Daring and the Duke (The Bareknuckle Bastards #3)(40)

He’d prepared for this, the biggest battle of his life.

“Told you,” Beast growled from the doorway.

“Mmm,” said Devil, thoughtfully.

Beast grunted his reply.

Irritation flared. “Did the two of you come here to converse without me, or . . .”

“Have you seen her?”

He stilled at the question, a thrill coursing through him at the words. She had not told them. They did not know that she’d masked herself and come to the ball. They did not know she’d danced in his arms. They did not know about the gardens. About the gazebo.

About the fantasy.

Which meant she’d wanted to keep it to herself.

He sat, hiding his thoughts, spreading his arms wide along the back of the chair that faced Devil on the other side of his desk. He drank, slow and steady. And he lied. “No.”

A grunt, behind him, from Beast.

Devil watched him carefully, that infernal walking stick tapping like water on stone. “I don’t believe you.”

“I haven’t seen her,” he said, ignoring how the words conjured all the ways he had seen her—the way her lips curved in a smile just for him, the way her voice washed over him after so many years, the soft skin of her breasts in his hands, her thighs tightening around him, the taste of her.

“You mean to tell us that you haven’t returned for her?” Devil said.

He didn’t reply. He couldn’t. The words refused to form. Of course he was back for her. He would always come back for her.

Another grunt in the silence.

He shot a look at the door. “Do you have trouble speaking? Too many blows to the head?”

“I think you might refrain from giving him too many ideas about blows to the head, Duke,” Devil said. “He’s itching to have a go at you.”

Ewan narrowed his gaze on Beast. “That didn’t go so well for you last time.”

“You fucking bastard,” Beast said, coming off the doorjamb. “You nearly killed my wife; I won’t pull the punch this time.”

Ewan resisted the flinch that threatened at the words. He hadn’t intentionally harmed the lady—she’d been on the docks when the fool he’d been paying to punish his brothers had destroyed a shipment the Bareknuckle Bastards were moving under cover of darkness. The Bastards ran myriad businesses throughout London, some aboveboard and many below, but their income was largely through smuggled goods, and Ewan had set his sights on that business, knowing that its destruction would in turn destroy them.

“She was not my target.”

“No, we were,” Devil said from behind the desk.

Ewan turned to face him. “I had a score to settle.” They’d told him Grace was dead, and it destroyed him. Turned him wild. Filled him with anger and vengeance. And he’d been willing to do anything to destroy them, in return.

But she was alive.

And with her, his hope.

He looked to Whit. “I quite like Lady Henrietta.” He paused. “Not Lady Henrietta anymore, is she? Mrs. Whittington.” He ignored the twist in his gut. “I am told you’ve a babe on the way. Felicitations.”

“You stay the fuck away from my family.” Whit came into the room, approaching him, but Ewan did not move, knowing he could not flinch.

“I’ve no interest in your family,” he said. It was a lie. He was immensely interested in his brothers’ families—something that had always seemed as likely to him as owning a unicorn or discovering a mermaid in the stream on his country estate.

They’d made a pact when they were children—in the darkness after their father had tormented them. Whoever became duke would let the line end with him, refusing to give their sire the pleasure of heirs.

Ewan had never allowed himself the liberty of imagining children. But now—his brothers—they had children, and he wondered about them. If they had the amber eyes they all shared. If Devil’s daughter had a wide smile like her father. If she was as clever as her mother. If Whit’s child would grow as loyal as its father was.

And what Ewan’s would have been like, if he’d lost the dukedom instead of winning it.

He held all that back, however. “The point is, I came for what you loved because you came for what I loved,” he said. “You told me she was dead.”

“She might as well be for all the chance you have at winning her back.”

Let me see you again. His words from the gazebo.

No. Hers.

He pushed away the memory and the threat that his hope might be misplaced. “She’s not why you’re here.”

“No, she’s not,” Devil conceded. “We’re here because every time you return to London, people die. And that’s not happening this time.”

“Unless it’s you,” Whit added.

Ewan looked to him. “And what, you intend to do it?”

“I’ve been aching to gut a Duke of Marwick for my entire life,” Devil said from behind the desk.

“And yet, I live.” He’d always wondered why they’d never returned to take their revenge. God knew, he’d deserved it.

“Yeah, well, when we make promises, we keep them.”

Ewan did not misunderstand. He’d made them a promise when they were children. That they would run together. That they would protect each other. And he hadn’t been able to keep it. Still, he leveled Devil with a sharp look. “Promises to whom?”