Daring and the Duke (The Bareknuckle Bastards #3)(2)

He let out a little surprised laugh. “A riot of foul language. You like that bit.”

“I didn’t even know cursing existed before you three.” Boys who came into her life like a riot themselves, rough and tumble and foul-mouthed and wonderful.

“Before Devil, you mean.”

Devil, christened Devon—one of his two half brothers—raised in a boys’ orphanage and with the mouth to prove it. “He’s proved very useful.”

“Yes. The cursing. Especially on the docks. No one swears like a sailor.”

“Tell me the best one you’ve ever heard.”

He cut her a sly look. “No.”

She’d ask Devil later. “Tell me about the rain.”

“It’s London. It rains all the time.”

She nudged him with her shoulder. “Tell me the good bit.”

He smiled, and she matched it, loving the way he humored her. “The rain turns the stones on the street slick and shiny.”

“And at night, it turns them gold, because of the lights from the taverns,” she filled in.

“Not just the taverns. The theaters on Drury Lane. The lamps that hang outside the bawdy houses.” Bawdy houses where his mother had landed after the duke had refused to keep her when she’d chosen to have his son. Where that son had been born.

“To keep the dark at bay,” she said softly.

“The dark ain’t so bad,” he said. “It’s just that the people in it haven’t a choice but to fight for what they need.”

“And do they get it? What they need?”

“No. They don’t get what they need, and not what they deserve, neither.” He paused, then whispered to the canopy, like it really was magic. “But we’re going to change all that.”

She didn’t miss the we. Not just him. All of them. A foursome that had made a pact when the boys had been brought here for this mad competition—whoever won would keep them all safe. And then they’d escape this place that had imprisoned them all in a battle of wits and weapons that would give his father what the older man wanted: an heir worthy of a dukedom.

“Once you’re duke,” she said, softly.

He turned to look at her. “Once one of us is duke.”

She shook her head, meeting his glittering amber gaze, so like his brothers’. So like his father’s. “You’re going to win.”

He watched her for a long moment and said, “How do you know?”

She pressed her lips together. “I just know.” The old duke’s machinations grew more challenging by the day. Devil was like his name, too much fire and fury. And Whit—he was too small. Too kind.

“And if I don’t want it?”

A preposterous idea. “Of course you want it.”

“It should be yours.”

She couldn’t help the little, wild laugh. “Girls don’t get to be dukes.”

“And here you are, an heir, nonetheless.”

But she wasn’t. Not really. She was the product of her mother’s extramarital affair, a gamble designed to deliver a bastard heir to a monstrous husband, forever tainting his precious familial line—the only thing he’d ever cared for. But instead of a boy, the duchess had produced a girl, and so she was not heir. She was a placeholder. A bookmark in an ancient copy of Burke’s Peerage. And they all knew it.

She ignored the words and said, “It doesn’t matter.”

And it didn’t. Ewan would win. He would become duke. And it would change everything.

He watched her for a long moment. “When I am duke, then.” The words were a whisper, as though if he spoke them in truth, he’d curse them all. “When I am duke, I shall keep us all safe. Us and all of the Garden. I shall take his money. His power. His name. And I shall walk away and never look back.” The words circled around them, reverberating off the trees for a long moment before he corrected himself. “Not his name,” he whispered. “Yours.”

Robert Matthew Carrick, Earl Sumner, heir to the Dukedom of Marwick.

She ignored the thread of emotion winding through her and lightened her tone. “You might as well have the name. It’s proper new. I’ve never used it.” She might have been baptized the heir, but she didn’t have access to the name.

Over the years, when she’d been anything at all, she’d been girl, the girl, or young lady. Once, for a heartbeat when she was eight, there was a housemaid who called her luv, and she’d rather enjoyed that. But the maid had left after a few months, and the girl had been back to being nobody.

Until they’d arrived—a trio of boys who saw her—and this one, who seemed not only to see her, but also to understand her. And they called her a hundred things, Run for the way she tore across the fields, and Red for the flame in her hair, and Riot for the way she fumed at their father. And she answered to all of them, knowing that none was her name, but not caring so much once they’d arrived. Because maybe they were enough.

Because to them, she was not nobody.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. He meant it.

To him, she was somebody.

They stayed that way for a heartbeat, gazes locked, truth like a blanket around them, until he cleared his throat and looked away, breaking the connection and rolling onto his back, returning his attention to the trees above, and saying, “Anyway, my mum used to say she loved the rain, because it was the only time she ever saw jewels in Covent Garden.”