Daring and the Duke (The Bareknuckle Bastards #3)(62)

Buttoned, the coat would make for perfect stealth, a hood pulled up over her wild red curls, the only evidence that they existed a small errant one, loosed from hiding. He wanted to knock that hood back and let it all fall down around her shoulders, as it had been earlier in the day.

He reveled in the look of her—steel and silk, like the woman herself, even as frustration flared. She’d come to him masked again. It might not be the silken mask she’d worn the night she’d come to the masquerade, but she wore a mask nonetheless, the same one she’d donned earlier, when she’d commanded her Covent Garden army—this one made of strength.

Gone was the woman he’d glimpsed after the bout—the one who’d told the story of learning to scale walls. The one who gave her smiles easily to the bruisers in the muck and the women at the wash.

He wanted those smiles, easy, for himself.

He wanted her. Honest.

But he would take this over nothing.

“How did you get in?”

She gave him a little smile. “I’m a hardened street criminal, Duke. You think a thing like Grosvenor Square would prevent me from a bit of breaking and entering?”

“It’s not the address I would have expected to stop you,” he said. “I am, however, surprised to know that my overbearing butler didn’t meet you on the stairs.”

She crossed the room to a small table where a collection of glasses sat with a heavy ship’s decanter, and Ewan could not look away from her swagger, her coat swinging around her long legs. She pulled the stopper from the decanter and sniffed at the brandy inside. Her brows rose. “French. Very expensive.”

“I understand there are ways to get it more cheaply,” he said as she poured herself a glass.

She did not miss the reference to the Bareknuckle Bastards’ less than legal enterprise. “I haven’t any idea what you’re talking about.” She drank and then said, “There wasn’t a single butler in nightcap, armed with antique dueling pistol, to be found. Disappointing, really.”

“Mmmm. What’s the point in having an overbearing butler if not to ward off interlopers?”

Her eyes glittered in the candlelight. “Aren’t all ducal butlers overbearing? How else can one be sure there is always a starched shirt and a pressed cravat, ready for donning?”

“I don’t know. I don’t spend much time on ducal estates.” It wasn’t precisely true. He spent most of his time on the Burghsey estate, but he lived in a small cottage he’d built on the western edge of the land. It ran on a skeleton staff, just enough to keep the place from falling down around him.

“Hmm,” she said. “Well, either way, your butler failed in buttling when I arrived, to be sure.”

“I shall bring up your concerns with him at his next performance review. Did not stop strange woman from entering house: demerit.”

Those beautiful lips curled again. “I’m not sure it counts as a demerit. Truthfully, I’m very good at getting where I need to be without being noticed.”

He didn’t know how that was possible, considering how intensely he noticed her. How he knew the shift in a room when she was present. Twenty years, and he still noticed her like she was cannon fire.

“Would you like me to leave?” she asked.

“No.” He never wanted her to leave.

She poured a second glass and closed the distance between them, offering it to him.

He took it. “And so?”

She tilted her head in question.

“Have you decided?” he asked, hearing the frustration in his tone, the reveal that he was losing patience.

She took a step closer and he sucked in a breath, imagining what would happen if he caught her in his arms and carried her to the bed, and stripped her bare—and made love to her as he’d wanted to every night since he’d been old enough for such thoughts.

Would he be able to strip her of her mask then?

And what would she do?

She would run.

He knew it, because she’d run from him for years—every time he’d ever come close to finding her in the twenty years since they’d parted. She’d run from him, and he deserved it for the way he’d betrayed her, and broken her heart, and broken his own in the balance.

She would run, and he would do anything to stop that, so he remained statue-still, and let her come to him.

She stopped a heartbeat from him, and she pulled a sack off her shoulder—he hadn’t noticed it when she’d entered. He could not see her eyes, the hood low enough that it cast the upper half of her face in shadow. All he could see were her full, pink lips when she said, “They did a fair bit of damage to you.”

He did not hesitate. “I did plenty of my own.”

She smiled in that way that made her look like she had a secret—was it possible she was proud? Christ, he wanted her proud. He wanted her to have watched him fight and admired his skill. He knew it made him an animal, but he didn’t care. He wanted her to know he could destroy worlds at her bidding, if only she’d ask for it.

Whatever she needed.

“Why haven’t you called a doctor?” she asked, softly.

He couldn’t stop the little thread of offense he took at the question. “I don’t need a doctor.”

She lifted her chin, and the candlelight caught her face, washing it gold as she met his eyes with disbelieving amusement. “Men and their ridiculous rules regarding medical care. You go on and on about how you’re perfectly fine, despite the bruises blooming all over you—it looks like Patrick O’Malley broke your nose.”