Daring and the Duke (The Bareknuckle Bastards 3)

“And my safety, most of all,” she said.

“Mmm,” Whit agreed. “And no one was more susceptible to threats against Grace than Ewan.”

Devil’s cane tapped against the roof in an even, pensive rhythm. “Fuck,” he finally whispered, awe in his tone. “He gave you up. Into our keeping. No wonder he was ready to blow up half of London when he thought we’d let you die.”

“He gave up everything,” she said, to herself as much as to them.

The brothers he’d just found.

Her.

I loved you the moment I set eyes on you a lifetime ago, but what that was—it pales in comparison to how I love you now.

“He gave us each other,” she said, watching the rooftops.

For twenty years, she’d traversed this city from up on high, believing that the rooftops were the place she’d stolen from him. Claimed for herself. But they weren’t stolen. They’d been gifted. He’d given her this place.

“All those years, we thought he chose the title over us,” Whit said. “When he actually chose the title for us. It was a sacrifice for us.”

“Not for us,” Devil said. “For Grace.”

He’d come to them for penance weeks ago. Vowed to make amends. When in actual fact, Ewan had been paying penance for twenty years.

“You said he left.” Grace looked to Devil, tears in her eyes. “Where did he go?”

“Northeast.” Toward Essex.

Back to the estate. To that place they all loathed, because it had stolen so much from them. And from him most of all. The answer made her want to scream. Instead, she came to her feet, looking from one of her brothers to the other. “He shouldn’t be there.”

“He’s Duke of Marwick; where else should he be?” Devil asked.

Anywhere else. “He hates the title. Hates the house. It destroyed him,” she said. “That place that was his ruin as much as it was ours.”

More.

She looked at them. “He doesn’t want it.”

“The house?”

“Any of it,” she clarified. “But he hasn’t a choice, has he?”

I want you, he’d said. I want you, and I love you, and it isn’t first love.

He could be happy with her.

They could be happy together.

It seemed at once impossible and like everything she’d ever wanted.

“He wants me,” she said, softly.

“Then why would he go back?” Devil asked.

“Because—” she started, then stopped, hating the end of the sentence. Not wanting to finish it. Because I was afraid to take what I wanted.

Whit spoke. “Because he has nowhere else to go.”

Because she’d pushed him away, again. She’d run from him, again. And this time, he hadn’t deserved it.

Regret coursed through her—regret and something even more powerful.

Need.

She needed him. And there was no shame in it. Only promise. Only hope.

She came to her feet. “He shouldn’t be there,” she said again. “He should be here. With me.”

She didn’t know how it would work. But it would work. If the choice was a lifetime with him or a lifetime without him, there was no choice. Not one worth considering.

She was queen of Covent Garden, and she’d spent a lifetime making the impossible possible.

“I made a mistake. I have to go after him.”

Devil’s gaze snapped to hers. “Don’t say it.”

She did. “I love him.”

“Fuck,” he replied.

“I love him, and I have to save him.”

Whit grunted. “I suppose we won’t be able to kill him now.”

“Pity, that.” Devil heaved a dramatic sigh. “I shall get the carriage.”

Hours later, Ewan entered Burghsey House to face his past.

No one had been inside the manor house in a decade—since Ewan had assumed the dukedom and banned the staff from the main house, knowing that even if everything he intended went to plan, and he did find Grace and convince her to marry him, he would never again live inside these walls that had brought him nothing but pain.

The setting sun streamed through the western windows as he lit a long-forgotten candle and walked the halls of the massive house, along dust-covered, threadbare carpets and around furniture that had faded in a decade without use.

Ten years of dust and disrepair, and still, the house was the same: the massive entryway, rich mahogany and stonework covered in tapestries that had hung since the dawn of the dukedom; the familiar scent, of candlewax and history; the heavy quiet that had settled once Devil and Whit and Grace had left, slowly stripping him of his sanity.

Standing there, inside the house, Ewan was cast back with the force of a scarred fist on a filthy Covent Garden street.

He climbed the stairs, the map of the place a pristine memory. Passing portrait after portrait, the lines of dukes and marquesses and earls and lords whose identities had been drilled into him as a boy. All the venerable men who made up the unimpeachable line of Marwicks.

And Ewan, the next in line.

Little had his father known that Ewan had never wished it.

Little had his father known that Ewan would never give him that line. That there would be no more heirs to the dukedom. Not after Ewan.

Ewan, who had never been a real heir to begin with.

He climbed up to the first floor, then the second, where the sunlight faded into the darkness of twilight, and he crossed from east wing to west.

He did not need the candle in his hand, the map of the house remained etched in his mind, navigable in the pitch black if he wished for it to be, he counted the doors as he made his way down the hallway past the first two.

Three. Four.

Watch the squeaky board.

Five.

Cross the hallway.

Six. Seven.

Eight—his fingers trailed over the door that had once been his—a door Grace had found countless times in the darkness. He pressed his hand to it, resisting the urge to try the handle. To crouch down and look through the keyhole.

He didn’t have to. He remembered every inch of that room. Every floorboard. Every pane of glass in the window. He did not have to revisit it. He was not here for the past, but for the future.

Behind the ninth door on the hall, a narrow staircase, climbing to the third floor, where the ducal chambers sat, triple the size of even the largest of the second floor rooms.

The master’s rooms.

The duke’s.

Ewan took a deep breath, turned the handle, and stepped inside to confront the enemy.

His father’s rooms had been the first to be closed off, the moment the body was cold. He hadn’t been inside them since, and he’d never imagined returning to this place—too afraid that it would be full of the man he loathed.

And perhaps, if he had returned before now, he would have found it such, thick with the memory of the man who had machinated and manipulated and threatened him again and again. The man who had stolen any hope Ewan might have had for happiness when he’d been taken from his mother’s home, and forced to turn his back on the people he loved, to keep them safe.

But everything had changed.

Darkness had fallen outside, and Ewan raised the candle as he crossed the room—past the great bed and the long-empty fireplace with the massive wingback chairs that sat unused—the silence no longer ominous as it had been in this house for so long.