Daring and the Duke (The Bareknuckle Bastards #3)(63)

“Are you here to nursemaid me?”

She did not reply, instead reaching up to lower her hood, letting her mass of red curls loose like an inferno. Christ, he loved her hair. It was a force of nature, threatening always to lay him low. Like the woman herself.

The darkness tightened around them. “Why are you here?”

She stilled.

He hated that stillness and the way it settled her mask once more. He’d miscalculated in the Garden. He’d lured her into showing him something of her truth, and then he’d left, and he might never get it back.

You can never have her back.

He couldn’t have the girl he’d known, but was he never to have even a glimpse of the woman she’d become? Was she to hide from him forever?

“Tell me the truth,” he whispered, and he couldn’t hide the urgency in the tone.

She stayed quiet, instead lifting her hand to his face, her fingers gentle as they traced the swollen skin beneath his eye, the yellowed bruising on his jaw. The line of his nose, somehow miraculously unbroken despite her suggestion.

“If I said I was here to mend you?”

He released a breath at the words, somehow filling him with more pleasure than her touch. “I would say you have a fair bit of work on your hands.”

He did not tell her he was not certain mending was an option.

She hovered on the edge of movement, as though she knew it.

Stay. Please.

It took everything he had to wait her out.

Choose this.

His heart threatened to beat from his chest until finally . . . finally, she reached for the linen strip he’d used in his attempt to bind his own ribs. He relinquished it without hesitation, standing so still he barely breathed as she circled him, investigating him, her touch soft and strong, sliding over his ribs and testing the damage that had been done.

He sucked in a breath as she traced over the muscles of his abdomen, and she looked up, her rich brown eyes inspecting his for pain. “Too much?”

Never enough.

He shook his head. “Go on.”

“This one could be broken,” she said softly.

“It’s not.”

“How do you know?” she asked.

“We both know I’ve broken them before.” The memory unfolded between them. Ewan had taken a boot to the rib and she’d mended him then, too.

“Whit was always better with his legs,” she whispered.

“And now?”

She smiled at the question, and jealousy flared at her clear adoration of the man Covent Garden called Beast. “Now he’s good with everything. He grew big and brutal. And he doesn’t lose.”

Something filled him at that—the fact that the smallest and weakest of them had become the strongest.

“The summer he grew—we were ten and five, maybe six,” she said, amusement in her words. “It was like witchcraft. We couldn’t keep him in shoes. One week, we were out of money and he put a toe through the front of one, and I had to steal a pair.”

“From where?”

She shrugged. “A cull in a brothel on Charles Street. Greasy git who liked to agree to one price and pay another. The sweaty bastard deserved it.”

“Was he—” He swallowed the rest of the question.

She tilted her head at him. “A customer? No. I was more use to Digger Knight as a fighter than I was as a moll.”

“I wouldn’t judge if he were.” Born in a brothel on Tavistock Row, Ewan knew better than most that women had few enough choices in life for men to decide they owned that one.

“I know you wouldn’t,” she said. And the truth in the words gave him pleasure.

She finished bandaging him, tucking the end of the linen in on itself, her lips flattened into a straight line as she inspected the rest of him—the bruises above the bandages and on his face, and his shoulder, rubbed raw from the ropes he’d used in the yard earlier that day.

The shoulder she’d bared for him earlier, revealing the scar he wished every day he could erase, along with the past that came with it.

But erasing the past would erase her, too.

With a little nod, she bent to retrieve the bag she’d come with. Setting it on a nearby chair, she fished a small ceramic pot from within and opened it, lifting it immediately to her nose. He couldn’t stop his smile as he watched the movement, an echo of the girl she’d been, who was first to smell anything—pleasing or otherwise.

“Is something amusing?”

“You’ve always done that.” She immediately dropped her hand and approached. “What is it?” She extended the pot toward him, and he leaned down to inhale. “Lemon.”

“And bay, and willow bark. It’s healed worse than this.”

“For you?”

“And scores of others.” She dipped her fingers in the salve and reached for him, and he let her, breathing deeply as she anointed him with it, every touch a glimpse of heaven.

“You’ve done this before.”

“Tended wounds?”

“Tended my wounds.” He paused, then, “I thought I dreamed it last year. Your touch.” In the darkness. In that little room where he’d realized she was alive. Where he’d realized he might be, again.

Grace didn’t look up from her work, and he took her rapt attention as a chance to drink her in, the spray of freckles across her nose, her enormous eyes, the scar across one brow, barely noticeable for the years that had passed since he’d wiped the blood from her forehead and the tears from her cheeks. He couldn’t stop himself from reaching up and touching the crooked half circle.