Daring and the Duke (The Bareknuckle Bastards #3)(102)

Her eyes went wide as he railed. “You think I don’t remember the pact we made every day? No heirs. No future. Nothing that carries on the name.” He stopped, his gaze wild on her face. “You think I don’t remember that pact every time I look at you and think about what a life with you could be, if only I wasn’t the fucking duke? Shall I tell you? What that life would be? What we could have?”

She shook her head, her heart tight in her chest. “No.”

But he was already there. “You think I don’t imagine days in the sun here in the Garden? Hauling on the docks? You think I don’t ache for a life where I return to you, here, in this magnificent place you have built, and sleeping next to you all night, until I can kiss you awake in the morning? You deal in fantasy. Would you like to know how mine goes?”

No.

Yes.

“No.”

He reached for her, capturing her face, tilting her up to him. “My fantasy is this. You, and me, here. With a collection of flame-haired babes.” She closed her eyes. “My brothers. Their children. A family.”

The last was a whisper.

“Christ. I cannot tell you how I long for a family—one built in our home. Yours and mine. The start of something new.”

A fat tear fell at the words, at the ache in them, and the twin ache they set off in her own chest. He was there to catch it, his thumb tracing over her cheek in a wide arc, brushing her tears away. “But I can’t have that. Because of that fucking title.”

Her heart pounded in the face of his anger, decades-old, finally revealed.

“But the one thing I have clung to over the years was this—one day, I would use it as we’d intended. And here is that chance. Tonight, I take that filthy, stolen title, and I claim it to save this place. For you. Tonight, I give you that fight you’ve wanted.”

She stiffened, terrified of what he would say.

“I love you.”

In her years of bareknuckle fighting, Grace had taken countless unexpected blows, but never anything like that one—which pulled the air from her.

And he did not stop.

“Yes, 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. You are perfect—strong and bold and brave and brilliant, and the way I ache to be near you is only made worse when I am near you, because I cannot have you. Because every time I reach for you, you slip through my fingers . . . like fucking fantasy.”

She swallowed, the knot in her throat impossibly tight as he spoke, the words an echo of her own feelings—her own desperate desires, impossible to sate.

“Yes—I asked the duchess to get you to the masque. And I stood at the edge of that ballroom, losing my mind, waiting for you to come in some kind of mad hope. And then you did, and I realized that what I felt before you arrived had not been hope, it had been fear. And when you arrived, you were hope.”

A tear spilled over, down her cheek, and he reached for it instantly, brushing it aside with his thumb. “I would do it all again. I shan’t ever not seek you, Grace. You are my beginning and end. The other half of me. And you always have been.

“Here is my fight,” he repeated, softly. “Marry me.”

She shook her head, sadness coursing through her, tears coming, hot and instant. “The story you told me. Cyrene and Apollo. He wanted her to leave with him. To live with the gods. She wanted to rule a kingdom. What happened?”

He hesitated.

“Tell me,” she said, already knowing the answer.

“He made her Queen of Libya. And the land was lush and beautiful and prosperous, and ruled by a warrior Queen.”

One fat tear fell, tracing down her cheek. “And what of him—did he rule by her side?”

He did not look at her. “Grace.”

“No. What of Apollo?”

He turned his beautiful amber eyes on her finally, and she saw the sadness in them. “He left her.”

She nodded. “Because she didn’t want idyll, married to a god, playing at power. She wanted her own kingdom. Her love. Her life. All of it. Together. Equal. Or none of it at all.”

“Was it worth it?” he asked. “A lifetime alone, when she did not have to be alone?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “But the alternative was not enough.”

He nodded. “And me? What of wanting me?”

Her throat ached at the question, painful and full with the truth of her answer. “I want you with my whole being,” she confessed. “I want you with everything I am.”

He reached for her then, his fingers sliding across her cheek and into her hair, his touch luring her closer, and she came, realizing even as she moved that it would always be like this between them. She would always come for him. Always be drawn to him.

The kiss he gave her was lush and heavy, full of aching desire and all the love that had gone unused in the years they’d been apart, and if it had been an hour earlier, a day earlier, Grace would have reveled in that caress and let it come as a gift, on a wave of future. Of hope.

But in that moment, it was not future.

It was the end.

Tears spilled down her cheeks when Ewan broke the kiss and lifted his head, opening those beautiful amber eyes and looking deep into hers. “And so my father wins.”

The words stole her breath, and fear coursed through her. Fear, and love and a keen desire that she could not deny—not even as she knew what was about to happen. Not even as she knew he was about to give her what she had sworn she wanted, only after she’d realized she was terrified of it.