She turned down the nearest alleyway, and then another, then down a long, curving Garden street, past half a dozen children playing skip the stones and a gaggle of women around a metal washtub, gossiping over the last of their laundry in the late afternoon sun.
The women smiled as she passed—the two she recognized lifted hands in greeting—but no one wavered from the conversation. “I ain’t never seen a duke lookin’ like that,” Jenny Richley said. The appreciation in the words sent a lick of memory through Grace that she didn’t care for.
“Cor, you ain’t never seen a duke, t’all, Jenny,” came a retort from Alice Neighbors.
Jenny laughed. “Do you think they’re all so handsome?”
No, Grace thought. They weren’t.
They shouldn’t be. They should be old and horse-faced. Soft and with a stink of privilege and a touch of gout. And he wasn’t.
Because he was never meant to be a duke.
She clung to that: the duke’s son who had stolen the dukedom. And he’d done it by leaving her to the wolves. And then he’d kept it by making sure the wolves stayed on the hunt.
Hadn’t he?
Doubt, fresh and unsettling.
Past the women, at the far end of the alley, there was a spot to take to the rooftops, footholds built into the side of the building, and Grace headed for it, knowing it was the surest way to lose him.
She wanted to lose him.
Didn’t she?
“I don’t know, but I’d be very happy to ’ave a second look at that one—really be certain he’s as pretty as he seemed.”
Grace reached for a brick protruding from the wall, ready to begin her climb, when the reply came—and not from the women. “I’d be more than happy to give you a second look, ladies.”
“Good God!” one of the women she did not know squeaked. “It’s ’im!”
Grace froze, clinging to the wall, the tails of her coat billowing out behind her, admiration flaring before she could stop it. He’d found her more quickly than she’d expected. She turned her head just enough to see him at the entrance to the alleyway, the blood from the gash on his cheek now dried, his once-white shirt now stained beyond repair, torn at the shoulder, clinging to the taut muscles of his chest.
Not that she noticed.
He raised a brow, noticing her not noticing.
Grace lowered herself to the ground and slowly turned around. “Lookin’ a bit worse for wear if you ask me, Duke.”
The women tittered.
“That much is true—the men in your Rookery know how to throw a punch.” He lifted a hand and touched the bruise blooming beneath his left eye.
“The women, too,” one of them said with a low, throaty laugh.
Ewan smirked at that, but did not look away from Grace. “Aye, I’ve experience with that, as well.”
She lifted her chin. “Seems like you’ve crossed the wrong crew, if you ask me.”
“It takes me time to learn my lesson.”
The women assembled laughed at the self-deprecation. “Well, he ain’t done nuffin’ to cross me,” Alice said as she reached for a nearby basket. “Are you hungry, my lord? Would you like cake?”
“He doesn’t want cake,” Grace said.
“Nonsense. Of course I want cake,” he said, approaching the women. The words were barely made before a tea cloth was extracted from the basket and unwrapped, a treat passed in his direction.
With a thank-you, he turned and fetched a nearby crate, flipping it upside down. She saw the tiny wince as he hefted the box with one hand. Barely there.
He was in pain.
She ignored her response to the realization, instead gritting her teeth as he joined the circle of women around the tub as though he’d spent every day of his life marauding through Covent Garden, availing himself of proffered cakes.
She crossed her arms and leaned back against the wall, watching as he accepted the cake and took an enormous bite, nothing polite or mannered about it.
“Now that’s a man,” Alice said with pride.
“Aye,” Jenny replied. “I would’ve thought dukes would be more concerned wiv crumbs.”
He smiled around his chewing, his jaw working like he was a cow in pasture. Grace ignored how the exaggerated movements underscored the angle of that jaw. The beauty of it. The fact that a body could draw a straight line with it.
She didn’t care. She had a perfectly functional ruler in her office.
He swallowed. “I don’t see how anyone could worry about crumbs with such a delicious bite in hand.” He dipped his head and gave the full force of his smile to Alice, who flushed under the brilliance of it. Not that Grace could blame her. She’d flushed beneath the weight of that smile herself countless times. Jested and danced for it.
Spent ages trying to remember the exact curve of it. The precise way his eyes warmed with it. The way it felt against her skin.
She inhaled, and he turned to look at her. Alice’s attention lingered on him, as she said, “It’s nuffin’, really. Just my mum’s scones. Another?”
He rubbed his hands together like an excited boy. “You know, I believe I will, thank you.”
Alice looked over at Grace. “And you, Dahlia? Will you ’ave one?”
She looked behind her, to the wall she should scale. To the rooftops that would lead her to 72 Shelton, far from this place and this man and whatever this new trap he laid was.
But before Grace could offer Alice a polite refusal, before she could head for the wall—she looked to him first. And she saw the dare in his eyes, clear as day.
Why shouldn’t she accept the treat? This was her place as well as his. More than his. And that made the scones more hers than his, too.
She approached, and Jenny moved to one side of the low block upon which she was perched, making room for Grace as she selected a scone and sat down across from him, making sure the washtub was between them, as though a metal drum of tepid, dirty water would protect her.
Not that she needed protection.
She didn’t. Not even when the man who sat across from her was nothing of what she expected—he was neither the boy she’d loved for too long, nor the madman she’d feared for longer, nor the lover she’d given herself over to some evenings earlier . . . for not long enough.
But it didn’t matter that she didn’t recognize him. Grace was an expert at disguises, and she knew without question that the man before her was ephemera. He remained the Duke of Marwick, and didn’t Grace make a living giving aristocrats a chance at playing pretend?
So this duke had chosen a Covent Garden fighter.
So he had the fists to back it up, and the heroic smile to win ladies as well as bouts.
It didn’t make it true. It made it fantasy. Not even his eyes, on hers, glowing like amber, could change that.
“Your shirt is covered in blood,” she said.
He licked crumbs from the corner of his mouth and she worked not to look. “Badge of honor.”
“That wound on your face won’t be when it goes bad. It’s time for you to head back to Grosvenor Square and send for your toff surgeon to come ’round and mend you.”
“If ye need help mendin’, I’ve some balm for ye, Duke,” Alice said.
“Oho!” another crowed. “Careful! Alice ain’t usually so generous!”
Alice laughed. “Any excuse to get a closer look!”
Grace expected Ewan to recoil from the bawdy jokes—the Garden was too harsh and too changeable for anyone to have time or inclination for the delicate sensibilities of the aristocracy. But instead, he grinned, the look sheepish and young. She ignored the way her stomach flipped with recognition of the boy she could glimpse in that look.
She didn’t want to recognize that boy.
Didn’t want to remember that there had been a time when she’d loved him.
When he loved her, and he’d held her in his arms and whispered about this place—his place—the place where they would one day reign together . . . unti
l he’d changed his mind and decided to turn his back on it.
“Thank you for the offer, Miss Alice”—Grace resisted the urge to roll her eyes at the way the women fawned over the use of the polite title—“but I’ve other plans than mending right now. After all”—he rolled his shoulders back all long and lazy—“Dahlia promised me a fight.”
Their audience turned in unison, to where she sat. Four separate sets of eyes going wide. Grace bit back a curse—there was no way this interaction wouldn’t get back to her brothers.
“You’re done with cake,” she said.
His eyes went wide. “Am I?”
“You are,” she said. “You’ve interrupted these women’s work. And they’ve lives that extend far beyond this place and you.”
“Nah, miss,” Alice protested. “The two of you are more excitement than we’ve seen in ages.”
“Truth. My girls won’t ever believe a duke came and sat with me while I did the wash,” Jenny said, shaking her head and leaning over to collect more of her wash from the basket at her feet. Tossing the grey linen waistcoat into the tub, she bent to fish a rock from the bottom and used it to rub the dirt from the clothing.
“Would they be more likely to believe it if you told them I helped?” Ewan looked down at the basket between them and lifted another clump of fabric from within, shaking it out to reveal a large billowing shirt before he plunged his own hands into the tub and came up with a rock of his own.
Grace’s eyes went wide.
The women around the tub froze, and truly, it felt like the whole Garden did—the children in the street, the clock at the market hall.
“Your Grace.” Jenny found her voice first, and it was full of shock. “You can’t.”
He looked to her. “I can, in fact. I wasn’t always a duke.”
He was mad. Grace’s eyes grew wider at the words—a revelation and a confession and a threat to everything he held dear. She couldn’t stop herself. “You were an earl before that.”
He met her gaze and she heard his words as though he’d spoken them aloud. I didn’t mean that.
She raised a brow. “Earls don’t do the wash, either, Your Grace.”
“I do,” he said, simply, turning back to his work, rubbing the stains on the shirt with his rock as the entire world gaped at him.
Finally, Jenny spoke again. “Please, Your Grace. Don’t. It’s terribly . . .” She trailed off and looked to Grace as if to say, Help, please?
She moved to stand. To call him off. But instead, he said, “Do you always travel by rooftop?”
She stiffened instantly at the question. She did not answer.
“Since she was a girl,” Alice replied instead of her, with a deep, rich laugh. “My boy was the one who taught her to climb.”
“She needed to learn, did she?”
She hadn’t needed to learn.
Ewan tilted his head at that, his eyes on Grace as he continued to work the stone over the fabric he washed in quick, practiced movements, like he’d done it before.
And he had. He’d done it here. In an alley much like this. After all, he’d been a Covent Garden boy long before he’d been an Eton man.
Though the muscles of his arms did not seem very Etonian to Grace.
Thankfully, he interrupted her thoughts before she could linger on them. “Tell me about the boy who taught you to climb.”
You taught me to climb. She couldn’t count the number of times they’d sat in the treetops together.
But she wasn’t about to say that, and so, instead, she said, “Asriel,” refusing to look at him. She collected a pair of trousers from Alice’s basket and dunked them in the basin. She smiled at the older woman as she grabbed a broad brush from the water and began to scrub. “He showed us all the footholds in the Garden.”
Alice laughed. “That child stopped my heart weekly, with the way he climbed.”
“Like a cat,” Grace said. How long had it been since she’d thought of that? “How is he, Alice?”
The black woman smiled, and Grace recognized a mother’s content. “Oh, he’s very well. Very well. Still with that casino over on St. James’s, but he finds his way home for supper now and then.” Asriel had been one of the few to leave the Garden for work, finding it as security detail at the Fallen Angel, one of the most desirable men’s clubs in London.
“You tell him Dahlia sends her gratitude for those long-ago lessons.”
Alice nodded. “I will.”
She looked to Ewan, not liking the way he watched her. Or, perhaps, liking it too much. “Don’t. Don’t look at me like that.”
His brows rose. “Like what?”
“Like you like me,” she said, returning her attention to her work.
“I’ve always liked you,” he said, simply, and she couldn’t help but peek up at him, finding his bruised and bloody face open and unsettling.
They weren’t supposed to like each other.
Her eyes flickered across the circle to rest on Ewan. “And you, milord—who taught you your skill?”
One side of his mouth kicked up. “I don’t expect you’re referring to laundry.”
All the women laughed, and Jenny crowed, “I wouldn’t mind hearing that story, too!”
“My mother taught me,” he said, simply.
She couldn’t keep herself from looking at him at that, knowing that there was nothing simple about it. His mother, once mistress to one of the most venerated dukes in Britain, then cast off, with child, here.
“Your mam!” Alice said, eyes going wide. “A duchess, doin’ the wash?”
“Not just the wash,” he said, deftly manipulating the conversation. “What would you say if I told you she taught me to throw a punch, too?”
“Cor!” the third woman said. “I’d say she sounded like a proper Garden duchess!”
“She was that,” he said with a smile, and everyone laughed. Everyone except Grace, who couldn’t stop watching him. And when he looked at her, she saw everything he was not saying, and hated it.
But then he said the rest. “Maybe I ought to find myself another Garden duchess.”
The laughter stopped immediately, silence opening up in the washing circle like a secret. Grace’s chest tightened with something close to panic.
It was panic, wasn’t it?
Whatever it was, this ended now.
Grace set the wet trousers she’d washed on the pile of clean laundry, cleared her throat, and stood. “That’s enough.”
He looked up. “Is it? Why?”
She studied him for a long moment. Did he really not know?
Perhaps he was the madman he’d once been. But he wasn’t dangerous.
Wrong. Like this, covered in blood and doing the wash, he was more dangerous than he’d ever been.
“Because you don’t belong here, Marwick.”
He flinched at the words before he stood, moving with a hint of stiffness that he tried to hide, but she saw anyway. When her eyes met his, something flashed there, and she recognized it from their youth. Defiance.
He knew the score—knew that if he showed weakness here, the Garden would eat him for supper. He’d been weaned on that lesson, in this very place. He did belong here, he would argue if given the chance. Had he not been born here? Had he not learned the maze of streets to the east of Drury Lane before the rest of them had even known Drury Lane existed?
But he’d left it. And she’d come and taken it.
And now it was hers and she understood it—and the pride of the people who lived there—better than he ever would. And he made them all feel like fools when he brought his fine cloth and his pristine speech and his manicured hands here.
And Grace, most of all.
“You’re awful deep in the Garden to be headed for Mayfair, Duke,” she said, tilting her chin to the west. “Follow the sun and find yourself home, before you meet a dangerous someone on the streets.”
She forced herself to turn away, to head back to the wall, to climb to the ro
oftops and get back to work. She’d be damned if she’d watch him leave.
“I am safe on these streets now, aren’t I, Dahlia?” he called out, and she couldn’t help it. She turned back, the name on his lips, where it didn’t belong.
He wasn’t leaving. He was coming for her, slow and easy, as though his thigh wasn’t aching and his shoulder wasn’t aflame and bruises weren’t blooming all over his smug face—how was it possible it was still so handsome? No one should be handsome as they turned black and blue.
“Haven’t you just claimed my protection your own?”
She came off the wall to her full height as he neared. “I wouldn’t say protection, no.”
“No? I heard it quite clearly,” he said, his voice lowering so it went liquid and dark, but not quiet enough to exclude their audience. “I heard you say I was yours.”
She ignored the way the words curled through her, narrowing her gaze as the women watching vibrated with excitement. He was performing, and she didn’t like it. “The blows to the head addled your brain then, because I said nothing of the sort.”
“No?”
“No. I said your fight was mine.”
“And if I told you that I was all fight?”
A little sigh came from beyond, and Grace ignored it. Ignored, too, the way the words wanted her sigh, as well. “I would tell you that you’ve been a toff too long for that to be true.”
He watched her for a long moment. “And what if being a toff has made me a fighter? What if it has filled me with anger and venom and made me into the kind of bruiser you would have?”
She stilled.
“What if I’m all fight?” he whispered. “What if that’s all I have to give?”
The sun was low now, nearly over the rooftops, casting golden light through the alley, turning his golden hair, dusted with soot and mud from the Rookery, to the same color as his eyes, burning into hers. Those eyes that she knew as well as her own. Better.
The ones that haunted her in her dreams—the only place she could allow herself to remember them.
He lowered his voice. “What if you cannot claim my fight without claiming me?”
She couldn’t breathe for the images the words wrought. For the memories that came with them.
Daring and the Duke EPB Page 17
