Ewan sucked in a breath, rage steeling his jaw and straightening his spine. They’d run together, his only comfort in the idea that they would protect each other. That his brothers would protect her.
She met his gaze and raised a dark brow. “I didn’t have to choose. Digger found us soon enough.”
He’d find this Digger, and he would eviscerate him.
She smirked. “And would you believe there was a market for child fighters?” Grace finished wrapping her wrist. She came closer, and he imagined he could scent her, lemon cream and spice. “That was a thing we all knew how to do, didn’t we?”
They had. They’d learned together.
“Digger didn’t give us wraps that first night. They’re not just to protect your knuckles, you know. The padding actually makes the fight longer. It was a kindness—he thought the fights would end faster for us if we fought bare.” She paused, and he watched the memory wash through her, saw her preen beneath it. “The fights did end faster.”
“You won.” The words came out like gravel, as though he hadn’t used his voice in a year. In twenty.
Maybe he hadn’t. He couldn’t remember.
Her eyes flew to his. “Of course I won.” She paused. “I’d learned to fight alongside the best of them. I learned to fight dirty. From the boy who won, even if it meant the worst kind of betrayal.”
Ewan somehow avoided flinching at the words, dripping with disdain. At the memory of what he’d done to win. He met her gaze, straight and honest. “I’m thankful for that.”
She did not reply. Instead, she advanced, and continued her tale. “It didn’t take long for them to give us a name.”
“The Bareknuckle Bastards.” He paused. “I thought it was just them.” Just Devil and Whit, one with a wicked scar down the length of his face—a scar Ewan had put there—and the other with fists that landed like stone, propelled by fury Ewan had sparked on that long-ago night. Just the two boys-turned-men who’d become smugglers. Fighters. Criminals. Kings of Covent Garden.
When, all along, there’d been a queen.
One side of her mouth turned up in a ghost of a smile. “Everyone thinks it’s just them.”
Grace was close enough to touch, and if his hands were untied, he would have touched her. He wouldn’t have been able to stop himself when she was there, tall and towering above him. “We climbed out of the muck and built ourselves a kingdom here in the Garden, this place that had been yours.”
She remembered. “I thought about that as I learned the curve of Wild Street. As I scrambled over the rooftops, out of reach of thugs and Bow Street. As I cut purses on Drury Lane and fought for blood in the moving rings of the Rookery.”
He worked at the bindings again, too well-tied for freedom.
And then freedom was impossible, because she was reaching for him. She was going to touch him, her fingertips stroking down his cheek, leaving fire in their wake. He inhaled sharply as her nails raked over the several days’ growth of beard, tracing over the rough stubble, toward his chin. He stilled, afraid that if he moved, she’d stop.
Don’t stop.
She didn’t, her fingers curling beneath his chin, tilting his face up to her, her own now shadowed by angles and curls. She stared deep into his eyes, her gaze holding him in thrall. “How you look at me,” she said softly, the sound barely there and filled with disbelief.
But she had to believe. Hadn’t he always looked at her this way?
Christ, she was moving in closer, leaning over him, blocking out the light. Becoming the light.
Her eyes saw every inch of him, laying him bare with their investigation. And he couldn’t stop himself as she drew closer and closer, setting his pulse pounding, until the room fell away, and it was nothing but the two of them, and then he fell away, and it was nothing but her. “They hid you from me.”
She shook her head, the movement wrapping him in the scent of her, like a sweet he’d had once and could both remember perfectly and somehow never find again.
“No one hides me,” she said. God, she was close. She was right there, her lips full and perfect, a hairsbreadth from his. “I take care of myself.”
He strained at the bonds, straight as steel. Hard as it. Desperate to close the distance between them. How long had it been since he touched her? How long had he dreamed of it?
A lifetime.
Her eyes were black with desire, on his mouth, and he licked his lower lip, knowing she wanted him like he knew his own breath. She wanted him as much as he wanted her.
Impossible. No one could want anything the way he wanted her.
Take it, he willed.
Please, God. Kiss me.
“I found you,” he said, the words like a prayer.
“No,” she corrected him, softly. “I found you, Ewan.”
His name—the name no one ever used anymore—shattered through him. He couldn’t stop himself from whispering her name in reply.
Her eyes lifted to his again, like a gift.
Yes.
“Take it,” he said. Whatever you need.
Everything you need.
“What do you need, Grace?” he whispered.
She leaned in, and he ached beyond reason.
Two taps, sharp and insistent, from the darkness, instantly recognizable as Devil, his brother by blood.
Hers by something much stronger.
Grace was gone instantly, as though drawn by a string, and the loss of her touch made him wild. Ewan turned toward the sound, a low growl in his throat, like a dog who’d been promised a meal and had it snatched away at the last second.
“He told me you were dead,” he said, turning back to her—keen for her nearness. “But you’re not dead. You’re alive,” he said once. Then again, unable to hide the relief from his voice. The reverence. “You’re alive.”
She narrowed her gaze, unmoved. “You tried to kill him.”
“He told me you were dead!” Did she not understand?
“You nearly killed Beast’s love.”
“I thought they’d let you die!” He’d nearly gone mad with the knowledge of it.
Not nearly.
She shook her head. “That’s not enough of a reason.”
He lifted his chin, a raw laugh pulled from him at the idea that he might not have torn London apart to avenge her death. “You’re right. It wasn’t enough. It was everything.” He met her gaze, warm and brown—a gaze that had aged like the rest of her. Full of knowledge and power. “I would do it again. Untie me.”
She watched him for a long moment in silence. “You know, I thought about you as I walked those cobblestones and learned to love them. As I learned to protect them, as though it had been me born in a Covent Garden drainpipe, and not you.”
“Untie me. Let me—”
Let me hold you.
Let me touch you.
She ignored the words. “I thought about you . . . until I stopped thinking of you.” She let the words wash over him. “Because you were no longer one of us. Were you, Duke?”
Grace wielded the title like a knife, carving deep enough to strike bone, but he did not show it.
Instead, Ewan did the only thing he could think to do. The only thing he could imagine would keep her with him.
The only gift she would take from him.
He leveled her with his most direct gaze and said, “Untie me, and I’ll give you the fight you want.”
Chapter Six
A fight was what she wanted.
She’d stood on the highest floor of this building she owned, in the world over which she reigned—a world that had once been his—looked her brothers in the eyes, and told them that she longed for vengeance.
It was the only thing she longed for, if she was honest. Everything else—everything she had and everything she was, was a means to that end. It was, after all, the only thing that was fully hers. All else—her home, her business, her brothers, the people of the Rookery, they were all shared. But vengeance was hers alone.
From the moment she was born, nothing had been hers. Her name had been stolen. Her future. A mother who loved her. A father she’d never know. And then, as she’d found the good in the world, those things, too. Happiness. Love. Comfort. Security. Every bit of it, gone. Taken from her.
By the only person she’d ever loved, because the idea of a life with her hadn’t been enough. Not when he might have a dukedom.
That had been the promise the boys’ father had made when he’d summoned his sons, half brothers, to his estate in the country. They would compete, like dogs, for a title that did not belong to any of them. A title that would bring with it fortune and power beyond measure—enough to change lives.
At first, the competition had been easy. Dancing and conversation. Geography and Latin. The trappings of aristocracy, with only the duke and an endless line of servants and tutors aware of their presence. And then it had taken a turn for the worse, and the challenges had become less about learning and more about suffering. About what the duke called “mental fortitude.”
The boys had been separated from her then . . . kept in dark rooms. In the cold. In isolation.
And then they’d been forced to fight each other. All for the promise of power. Of fortune. Of future. Of a name that had been hers, at baptism: Robert Matthew Carrick, Earl Sumner. Future Duke of Marwick.
Few had known that the babe in the nursemaid’s arms was a girl—and those who had . . . they were too terrified of the duke to say anything as he broke the laws of God and country.
And it didn’t matter, in the long run, as eventually, there had been a boy who took the name. A boy who had won, even as Grace and Devil and Whit had run before he could complete his final task.
They’d tried to forget, building their family and their empire without him. But they’d none of them found peace—at least, not until Devil and Beast had found love.
But Grace had never had peace.
It would come tonight, however, when she made good on her promise to her brothers, and sent the man on his knees before her into the street with the certainty that he would never again come for them. He’d spent years searching for them—for her—and they’d spent years hiding her from him. It was time for him to understand that what he sought did not exist, and hadn’t for twenty years.
Memory flashed, Devil and Whit shouting as Ewan advanced on her, blade in hand. She hadn’t moved quickly enough. She’d been frozen by the realization that he would actually hurt her. No matter what the monstrous duke had promised him, Ewan had claimed to love her. He’d vowed to protect her. They’d all vowed to protect each other. How many times had the three brothers fought as one? How many plans had the four of them made in the dark of night?
How many promises had the two of them made?
Future. Family. Safety. Love.
None of it had mattered that night. Not once the dukedom was on the line. Not once it was in hand. Ewan had won the day, and with it, power and privilege that rendered the rest of them at best useless and at worst dangerous.
And Grace the most dangerous of them all, because she was the proof that Ewan—now Robert Matthew Carrick, Earl Sumner, Duke of Marwick—was a fraud.
As Grace and Devil and Whit had grown stronger—as they had built names of their own from the soot of the Rookery where they still lived and from which they managed businesses that employed hundreds and made them hundreds of thousands—they’d known they were building more than names. They had been building the power to protect themselves from the inevitable—the arrival of this man, their enemy, whom they’d known would one day come for them—the only other people in the world who knew his secret . . . a secret that would see him hanged for treason.
All the years of preparation ended tonight. Now. At Grace’s hands, as her brothers looked on.
But before she punished him, she’d touched him.
She didn’t know why.
It wasn’t because she’d wanted to.
And the kiss—she hadn’t wanted that, either.
Lie.
She hadn’t wanted to want it.
But there, in the darkness of that underground room, the sounds of the party raging above muffled by sawdust, she hadn’t been able to resist. He had been a handsome boy—taller than most, whipcord lean, with amber eyes that saw everything and a slow, easy smile that could tempt a body to follow him to the ends of the earth. As they’d all been willing to do.
Ewan. The boy king.
There was no smile now. It was gone in the magnificent angles of his face. All three of them—Devil, Beast, and Ewan—carried the marks of their father in their eyes and their jaws, but Devil had grown tall and rakish, and Beast had become a massive bruiser with the face of an angel. Ewan was neither of those things. He had become an aristocrat, all planes and shadows, a long aquiline nose, clefted chin, hollowed cheeks, a noble brow—and his lips, pure temptation.
Grace was the owner and proprietress of 72 Shelton Street, the most discreet, highest-end brothel for ladies in London, and a place that was known to offer a discerning clientele a bevy of men who were each more perfect specimens of masculinity than the next. She considered herself a connoisseur of handsomeness. She traded in it.
And he was the most handsome man she’d ever seen even now. Even a touch too thin for his frame. A touch too hollow in the cheeks. A touch too wild in the eyes.
So, of course she’d been tempted. Just for a moment. A second. A fraction of one. She would have wanted to kiss anyone with such a face. She would have wanted to touch anyone with such a body.
Another lie.
She’d touched him because there would never be another chance to touch the boy she’d once loved. To look into his eyes, and maybe find a glimpse of him, hidden inside the cold, hard duke he’d become.
And perhaps, if she’d seen him there, she would have stopped it. Perhaps. But she hadn’t, and so she’d never know. And when she’d let him go, he’d ended any chance of her knowing.
“Untie me, and I’ll give you the fight you want.”
The words hung in the air between them as she considered his face, all its soft boyishness gone, disappeared into the hard angles of manhood, thieved by time.
He’d always known what she wanted.
And tonight, she wanted a fight. The long linen strips weren’t as comfortable as they usually were, wrapped tightly over her knuckles. They did not feel like second skin, as they had for years, night after night, as Grace had taken to the sawdust-covered floor in makeshift rings in the darkest, dingiest, dirtiest rooms in the Garden.
They scraped, just as they had twenty years earlier, when she’d wrapped her knuckles for the first time. Unfamiliar. Unwanted. She shook out her hand as she walked around him, leaning down to extract a blade from her boot and cut the binds at his wrists.
Once free, he moved, rolling to his feet as though he’d been relaxing on a chaise longue instead of on his knees in the sawdust of the basement ring of a Covent Garden club. He straightened with the ease and skill of a fighter—something that should have surprised her. After all, dukes did not move like fighters. But Grace knew better. Ewan had always moved like a fighter.
He’d always been agility and speed . . . the best fighter among them, able to make a blow look like it would shatter bone and somehow, miraculously, pull the punch so that it landed like a feather. She could see he hadn’t lost his skill. But Grace—she had gained it.
He’d trained where gentlemen trained. Eton and Oxford and Brooks or wherever it was toffs learned to fight with their pretty rules.
Those rules wouldn’t help him in the Garden.
She tracked his movements as he danced backward, out of the light, shaking his arms, bringing the blood back to his fingers.
Grace Condry had been a winning street fighter since she was a child, but it was not strength that brought her victory—girls could rarely compete in that arena—nor was it speed, though God knew she had that. For Grace, it was the ability to see an enemy’s fa
ults, no matter how well hidden. And this duke had faults.
His gait was a touch too long—it would crowd him to the edges of the ring before he knew what had hit him.
He held his broad shoulders too straight—leaving the wide expanse of him open to attack. He should have canted himself, leading with one side, shielding the flat planes of his chest, which wouldn’t be able to take a blow.
And then there was his right leg, with its barely-there drag . . . so slight that one couldn’t even call it a drag. No one would even notice it, the whisper of a limp that would go away eventually, once the gash on his thigh—sustained when he’d blown up half the London dock and her brother’s future bride—fully healed.
It would heal because Grace had stitched him perfectly.
But tonight, it was a liability, and she would not hesitate to take advantage of it. Two decades ago—an hour ago—she had promised herself and her brothers vengeance, and now it was here, in reach.
He turned to the far corner of the room, where Devil and Whit sat in the darkness, invisible. “You let her fight your battles for you?”
“Aye, bruv,” came Devil’s clear reply. “We cast dice for the honor. She’s always been the lucky one.”
Ewan looked to her. “Have you?”
She lifted her chin and rocked back on her heels. “I’m in the ring, am I not?”
A muscle in his jaw twitched as he seemed to consider his next move. Grace waited, trying to ignore the long lines of him, the way his dark blond hair fell over his brow, the way his limbs remained loose even as he faced her, preparing for a fight.
He’d been a natural fighter when they were children. The kind every street rat in London ached to be. The kind every street rat in London ached to beat. Grace included.
She took a deep breath, willing herself calm. How many had she fought before now? And with virtually no losses? Her heartbeat slowed along with time in the room. He approached and she raised her fists, ready for the fight as he closed the gap between them.
Daring and the Duke EPB Page 5