Daring and the Duke (The Bareknuckle Bastards #3)(17)

Once free, he moved, rolling to his feet as though he’d been relaxing on a chaise longue instead of on his knees in the sawdust of the basement ring of a Covent Garden club. He straightened with the ease and skill of a fighter—something that should have surprised her. After all, dukes did not move like fighters. But Grace knew better. Ewan had always moved like a fighter.

He’d always been agility and speed . . . the best fighter among them, able to make a blow look like it would shatter bone and somehow, miraculously, pull the punch so that it landed like a feather. She could see he hadn’t lost his skill. But Grace—she had gained it.

He’d trained where gentlemen trained. Eton and Oxford and Brooks or wherever it was toffs learned to fight with their pretty rules.

Those rules wouldn’t help him in the Garden.

She tracked his movements as he danced backward, out of the light, shaking his arms, bringing the blood back to his fingers.

Grace Condry had been a winning street fighter since she was a child, but it was not strength that brought her victory—girls could rarely compete in that arena—nor was it speed, though God knew she had that. For Grace, it was the ability to see an enemy’s faults, no matter how well hidden. And this duke had faults.

His gait was a touch too long—it would crowd him to the edges of the ring before he knew what had hit him.

He held his broad shoulders too straight—leaving the wide expanse of him open to attack. He should have canted himself, leading with one side, shielding the flat planes of his chest, which wouldn’t be able to take a blow.

And then there was his right leg, with its barely-there drag . . . so slight that one couldn’t even call it a drag. No one would even notice it, the whisper of a limp that would go away eventually, once the gash on his thigh—sustained when he’d blown up half the London dock and her brother’s future bride—fully healed.

It would heal because Grace had stitched him perfectly.

But tonight, it was a liability, and she would not hesitate to take advantage of it. Two decades ago—an hour ago—she had promised herself and her brothers vengeance, and now it was here, in reach.

He turned to the far corner of the room, where Devil and Whit sat in the darkness, invisible. “You let her fight your battles for you?”

“Aye, bruv,” came Devil’s clear reply. “We cast dice for the honor. She’s always been the lucky one.”

Ewan looked to her. “Have you?”

She lifted her chin and rocked back on her heels. “I’m in the ring, am I not?”

A muscle in his jaw twitched as he seemed to consider his next move. Grace waited, trying to ignore the long lines of him, the way his dark blond hair fell over his brow, the way his limbs remained loose even as he faced her, preparing for a fight.

He’d been a natural fighter when they were children. The kind every street rat in London ached to be. The kind every street rat in London ached to beat. Grace included.

She took a deep breath, willing herself calm. How many had she fought before now? And with virtually no losses? Her heartbeat slowed along with time in the room. He approached and she raised her fists, ready for the fight as he closed the gap between them.

But he didn’t close the gap. Instead, he launched a different kind of attack. One for which she had not been prepared.

He began to disrobe.

She stilled as he lifted his arms, clasping the back collar of the linen shirt he wore, pulling it out of his trousers and over his head without hesitation, and casting it to the side, forgotten in the dust. Her gaze followed the discarded shirt. “A gross mistreatment of the only clothing you have.”

“I shall fetch it later.”

When she looked back at him, it was to discover that he was closer than she would have imagined. She resisted the instinct to take a step back, refusing to reveal her response to the way he filled the ring. This was different from seeing him unconscious in a bed.

If his face had changed over the last two decades, his body had been revolutionized. He was tall—over six feet, and his broad shoulders tapered to narrow hips via a vast expanse of lean, corded muscle lightly dusted with hair. The trail of hair darkened as it descended past his navel, into the waist of his trousers. If the warm color of his skin was any indication, that athleticism had been honed in the outdoors. In the sunlight.

Doing what?

She might have asked if the scar on his left pectoral muscle hadn’t distracted her. Three inches long, a quartet of jagged, pale lines against smooth tan skin. She was transfixed by it—the proof that this man was the boy she’d once known. She’d been there when he’d taken it.

His father had put it there as punishment for protecting her. As a reminder of what was truly valuable. She could remember the bite of her fist tight against her lips, desperate to keep her cries silent as the blade had sliced through his skin. Her cries hadn’t been silent though. He’d shouted them for her as he’d taken the pain.

Days later, the letter M still fresh on his skin, he’d stopped taking it.

And he’d come for her.

The thought returned her to the present. To the fight. Her gaze flickered up over his chest and the cords of his neck, to the line of his jaw, the high angles of his cheekbones—and finally, to his eyes, watching her. Betraying nothing.

And then, the bastard smirked. “Like what you see?”