Daring and the Duke EPB
Page 12
But it wasn’t his name. It was hers.
She’s nothing. She held your place. Now, you must take it.
He should have expected this—his last test—a heartbeat from the future he’d been promised when his father had picked through the muck to the brothel on Tavistock Row where he’d lived with his mother and a dozen other women like her, and made Ewan an offer that no child would refuse. Money, safety, a new chance for his mother, and a life beyond the stink and sweat and brutality of the streets. A title—a dukedom—so impossible a future that it somehow felt like it was in reach.
And then it was in reach, and he’d been such a fool, thinking that he could take everything his sire offered and still keep the rest. Still keep his mother. His brothers.
Love.
He should have known the duke would see everything. Would plan for it. Would make it impossible. Evil rarely came with stupidity.
She cannot live, his father had said, no feeling in his voice. None of them can.
Ewan had balked, immediately planning to run. To save them all.
But the duke was ahead of him. And the die had been cast.
Now.
And when he had protested, the older man had said the only thing that could have moved him to action. You do it, boy. You do it, or I do—and she will suffer the most.
Ewan had believed him. How many times had their father turned sadist? How many switchings from a misstep at a waltz, a fork misused at dinner. The nights threatening to kill them with the cold. The darkness threatening to steal their sanity. The beatings.
The sweets, the gifts, the pets . . . destroyed before their eyes.
And now, his final threat.
And Ewan, the only thing that might stop him.
Whit had been first, alone in the room, knowing, in that way that he always did, what was to come. Ewan had dropped him, and though Whit had tried to remain quiet, his cries had summoned the others, which of course had been their father’s sadistic plan.
Devil had crashed through the door, immediately taking in one brother on the ground and Ewan standing over him, blade in hand.
Not Ewan.
Robert. Sumner. Someday, Marwick himself.
The names shattered through him. He didn’t want them. Not any longer. Not at this price.
But he no longer had a choice.
“Get the fuck away from him, bruv,” Devil had growled, coming for him with the pure hot rage that moved him through the world. Fists and fury. He’d driven Ewan back, across the room, and Ewan had taken the blows. Deserving them. Knowing that they’d make his own less powerful.
Needing to be less powerful.
They’d toppled a small table and upended a chair before Ewan had knocked Devil to the ground, buying enough time for him to focus on his real goal.
“What have you done?” Grace’s voice. Soft. Disbelieving.
She was the most beautiful thing he would ever see.
The best person he’d ever know.
The only thing he’d ever love.
And he had no choice.
Robert Matthew Carrick, Earl Sumner, clasped the knife tighter, the bite of the steel hilt sharp in his palm, knowing he had one chance to make this right. Knowing what he had to do.
She stood, seeing what was to come. “Ewan—no!”
Devil moved at his feet, rolling to his knees.
Save her, Robert thought, willing his brother up.
They would, wouldn’t they?
“Ewan, what the fuck—” Whit, from his place on the floor, trying to straighten. To ignore the pain in his ribs, tears in salty tracks on his face.
“Ewan—” Grace, her hair a cloud of fire around her, her brown eyes enormous and full of confusion . . . confusion and something worse . . . betrayal.
“Don’t do it,” Devil yelled from behind him. “Fucking hell, bruv.”
The foul little bastards deserve what’s coming to them. If he didn’t, his father would.
I’ll never let you all go. His fucking father.
Do it, and I’ll bring your mother here. Ewan knew it was a lie. But he also knew he had only one chance to make sure that this man didn’t destroy everyone he cared for.
Sacrifice. His father meant it for the title.
Sacrifice. Fuck the title.
He tightened his grip on the knife, willing his brothers to be what he knew them to be. Willing them to be more than he ever could be. He met her eyes, across the room. He could read her thoughts—he’d always been able to read her thoughts. She didn’t believe he would do it.
Of course she didn’t.
She knew he loved her.
She shook her head, barely a movement, but he saw it. Saw it, and heard the words they’d whispered to each other night after night: We’ll run. All of us.
But she didn’t know the rest. Didn’t know his father would never let them go together. She didn’t know that their best bet at survival was this—Ewan, staying.
He deserved to stay. He wasn’t like them . . . he’d wanted the title. Which maybe made him as bad as their father.
But they deserved to live.
I’m sorry.
Behind him, Devil was on his feet.
Save her.
He went for her, unable to look away from her eyes—those eyes he dreamed of every night. The eyes he’d loved almost from the first moment he’d seen her. Those eyes that would haunt him, forever.
They went wide with shock. Then understanding. Then fear.
She screamed, and his blade met flesh.
A sharp rap on the door to his study yanked Ewan from the memory, and he nearly dropped the tumbler of whisky that dangled from his hand as he returned to the present.
He stood at the window, staring down into the quiet gardens that, a week earlier, had teemed with revelers. The night sky was clear and the autumn moon was nearly full, revealing the roof of the gazebo behind the secret wall in the distance. The place he’d last seen Grace. The place where she’d left him.
“Come,” he said.
The door opened before the word was fully formed, and he looked over his shoulder at O’Clair, the impeccable butler who came with the London house and appeared never to require sleep or food or time to himself.
“Your Grace,” O’Clair said, with perfect clarity, stepping into the room. The words set Ewan immediately on edge. Christ, he hated that title. “There are . . . gentlemen below.”
The emphasis made it clear that whoever was below had not passed the inspection of the butler, and that was enough for Ewan at the moment. He had no interest in visitors. “It’s the middle of the night. Whoever it is can return at a reasonable hour.”
The butler cleared his throat. “Yes, well, they don’t seem to—”
“We ain’t the kind of men who show face in Mayfair at reasonable hours, Duke,” came a voice from behind O’Clair, whose eyes went wide with a mix of shock and affront that would have amused Ewan if he wasn’t so surprised himself by the new arrivals.
Devil punctuated his words with a kick to the door, sending it swinging back on the hinge and crashing into the wall. He entered the room as Whit took up residence in the doorway behind him, arms crossed over his massive chest, looking every inch the Beast London called him.
No longer runt of the litter.
Ewan narrowed his gaze on his brothers. He appeared to have summoned them with his memory. Bad luck, that.
“Sirs! I must insist—” O’Clair, for his part, was beside himself and still soldiering on. “The duke is not receiving.”
“Oho! Is he not?” Devil tapped O’Clair on the shoulder with the silver handle of his ebony cane, his scar flashing white and wicked down the side of his cheek. “No need to stand on ceremony, good man—the duke’s more than happy to see us.” He didn’t look to Ewan as he said, “Ain’t you, bruv?”
“I wouldn’t use the word happy, no.”
“Too fuckin’ bad,” Beast said from the doorway, the words coming like gravel.
The butler turned wide eyes on him. “Your Grace?”
Tonight, of all nights, he chose to resist orders? “I shan’t need you for the rest of the evening.”
O’Clair didn’t seem convinced, but still, he collected himself. “Of course.” He bowed, shortly, and moved to leave the room, stopping when he reached Beast in the doorway. “I beg your pardon, sir.”
Beast grunted and moved just enough to let him past.
“I’ll thank you not to torment my servants,” Ewan said.
“Beast ain’t good wiv manners.” It was a lie. They were all impeccable at manners. Their father had made sure of it. He’d delighted in playing abusive Pygmalion before he’d found other ways to entertain himself. Beast grunted as Devil rounded the desk and sat. “Was this the old man’s desk?”
“Yes,” Ewan said, moving to pour more whisky. He sensed he was going to need it.
“Good,” Devil said, the word punctuated with the thunk of his great heavy boots, muddy and full of whatever filth he’d brought in from Covent Garden.
Ewan couldn’t blame him. He fucking hated that desk, and everything else in the house that had belonged to their father. But he’d be damned if he’d show as much.
Had Grace sent them? Had she discovered the truth of the night in his gardens, in the gazebo, and decided to send her brothers to finish the job she’d begun a year earlier? Had he miscalculated?
His heart began to pound. No. She wouldn’t send them to do her dirty work. She was not one to turn away from a fight. Certainly not one from him.
Why hadn’t she come to confront him herself?
He willed himself calm and filled his glass in silence. “What then, are you here for another round of Who Shall Kill the Duke?”
Every time he’d faced these two in the last two years, it had ended in battle. Every time he’d faced them in the last twenty years. And he’d always laid them out. But somehow, they were the ones who had won. They had homes and families and a whole world to bring them purpose and pleasure.
And they had Grace.
“It isn’t the worst idea, innit?” Devil said, the sound of the Garden so thick that Ewan knew it was meant to grate when he added, “Come now, bruv, we ain’t monsters.”
It did grate.
He refused to let it show. “Are you not?”
“No,” came the reply from the doorway. “That’s always been your specialty.”
Ewan did not look up, even as Devil whistled his admiration and tapped his walking stick on his filthy boots, ever the showman. “Look at that. You’ve got Beast out here giving soliloquies.”
“What do you want, Devon?”
The name was a calculated risk, one that paid off with the silence that came in reply. Ewan turned to face his brother, who was staring directly at him. The lightness was gone from Devil’s voice when he said, “I remind you that only one of us has a given name that sees him to the gallows.”
Ewan did not respond. They’d had the means to reveal him an imposter duke for decades, and somehow had never used them. He didn’t worry about it now.
Some days, he wished for it.
Devil tapped his walking stick on his boots again. Once, twice in slow succession, his gaze tracking Ewan from head to toe. “You’ve changed.”
He knew what they’d seen in the ring a year ago—when he’d met Grace after an eternity of thinking she was dead. When he’d taken her hits. And when she’d laid him low with the worst of it—the knowledge that he would never be worthy of the girl he’d once loved.
That that girl no longer existed.
These men had watched his destruction.
He knew what they saw now. He was bigger than he’d been when he’d seen them last. Broader and more muscular. His cheeks shaven, less hollow. His body healthier—and his mind, as well.
Not always, but mostly.
He’d prepared for this, the biggest battle of his life.
“Told you,” Beast growled from the doorway.
“Mmm,” said Devil, thoughtfully.
Beast grunted his reply.
Irritation flared. “Did the two of you come here to converse without me, or . . .”
“Have you seen her?”
He stilled at the question, a thrill coursing through him at the words. She had not told them. They did not know that she’d masked herself and come to the ball. They did not know she’d danced in his arms. They did not know about the gardens. About the gazebo.
About the fantasy.
Which meant she’d wanted to keep it to herself.
He sat, hiding his thoughts, spreading his arms wide along the back of the chair that faced Devil on the other side of his desk. He drank, slow and steady. And he lied. “No.”
A grunt, behind him, from Beast.
Devil watched him carefully, that infernal walking stick tapping like water on stone. “I don’t believe you.”
“I haven’t seen her,” he said, ignoring how the words conjured all the ways he had seen her—the way her lips curved in a smile just for him, the way her voice washed over him after so many years, the soft skin of her breasts in his hands, her thighs tightening around him, the taste of her.
“You mean to tell us that you haven’t returned for her?” Devil said.
He didn’t reply. He couldn’t. The words refused to form. Of course he was back for her. He would always come back for her.
Another grunt in the silence.
He shot a look at the door. “Do you have trouble speaking? Too many blows to the head?”
“I think you might refrain from giving him too many ideas about blows to the head, Duke,” Devil said. “He’s itching to have a go at you.”
Ewan narrowed his gaze on Beast. “That didn’t go so well for you last time.”
“You fucking bastard,” Beast said, coming off the doorjamb. “You nearly killed my wife; I won’t pull the punch this time.”
Ewan resisted the flinch that threatened at the words. He hadn’t intentionally harmed the lady—she’d been on the docks when the fool he’d been paying to punish his brothers had destroyed a shipment the Bareknuckle Bastards were moving under cover of darkness. The Bastards ran myriad businesses throughout London, some aboveboard and many below, but their income was largely through smuggled goods, and Ewan had set his sights on that business, knowing that its destruction would in turn destroy them.
“She was not my target.”
“No, we were,” Devil said from behind the desk.
Ewan turned to face him. “I had a score to settle.” They’d told him Grace was dead, and it destroyed him. Turned him wild. Filled him with anger and vengeance. And he’d been willing to do anything to destroy them, in return.
But she was alive.
And with her, his hope.
He looked to Whit. “I quite like Lady Henrietta.” He paused. “Not Lady Henrietta anymore, is she? Mrs. Whittington.” He ignored the twist in his gut. “I am told you’ve a babe on the way. Felicitations.”
“You stay the fuck away from my family.” Whit came into the room, approaching him, but Ewan did not move, knowing he could not flinch.
“I’ve no interest in your family,” he said. It was a lie. He was immensely interested in his brothers’ families—something that had always seemed as likely to him as owning a unicorn or discovering a mermaid in the stream on his country estate.
They’d made a pact when they were children—in the darkness after their father had tormented them. Whoever became duke would let the line end with him, refusing to give their sire the pleasure of heirs.
Ewan had never allowed himself the liberty of imagining children. But now—his brothers—they had children, and he wondered about them. If they had the amber eyes they all shared. If Devil’s daughter had a wide smile like her father. If she was as clever as her mother. If Whit’s child would grow as loyal as its father wa
s.
And what Ewan’s would have been like, if he’d lost the dukedom instead of winning it.
He held all that back, however. “The point is, I came for what you loved because you came for what I loved,” he said. “You told me she was dead.”
“She might as well be for all the chance you have at winning her back.”
Let me see you again. His words from the gazebo.
No. Hers.
He pushed away the memory and the threat that his hope might be misplaced. “She’s not why you’re here.”
“No, she’s not,” Devil conceded. “We’re here because every time you return to London, people die. And that’s not happening this time.”
“Unless it’s you,” Whit added.
Ewan looked to him. “And what, you intend to do it?”
“I’ve been aching to gut a Duke of Marwick for my entire life,” Devil said from behind the desk.
“And yet, I live.” He’d always wondered why they’d never returned to take their revenge. God knew, he’d deserved it.
“Yeah, well, when we make promises, we keep them.”
Ewan did not misunderstand. He’d made them a promise when they were children. That they would run together. That they would protect each other. And he hadn’t been able to keep it. Still, he leveled Devil with a sharp look. “Promises to whom?”
Devil’s brows lifted. “I think you know.”
“Grace.” The word came unexpectedly, on a breath he should have held in. One that revealed too much.
She’d kept him alive.
Whit looked to Devil. “I told you.”
“Mmm,” Devil said. “We ain’t here about that, though.”
About what? What had she said?
He resisted the urge to ask the questions, instead settling on a frustrated, “What then? Get it over with.”
Devil tsked at the tone. “Just because we agreed not to kill you don’t mean we wouldn’t happily rough you up, bruv.”
Frustration flared into something else, and he worked to remain relaxed in the chair, despite itching for a fight. He’d been itching for one since he’d come to London. Since he’d vowed to be a different man.