Daring and the Duke (The Bareknuckle Bastards 3)

And Grace would be damned if she’d let them have it without a fight. She nodded, heading for the door. “Then we’d better get down there.”

Veronique pulled a pistol from its holster under her arm and looked to Ewan. “You’re sure he can fight?”

Grace met the eyes of the man she loved, in trousers and shirtsleeves, all muscle and strength, fury in his eyes and his jaw, looking for all the world as though he was prepared to walk through fire for right.

For her.

“I’ve never seen his equal.”

She opened the door, and the trio headed toward the screams.

They ran down the center stairs to the main oval room of the club, where a half-dozen fights had broken out. The men who had come to destroy 72 Shelton were easily recognizable—dirty and ruthless. But they hadn’t wagered on Veronique’s security being equally ruthless and prepared to do battle.

Nor on the Bastards’. Across the room, Annika, who ran Devil and Whit’s smuggling operation, pushed Lady Nora Madewell behind her and threw a wicked punch, breaking her opponent’s nose, if the howl he let out was any indication.

“Not without me, you don’t!” Lady Nora shouted, picking up a heavy crystal vase, laden with hothouse flowers, and cracking him over the head, setting him to his knees. With a grin, Nora looked to her love, pride on her open, pretty face. “Not bad, if I do say.”

“Not bad,” Annika agreed with a half smile—the highest praise a body could receive from the stoic Norwegian—pulling her lady close. “Very good.”

Nearby, one of Shelton Street’s army took a chair to a brute with a heavy club, and dropped him to the ground, summoning a collection of little shrieks from the members who were herding past, through to the back rooms, and the staircase that would lead to the underground tunnels that would take them safely from the club.

“That was a solid hit for Cate,” Grace said.

“You’ve trained them well,” Ewan said.

“Tell me that when we’re on the other side of this,” she said.

“Whoever this is, they’ll never get away with it,” Ewan said, looking over the crowd. “I recognized a dozen of the most powerful members of the House of Lords here tonight.”

“They’re not here for the men,” Grace replied. “They’re after the members; every woman here.”

They looked over the crowd, scrambling to escape the men who were taking care to destroy everything in their path. Grace watched a brute with a club smash a stained-glass lantern in the corner of the oval salon before slicing a cushion open with a wickedly sharp blade.

On the other side of the room, someone had toppled a chaise.

They were after her club, dammit.

A couple peeled away from the stream of escapees and headed for them—Nelson, a cut on his forehead bleeding more than Grace liked, his arm lodged protectively around the Dowager Countess of Granville, a bloody handkerchief in her hand, her mask having been traded for a furrowed brow.

He met Grace’s gaze as he pressed a kiss to the lady’s temple. “We’re for the roof.”

“And for Mayfair,” Lady Granville said, pointedly, worry and something else in her eyes.

They would never be back. Grace knew love when she saw it.

She stepped aside to let them pass. “Be well.”

The couple was gone, a riot of sound following them up the stairs and into the night.

Grace looked back over the chaos before them. “They don’t want to scare us,” she said. “They want to end us.”

“Why?” Ewan asked.

“Because,” she said, watching. Lady Marsham and the Duchess of Pemberton pushed past, wild-eyed, and she saw the terror in their eyes as they peeked over their shoulders, looking for the enemy beyond. “They don’t like that we are the future.”

Even if they got everyone out that night, it would not be enough. The raid would do what it was meant to do—scare members off. Send them, frightened, back to their Mayfair drawing rooms and their Park Lane teas. Back to gossip on Bond Street and walks along the Serpentine. Back to the safety they enjoyed as the second sex.

And 72 Shelton would be made an example by the men who ran them back to ground.

Over her decaying corpse.

Anger flared, hot in Grace’s throat, and she caught the eye of the aerialist, still high above the crowd, having pulled herself to standing on the trapeze for the best view in the house.

Grace lifted her chin toward the woman. “Where?”

Thankfully, the other woman did not misunderstand. She pointed in the direction of the front room, where Fortuna had been earlier in the evening. Where she and Ewan had danced, wild and free—a memory that would forever be tainted by this—these men, in her palace, leaving destruction in their wake.

Anger became rage.

Another scream sounded from the front room, and she was already moving, pulling the scarf from her waist and wrapping the ends around her fists with quick, economical movements as she pushed through the crowd.

She heard Ewan roar her name behind her, but she did not look back. This was her place. Her world. These were her people. And she would protect them at all costs.

One moment she was with him and the next, she was gone, disappeared into the throngs of people fleeing in one direction, swimming upstream, running, as she had always done, into the fray.

Grace, always the first to save, no matter what danger she might face.

A glimpse of her flame red curls the only thing that retained his sanity as he followed her. She was moving too fast, lost almost instantly in the crowd. He roared her name, frustration and fear propelling him into the crowd—which seemed, blessedly, to understand his urgency and make space for him.

“It’s Mad Marwick!” he heard at the back of his consciousness as he pushed through the crush, the moniker from his past, which he had worked so hard to overcome in the months since he’d returned—now back because he was mad. He was a wild animal, desperate to get to the woman he loved.

He looked over his shoulder. “You said fifteen?”

“Give or take.” Grace’s second-in-command was at his side. “Four in the center room, makes ten or so elsewhere.”

“And your men? They can fight?” What was Grace headed into?

“My women are made of stronger stuff than you, toff.”

He grunted, coming through to the room where the magician and the fiddlers and the acrobat had been earlier in the evening. He pulled up short as the woman with him cursed, under her breath.

The room had been destroyed. Curtains slit and furniture smashed, tables and chairs upended. Paintings ripped from the walls and slashed.

This wasn’t sport. It was punishment.

They don’t like that we are the future.

Around the room, the intruders brawled with club employees, and at the center of it all, Grace. As he watched, she clocked one of the brutes, setting him off kilter long enough to deliver a heavy kick to his midsection. He landed on the ground and she used her scarf to deliver the final blow, her quick actions inhibiting his movement as she knocked him unconscious.

She shook out her hand as he landed on the ground and turned around, her brown eyes finding Ewan’s as he watched her, pride bursting in his chest at this view of her, in her element.