Christ, he’d wanted her. He’d wanted to toss her over his shoulder and take her to the nearest private corner to give her the opportunity to give him the fight she promised.
But when he’d found her, halfway up a wall, headed for the rooftops, returning to dominion over this world he’d loved so well, he had realized that he didn’t want her in private. He wanted her in public.
He wanted to be the one who knew her secrets and her stories. He wanted her to show him all the ways they could take to the rooftops together.
He’d hated that there’d been another boy, teaching her to climb. Hated that he’d never realized she would need to know more than trees to survive. Hated that she’d had to survive—and all because of him.
He wanted to learn her maps—over slate tiles and around smokestacks—and hear every tale she had to tell about the last twenty years. He wanted to make new maps. New tales.
And he wanted the world to see them together.
I don’t know, she’d said, and he’d heard the layers of the confession. Felt them in his soul. Because he did not know, either. The only thing he knew was that he wanted to learn with her. He wanted a future, and all they had was the past.
You betrayed me.
With a grunt, he yanked on the long strip of linen he wrapped around his ribs, pulling it as tight as he could, gritting his teeth against the pain.
“You’ll never get it tight enough on your own.”
He nearly dropped the bandages at the words, the movement sending a screaming pain through him, and he exhaled it harshly as she stepped into the room, closing the door behind her.
Heart pounding, he drank her in, relief and pleasure and no small amount of pride coursing through him. She had come. Would there ever be a time when he wasn’t consumed with thrill at the idea that she had sought him out, of her own will?
And this was her own will.
His, as well.
She wore her uniform—the clothes that made her a monarch. Black trousers and leather boots that threatened always to do him in, encasing her long legs up over the knee like sin. Above the trousers, an ice blue corset, embroidered with gold thread. At her waist, another scarf—her weapon of choice—the foil of the corset, gold with threads of that blue. Over all that, a black coat, perfectly tailored. On another woman he would have thought the coat a disguise—something to hide her from prying eyes and turn her into a gentleman on the street. But Grace did not hide. The coat hung open to reveal the stunning corsetry beneath and the matched lining beyond, the same blue, the pale blue color of a winter’s sky.
Buttoned, the coat would make for perfect stealth, a hood pulled up over her wild red curls, the only evidence that they existed a small errant one, loosed from hiding. He wanted to knock that hood back and let it all fall down around her shoulders, as it had been earlier in the day.
He reveled in the look of her—steel and silk, like the woman herself, even as frustration flared. She’d come to him masked again. It might not be the silken mask she’d worn the night she’d come to the masquerade, but she wore a mask nonetheless, the same one she’d donned earlier, when she’d commanded her Covent Garden army—this one made of strength.
Gone was the woman he’d glimpsed after the bout—the one who’d told the story of learning to scale walls. The one who gave her smiles easily to the bruisers in the muck and the women at the wash.
He wanted those smiles, easy, for himself.
He wanted her. Honest.
But he would take this over nothing.
“How did you get in?”
She gave him a little smile. “I’m a hardened street criminal, Duke. You think a thing like Grosvenor Square would prevent me from a bit of breaking and entering?”
“It’s not the address I would have expected to stop you,” he said. “I am, however, surprised to know that my overbearing butler didn’t meet you on the stairs.”
She crossed the room to a small table where a collection of glasses sat with a heavy ship’s decanter, and Ewan could not look away from her swagger, her coat swinging around her long legs. She pulled the stopper from the decanter and sniffed at the brandy inside. Her brows rose. “French. Very expensive.”
“I understand there are ways to get it more cheaply,” he said as she poured herself a glass.
She did not miss the reference to the Bareknuckle Bastards’ less than legal enterprise. “I haven’t any idea what you’re talking about.” She drank and then said, “There wasn’t a single butler in nightcap, armed with antique dueling pistol, to be found. Disappointing, really.”
“Mmmm. What’s the point in having an overbearing butler if not to ward off interlopers?”
Her eyes glittered in the candlelight. “Aren’t all ducal butlers overbearing? How else can one be sure there is always a starched shirt and a pressed cravat, ready for donning?”
“I don’t know. I don’t spend much time on ducal estates.” It wasn’t precisely true. He spent most of his time on the Burghsey estate, but he lived in a small cottage he’d built on the western edge of the land. It ran on a skeleton staff, just enough to keep the place from falling down around him.
“Hmm,” she said. “Well, either way, your butler failed in buttling when I arrived, to be sure.”
“I shall bring up your concerns with him at his next performance review. Did not stop strange woman from entering house: demerit.”
Those beautiful lips curled again. “I’m not sure it counts as a demerit. Truthfully, I’m very good at getting where I need to be without being noticed.”
He didn’t know how that was possible, considering how intensely he noticed her. How he knew the shift in a room when she was present. Twenty years, and he still noticed her like she was cannon fire.
“Would you like me to leave?” she asked.
“No.” He never wanted her to leave.
She poured a second glass and closed the distance between them, offering it to him.
He took it. “And so?”
She tilted her head in question.
“Have you decided?” he asked, hearing the frustration in his tone, the reveal that he was losing patience.
She took a step closer and he sucked in a breath, imagining what would happen if he caught her in his arms and carried her to the bed, and stripped her bare—and made love to her as he’d wanted to every night since he’d been old enough for such thoughts.
Would he be able to strip her of her mask then?
And what would she do?
She would run.
He knew it, because she’d run from him for years—every time he’d ever come close to finding her in the twenty years since they’d parted. She’d run from him, and he deserved it for the way he’d betrayed her, and broken her heart, and broken his own in the balance.
She would run, and he would do anything to stop that, so he remained statue-still, and let her come to him.
She stopped a heartbeat from him, and she pulled a sack off her shoulder—he hadn’t noticed it when she’d entered. He could not see her eyes, the hood low enough that it cast the upper half of her face in shadow. All he could see were her full, pink lips when she said, “They did a fair bit of damage to you.”
He did not hesitate. “I did plenty of my own.”
She smiled in that way that made her look like she had a secret—was it possible she was proud? Christ, he wanted her proud. He wanted her to have watched him fight and admired his skill. He knew it made him an animal, but he didn’t care. He wanted her to know he could destroy worlds at her bidding, if only she’d ask for it.
Whatever she needed.
“Why haven’t you called a doctor?” she asked, softly.
He couldn’t stop the little thread of offense he took at the question. “I don’t need a doctor.”
She lifted her chin, and the candlelight caught her face, washing it gold as she met his eyes with disbelieving amusement. “Men and their ridiculous rules regarding medical care. You go on and on about ho
w you’re perfectly fine, despite the bruises blooming all over you—it looks like Patrick O’Malley broke your nose.”
“Are you here to nursemaid me?”
She did not reply, instead reaching up to lower her hood, letting her mass of red curls loose like an inferno. Christ, he loved her hair. It was a force of nature, threatening always to lay him low. Like the woman herself.
The darkness tightened around them. “Why are you here?”
She stilled.
He hated that stillness and the way it settled her mask once more. He’d miscalculated in the Garden. He’d lured her into showing him something of her truth, and then he’d left, and he might never get it back.
You can never have her back.
He couldn’t have the girl he’d known, but was he never to have even a glimpse of the woman she’d become? Was she to hide from him forever?
“Tell me the truth,” he whispered, and he couldn’t hide the urgency in the tone.
She stayed quiet, instead lifting her hand to his face, her fingers gentle as they traced the swollen skin beneath his eye, the yellowed bruising on his jaw. The line of his nose, somehow miraculously unbroken despite her suggestion.
“If I said I was here to mend you?”
He released a breath at the words, somehow filling him with more pleasure than her touch. “I would say you have a fair bit of work on your hands.”
He did not tell her he was not certain mending was an option.
She hovered on the edge of movement, as though she knew it.
Stay. Please.
It took everything he had to wait her out.
Choose this.
His heart threatened to beat from his chest until finally . . . finally, she reached for the linen strip he’d used in his attempt to bind his own ribs. He relinquished it without hesitation, standing so still he barely breathed as she circled him, investigating him, her touch soft and strong, sliding over his ribs and testing the damage that had been done.
He sucked in a breath as she traced over the muscles of his abdomen, and she looked up, her rich brown eyes inspecting his for pain. “Too much?”
Never enough.
He shook his head. “Go on.”
“This one could be broken,” she said softly.
“It’s not.”
“How do you know?” she asked.
“We both know I’ve broken them before.” The memory unfolded between them. Ewan had taken a boot to the rib and she’d mended him then, too.
“Whit was always better with his legs,” she whispered.
“And now?”
She smiled at the question, and jealousy flared at her clear adoration of the man Covent Garden called Beast. “Now he’s good with everything. He grew big and brutal. And he doesn’t lose.”
Something filled him at that—the fact that the smallest and weakest of them had become the strongest.
“The summer he grew—we were ten and five, maybe six,” she said, amusement in her words. “It was like witchcraft. We couldn’t keep him in shoes. One week, we were out of money and he put a toe through the front of one, and I had to steal a pair.”
“From where?”
She shrugged. “A cull in a brothel on Charles Street. Greasy git who liked to agree to one price and pay another. The sweaty bastard deserved it.”
“Was he—” He swallowed the rest of the question.
She tilted her head at him. “A customer? No. I was more use to Digger Knight as a fighter than I was as a moll.”
“I wouldn’t judge if he were.” Born in a brothel on Tavistock Row, Ewan knew better than most that women had few enough choices in life for men to decide they owned that one.
“I know you wouldn’t,” she said. And the truth in the words gave him pleasure.
She finished bandaging him, tucking the end of the linen in on itself, her lips flattened into a straight line as she inspected the rest of him—the bruises above the bandages and on his face, and his shoulder, rubbed raw from the ropes he’d used in the yard earlier that day.
The shoulder she’d bared for him earlier, revealing the scar he wished every day he could erase, along with the past that came with it.
But erasing the past would erase her, too.
With a little nod, she bent to retrieve the bag she’d come with. Setting it on a nearby chair, she fished a small ceramic pot from within and opened it, lifting it immediately to her nose. He couldn’t stop his smile as he watched the movement, an echo of the girl she’d been, who was first to smell anything—pleasing or otherwise.
“Is something amusing?”
“You’ve always done that.” She immediately dropped her hand and approached. “What is it?” She extended the pot toward him, and he leaned down to inhale. “Lemon.”
“And bay, and willow bark. It’s healed worse than this.”
“For you?”
“And scores of others.” She dipped her fingers in the salve and reached for him, and he let her, breathing deeply as she anointed him with it, every touch a glimpse of heaven.
“You’ve done this before.”
“Tended wounds?”
“Tended my wounds.” He paused, then, “I thought I dreamed it last year. Your touch.” In the darkness. In that little room where he’d realized she was alive. Where he’d realized he might be, again.
Grace didn’t look up from her work, and he took her rapt attention as a chance to drink her in, the spray of freckles across her nose, her enormous eyes, the scar across one brow, barely noticeable for the years that had passed since he’d wiped the blood from her forehead and the tears from her cheeks. He couldn’t stop himself from reaching up and touching the crooked half circle.
She sucked in a breath and shot him a warning look.
He lowered his hand, and returned to his inspection, taking in the stitching of her coat and the rich sheen of the silk of her corset—which should have scandalized but instead set a body back with its strength.
“Do you ever wear gowns?” he asked, knowing it was a risk.
She hesitated. Then, “I’m familiar with the concept,” she replied, the corner of her mouth twitching, making him want to kiss the spot.
Her fingers traced over his skin, passing from one shoulder, marked with a bruise, to the other, red and angry. She returned to the pot of salve, and when she touched him again, the cool balm soothed more than his shoulder.
“You wore one to my masquerade.”
It was a risk, revealing what he knew, and she stilled, her fingers on his shoulder pausing. He could hear the calculations in her mind—could she convince him it hadn’t been she?
No masks, Grace. Not tonight.
“How long have you known?”
He waited for her to look up at him. “I will always know you.”
“You do not search for a wife.”
He shook his head. “No.”
“The mothers, throwing daughters in your path?”
“Unsuccessful.”
She watched him for a long moment, and then, “The masque was not for Mrs. Duke of Marwick. A woman who liked mossy earth and towering trees. It was for me.”
One and the same.
He was keenly aware of her fingers on his shoulder, stroking over the markings of his past. Of theirs. And as they stroked, he heard his brother’s words.
You broke her heart, Whit had said.
She did not trust him. And all he could do was trust her, instead.
“I heard you liked elaborate parties.”
Her fingers stuttered as she painted the salve over his skin in wide sweeps, around and around, avoiding the place he knew she watched. The scar his father had put in his shoulder the night he’d discovered that Grace was the only thing that mattered to Ewan. "I am not available for the position,” she said, softly.
“I know.” But it didn’t make him want her any less.
“I would die a thousand deaths before I’d let that monster win.”
The old duke, wh
o had only ever cared about the line. He gave a little, humorless laugh at her anger. “And you think I feel otherwise?”
She met his eyes, and he let her see the full force of his anger for his father—that man who had made the continuation of the Marwick line a singular goal. And then, when Ewan had become duke, it had fallen to him to ensure his father never received that which he had deemed so paramount.
Which meant no children for Ewan, ever.
Not even beautiful, red-haired little girls.
Oblivious to his thoughts, Grace spoke again. “You came back despite my telling you to stay away.”
I will always come back.
“But not for a year. Where did you go?”
“I went back.”
To Burghsey, where he’d found an estate in ruin—one he’d left to crumble when he’d inherited and walked away. An estate he’d resurrected as he’d resumed his place there, restoring the lands and attending to the tenants, even as he took his place in Parliament and attended to an end he’d promised her a lifetime earlier.
He’d rebuilt himself, as well, into a new man. A man healthier and stronger and better than the one he’d been; worthier, too, even as he knew that he would never be worthy of the woman she had become—a woman who was strong and brilliant and powerful and so far above him he didn’t deserve to look at her, let alone reach for her.
Nevertheless, he looked. And he reached.
“And why are you back now?” she asked, no longer touching him, and he could hear the edge in her words—anger. Frustration. “Do you think to convince me you regret it?”
“I do regret it. I regret turning my back on my brothers,” he said. “And Grace, there is not a moment I don’t regret turning my back on you.”
Years of practice kept her from revealing that she was moved by the words, but he was watching her intently, his gaze riveted to the pulse point at the base of her neck, and he saw her heart race.
She did look at him then, her beautiful brown eyes wide and glittering in the candlelight. “And so? You thought a masquerade and a Garden brawl would make good on the past?”
Daring and the Duke EPB Page 19
