Daring and the Duke (The Bareknuckle Bastards #3)(13)

Whatever physical blow came would be nothing compared to the mental torture.

What if he’d lost her, just as he’d found her?

The thought echoed through him like a scream. He squirmed, the sack over his head suddenly suffocating, the bindings at his wrists now too tight as he fought and twisted and writhed to no avail. “Tell me where she is!”

The command hung heavy in the silent room, and for a heartbeat, there was no movement, the entire space so still that he wondered if he’d been left alone once more. If he’d imagined the entire thing. If he’d imagined her.

Please, let her be alive. Let me see her.

Just once.

Like that, the sack over his head was gone. And his wild prayer was answered.

He sat back on his heels, his jaw slackened like he’d just taken a blow.

For twenty years, he’d dreamed of her, the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. He’d imagined how she might have aged, how she might have grown and changed, how she would have gone from girl to woman. And still, he was not prepared for it.

Yes, twenty years had changed her. But Grace had not gone from girl to woman; she had gone from girl to goddess.

There were little hints of her youth, only visible to someone who’d known her then. Who’d loved her then. The bright orange curls of her childhood had darkened to copper, though they remained thick and wild, tumbling around her face and shoulders like an autumn wind. The crooked scar on one brow was barely noticeable—only there if you knew to look for it. He noticed. He’d been there when she’d earned it, learning to fight in the woods. Ewan had put his fist into Devil’s face for the infraction before wiping her blood away with the sleeve of his shirt.

And though she revealed nothing in the moment as she stared at him, Ewan drank in the fine lines at the corners of her mouth and at the outer edges of her eyes, lines that proved she knew well how to laugh, and had done it often over the last twenty years. Who had made her laugh? Why hadn’t it been he?

There’d been a time when he was the only one who could. There, on his knees, wrists bound, he struggled with a wild urge to do it again.

The thought consumed him as he met her beautiful brown eyes, ringed with black, the same as they had been when they were children, but with none of the openness they’d once had for him. None of the adoration. None of the love.

The fire in those eyes was not love, but loathing.

Still, he drank her in.

She’d always been tall, but she’d grown into her awkward lankiness, nearly six feet of it, towering above him, and with curves that made him ache. She stood in an impossible pool of light—the space somehow cast in golden glow, despite the scarcity of candles in the room. There were others there—he had heard them enter, hadn’t he?—but he could not see them, and he did not try. He wouldn’t waste a moment looking at others when he could look, instead, at her.

She turned away, crossing out of the light, out of sight.

“No!”

She didn’t respond, and Ewan held his breath, waiting for her to come back. When she did, it was with a long strip of linen in her right hand, and another slung over her shoulder. She began to methodically wrap the material about her left knuckles and wrist.

That’s when he understood.

She wore the same trousers from earlier in the evening—black and fitted tight to her legs, long and perfect. The boots over them were made of supple, dark brown leather that hugged her calves, ending a half foot above her knees. They were scuffed at the toes, not enough to look unkempt, but enough to prove that she wore them regularly—and did business in them.

At her waist, two belts. No. One belt and a scarf, scarlet, inlaid with gold thread—the gold thread he’d always promised her when they were children, playing at dreams. She’d bought it herself. Above the belt and the scarf, a white linen shirt, the arms cut short, leaving her bare from her fingers to above her elbows. The shirt was tucked in carefully and tied up the middle, no loose fabric to be found.

No loose fabric, because loose fabric was a liability in a fight.

And as she wrapped her wrist carefully, around and around, like she’d done it a hundred times before—a thousand—Ewan knew a fight was what she had come for.

He didn’t care. Not as long as he was the one to give it to her.

He would give her whatever she wished.

“Grace,” he said, and though he meant it to be lost in the sawdust on the floor between them, the word—her name, his title—carried like gunshot in the room.

She didn’t react. Not a flinch, not even a flicker of recognition in her face. No change in her posture. And something unpleasant whispered through him.

“I hear you tore my door off the wall,” she said; her voice, low and liquid and magnificent.

“I’ve brought London to its knees searching for you,” he replied. “You think a door would keep me away?”

Her brows rose. “And yet here you are, on your knees, so it seems something has kept you from me after all.”

He lifted his chin. “I’m looking at you, love, so I don’t feel kept from you at all.”

A slight narrowing of her gaze was the only indication he’d struck true. She finished wrapping her wrist, tucking the end of the bandage neatly in the palm of her hand before beginning to wrap the second. And only then, only once she’d begun the measured, methodical movement, did she speak.