Daring and the Duke (The Bareknuckle Bastards #3)(14)

“It is strange, is it not, that we call it bareknuckle fighting, but we do not fight with bare fists?”

He did not reply.

“Of course, we did fight with bare knuckles. When we came here.” She met his eyes then. “To London.”

The words were a blow, harsher than any she could have given him, with or without the wraps. A reminder of what they’d faced when they came here. He went still beneath them.

“I can still remember the first night,” she said. “We slept in a field just outside the city. It was warm and we were under the stars and we were terrified but I’d never felt such freedom. Such hope.” She met his eyes. “We were free of you.”

Another blow, nearly knocking him back.

“I stitched Devil’s face in that field, with a needle I’d snatched as we left the manor, and thread pulled from my skirts.” She paused. “It didn’t occur to me that I might need unripped skirts to find work.”

He closed his eyes. Christ. They’d been in such danger.

“No matter,” she said, “I learned quickly. After the third day of no kind of work that would care for all three of us—no decent food to be had, and no decent roof over our heads, we learned that we had limited choices. But I—I was a girl—and I had one more readily available to me than Dev and Whit.”

Ewan sucked in a breath, rage steeling his jaw and straightening his spine. They’d run together, his only comfort in the idea that they would protect each other. That his brothers would protect her.

She met his gaze and raised a dark brow. “I didn’t have to choose. Digger found us soon enough.”

He’d find this Digger, and he would eviscerate him.

She smirked. “And would you believe there was a market for child fighters?” Grace finished wrapping her wrist. She came closer, and he imagined he could scent her, lemon cream and spice. “That was a thing we all knew how to do, didn’t we?”

They had. They’d learned together.

“Digger didn’t give us wraps that first night. They’re not just to protect your knuckles, you know. The padding actually makes the fight longer. It was a kindness—he thought the fights would end faster for us if we fought bare.” She paused, and he watched the memory wash through her, saw her preen beneath it. “The fights did end faster.”

“You won.” The words came out like gravel, as though he hadn’t used his voice in a year. In twenty.

Maybe he hadn’t. He couldn’t remember.

Her eyes flew to his. “Of course I won.” She paused. “I’d learned to fight alongside the best of them. I learned to fight dirty. From the boy who won, even if it meant the worst kind of betrayal.”

Ewan somehow avoided flinching at the words, dripping with disdain. At the memory of what he’d done to win. He met her gaze, straight and honest. “I’m thankful for that.”

She did not reply. Instead, she advanced, and continued her tale. “It didn’t take long for them to give us a name.”

“The Bareknuckle Bastards.” He paused. “I thought it was just them.” Just Devil and Whit, one with a wicked scar down the length of his face—a scar Ewan had put there—and the other with fists that landed like stone, propelled by fury Ewan had sparked on that long-ago night. Just the two boys-turned-men who’d become smugglers. Fighters. Criminals. Kings of Covent Garden.

When, all along, there’d been a queen.

One side of her mouth turned up in a ghost of a smile. “Everyone thinks it’s just them.”

Grace was close enough to touch, and if his hands were untied, he would have touched her. He wouldn’t have been able to stop himself when she was there, tall and towering above him. “We climbed out of the muck and built ourselves a kingdom here in the Garden, this place that had been yours.”

She remembered. “I thought about that as I learned the curve of Wild Street. As I scrambled over the rooftops, out of reach of thugs and Bow Street. As I cut purses on Drury Lane and fought for blood in the moving rings of the Rookery.”

He worked at the bindings again, too well-tied for freedom.

And then freedom was impossible, because she was reaching for him. She was going to touch him, her fingertips stroking down his cheek, leaving fire in their wake. He inhaled sharply as her nails raked over the several days’ growth of beard, tracing over the rough stubble, toward his chin. He stilled, afraid that if he moved, she’d stop.

Don’t stop.

She didn’t, her fingers curling beneath his chin, tilting his face up to her, her own now shadowed by angles and curls. She stared deep into his eyes, her gaze holding him in thrall. “How you look at me,” she said softly, the sound barely there and filled with disbelief.

But she had to believe. Hadn’t he always looked at her this way?

Christ, she was moving in closer, leaning over him, blocking out the light. Becoming the light.

Her eyes saw every inch of him, laying him bare with their investigation. And he couldn’t stop himself as she drew closer and closer, setting his pulse pounding, until the room fell away, and it was nothing but the two of them, and then he fell away, and it was nothing but her. “They hid you from me.”

She shook her head, the movement wrapping him in the scent of her, like a sweet he’d had once and could both remember perfectly and somehow never find again.