Daring and the Duke (The Bareknuckle Bastards #3)(54)

“Dead dukes tend to attract attention, and I don’t like the Crown in my business.”

“No place for it here,” he said. “The Garden already has its queen.”

He heard the echo of the night earlier in the week, when she’d come to him masked and free of their past.

You are a queen. Tonight, I am your throne.

She heard it, too. He saw her breath catch for a moment. Watched her pupils dilate a touch—just enough to reveal the truth. She heard it, and she remembered it. And she wanted it again.

She’d come for him.

As though she could sense his arrogant pleasure, her lips flattened into a thin line. “I told you not to come back.”

She was angry, but anger was not indifference.

Anger was like passion.

She straightened and stepped away from him, leaving their intimacy and returning to her subjects. She lifted her voice to the assembled masses. “I think we’ve doled out enough Rookery medicine this afternoon, lads.” She looked to the brute who’d started the fight. “Your kind ain’t for dukes, Patrick O’Malley. Careful next time—I may not be here to save you from the hangman.”

“Aye, Dahlia.” The Irishman gave her a sheepish smile that made Ewan want to set him into the ground for the familiarity of it.

Until that very moment, it hadn’t occurred to him that she might have a lover. That one of these men, born of this place and built by it, might be hers.

He sucked in a breath at the thought. It was impossible. Not a week earlier, she’d come apart in his arms. Against his mouth, her hands in his hair and her cries in the air between them. She’d chosen him that night.

Tonight, only, she’d whispered.

One night. That’s what she’d promised him. Fantasy for one night.

No. He resisted the thought. One night was not enough. Would never be.

Mine.

While he was planning the bruiser’s demise, she turned away, leaving him, her leather-encased legs devouring the yard. Frustration flared at the idea that this might be all there was.

“And you, Dahlia?” he called out, using the name this place had given her. “What of you? Is your kind for dukes?”

A ripple of surprise tore through the crowd at the bald question. She froze. Turned back. He had her.

“I’ll ’ave ’im if you won’t!” a woman shouted off to his left.

For a moment, she was still as stone. But he saw the anger flash in her eyes just before she turned to address her subjects. When she spoke, her words ricocheted off the buildings, ensuring that everyone assembled heard her. “This toff wants to come to scratch, and Lord knows we’re all itching to give him the fight he’s asking for. But he ain’t for you.”

Anger flared, and he took a step toward her, the movement sending a sharp pain up his side, licking through his shoulder like fire.

She looked up to the rooftops, to where he knew his brothers watched. She repeated herself. “He ain’t for you.”

What was she doing?

And then she looked at him, something in her eyes that he wasn’t expecting. She held his gaze for a long moment, and he would have given anything—paid anything—done anything—to know what she was thinking.

“He’ll get the fight he wants,” she said, her voice a clarion call. “But hear me now—this fight is mine.” The words thrummed through him as she turned to the Garden. “Understood, lads?”

Around the yard, a chorus of grunted agreement.

She met his eyes.

“He’ll get it from me.”

His whole body drew tight at the words and the underlying promise in them. That they weren’t done with each other. That she wasn’t through.

That she’d come for him.

And then she turned away, and a thrill of pleasure rioted through him even as she disappeared into the crowd.

She’d come for him, and now it was time for him to go to her.





Chapter Fifteen


Grace left, knowing what she had wrought.

Knowing—even as she slipped from the yard and its crush of people, even as she increased her pace, half wanting to lose him, half wanting him to follow—that he would follow. She moved more quickly, eager to get into the web of labyrinthine streets, away from him and the way he made her feel. Away from the fact that he made her feel, at all.

She turned down the nearest alleyway, and then another, then down a long, curving Garden street, past half a dozen children playing skip the stones and a gaggle of women around a metal washtub, gossiping over the last of their laundry in the late afternoon sun.

The women smiled as she passed—the two she recognized lifted hands in greeting—but no one wavered from the conversation. “I ain’t never seen a duke lookin’ like that,” Jenny Richley said. The appreciation in the words sent a lick of memory through Grace that she didn’t care for.

“Cor, you ain’t never seen a duke, t’all, Jenny,” came a retort from Alice Neighbors.

Jenny laughed. “Do you think they’re all so handsome?”

No, Grace thought. They weren’t.

They shouldn’t be. They should be old and horse-faced. Soft and with a stink of privilege and a touch of gout. And he wasn’t.

Because he was never meant to be a duke.