hated that she’d had to survive—and all because of him.

He wanted to learn her maps—over slate tiles and around smokestacks—and hear every tale she had to tell about the last twenty years. He wanted to make new maps. New tales.

And he wanted the world to see them together.

I don’t know, she’d said, and he’d heard the layers of the confession. Felt them in his soul. Because he did not know, either. The only thing he knew was that he wanted to learn with her. He wanted a future, and all they had was the past.

You betrayed me.

With a grunt, he yanked on the long strip of linen he wrapped around his ribs, pulling it as tight as he could, gritting his teeth against the pain.

“You’ll never get it tight enough on your own.”

He nearly dropped the bandages at the words, the movement sending a screaming pain through him, and he exhaled it harshly as she stepped into the room, closing the door behind her.

Heart pounding, he drank her in, relief and pleasure and no small amount of pride coursing through him. She had come. Would there ever be a time when he wasn’t consumed with thrill at the idea that she had sought him out, of her own will?

And this was her own will.

His, as well.

She wore her uniform—the clothes that made her a monarch. Black trousers and leather boots that threatened always to do him in, encasing her long legs up over the knee like sin. Above the trousers, an ice blue corset, embroidered with gold thread. At her waist, another scarf—her weapon of choice—the foil of the corset, gold with threads of that blue. Over all that, a black coat, perfectly tailored. On another woman he would have thought the coat a disguise—something to hide her from prying eyes and turn her into a gentleman on the street. But Grace did not hide. The coat hung open to reveal the stunning corsetry beneath and the matched lining beyond, the same blue, the pale blue color of a winter’s sky.

Buttoned, the coat would make for perfect stealth, a hood pulled up over her wild red curls, the only evidence that they existed a small errant one, loosed from hiding. He wanted to knock that hood back and let it all fall down around her shoulders, as it had been earlier in the day.

He reveled in the look of her—steel and silk, like the woman herself, even as frustration flared. She’d come to him masked again. It might not be the silken mask she’d worn the night she’d come to the masquerade, but she wore a mask nonetheless, the same one she’d donned earlier, when she’d commanded her Covent Garden army—this one made of strength.

Gone was the woman he’d glimpsed after the bout—the one who’d told the story of learning to scale walls. The one who gave her smiles easily to the bruisers in the muck and the women at the wash.

He wanted those smiles, easy, for himself.

He wanted her. Honest.

But he would take this over nothing.

“How did you get in?”

She gave him a little smile. “I’m a hardened street criminal, Duke. You think a thing like Grosvenor Square would prevent me from a bit of breaking and entering?”

“It’s not the address I would have expected to stop you,” he said. “I am, however, surprised to know that my overbearing butler didn’t meet you on the stairs.”

She crossed the room to a small table where a collection of glasses sat with a heavy ship’s decanter, and Ewan could not look away from her swagger, her coat swinging around her long legs. She pulled the stopper from the decanter and sniffed at the brandy inside. Her brows rose. “French. Very expensive.”

“I understand there are ways to get it more cheaply,” he said as she poured herself a glass.

She did not miss the reference to the Bareknuckle Bastards’ less than legal enterprise. “I haven’t any idea what you’re talking about.” She drank and then said, “There wasn’t a single butler in nightcap, armed with antique dueling pistol, to be found. Disappointing, really.”