For a moment, she forgot that he was not safety.

He was not home.

He was the enemy—hers, and her brothers’ and the whole of Covent Garden’s.

She pushed at his shoulders, and he went more readily than she would have expected. More readily than she wished.

She pushed the realization aside, hating the questions that followed. Hating the answers more. Anger and frustration coursed through her. “That was a mistake.”

He shook his head. “No, it wasn’t.” He said it like it wasn’t a discussion. Like they discussed the time of day. Or the color of the sky.

“Of course it was. This is the game we play,” she said, letting her exhaustion seep into her words. She was tired of running from him. Tired of hiding from him. “We make mistakes.” She paused. “You make them.”

The words struck true, wildness flooding his gaze. A hint at the mad duke Mayfair thought him. “Then tell me how to pay for them.”

How many times had she imagined him saying those exact words to her? She shook her head. “There is no paying for them, Duke. Not with money or power or a lifetime of washing clothes.”

The women behind tittered their interest.

“What, then?” He pressed on. “I take my knocks from the men in your yard. From your brothers. From you.”

“Your brothers,” she said.

“What?”

“They are your brothers.”

He shook his head. “No. They ran with you. They protected you.”

“Yes,” she said, lifting her chin. “They protected me from you, but they are your blood.”

He ignored the truth of the words. “You still haven’t given me a reason. One good reason, and I’ll leave. One reason why I cannot pay my dues. Say my prayers. Do my penance.”

“There are a thousand reasons!”

“One would imagine you could give me one, then.” He paused. “Instead, you lead me on a merry chase through the Garden.”

“You followed me,” she retorted.

He raised a brow. “Yeah, but you wanted it.”

She had. Damn him for saying so.

Frustration and anger flared, making her want to scream. Instead, she closed the distance between them, reached up and grabbed the already threadbare neck of his shirt—the place where the rope from earlier had torn a hole in the fine lawn. She yanked, finishing what the earlier fight had started, tearing it open to reveal his raw shoulder and on it, the M his father had put there—white and raised against the angry red skin, a wicked scar.

“There’s your reason!”

He rocked back on his heels as she let the shirt go.

“You’ll always be his. And I don’t care what song you sing to the women of the Rookery. I don’t care how skilled you are at doing the wash. I don’t care that the map of the Garden is inked on you, or that you were born in its muck. You walked away from it all the moment you betrayed us. The moment you chose him over us.”

She stopped, resisting the heavy fullness in her throat. Resisting the prickling pain behind her eyes. The mourning for the boy she’d once loved. The one who’d sworn never to leave her. Never to hurt her.

That boy had lied.

“You’ll always be Marwick,” she said, staring into his face, dark with the bruises of the day and the shadows of the evening. “And that means you’ll always be a mistake.”

And maybe, one day, she would learn it.

Grace swallowed around the ache in her throat, turning away before he could say anything, but he reached for her, clasping her hand before she could leave him. Pulling her back around to face him.

“I never chose him.”

She shook her head, but he refused to let her dismiss him, his hand sliding down her arm until he was holding hers. She should have shaken him off. But she didn’t, even as she hated the feel of him there, against her skin. Rough. Strong. Hot.

Lie. She didn’t hate it.

And she hated it even less when he tightened his grip and said again, “I never chose him. I have done terrible things in my life. Things for which I will surely spend an eternity in fire. Things for which you may never forgive me. And I bear them all. But that is one I will never bear.” There was anger in his voice. No. It was not simple like anger. It was hotter. It was fury. “I never chose him.”

She wanted to believe it. God, there was nothing she wanted to believe more. But when she closed her eyes, she could still see him, years ago, coming for her, knife in hand. She could still see him in the darkness last year, watching the London docks burn.

But now . . . who was this man? So different?

He looked to the rooftops. “I swore I would wait.”

Confusion flared. “Wait for what?”

He leveled her with a gaze. “What do you need?”

That question again. He’d asked it before. In her ring. In his gardens.

What do you need, as though he existed solely for her pleasure.

No. Not pleasure.

Purpose.

For her whole life, she’d known her purpose. She’d been placeholder, prize, protector. She’d been an employer and a friend. She’d been businesswoman and negotiator and fighter and spy. And there had never in her life been a moment when she hadn’t known precisely her purpose. When she had not had a plan.

When she did not know the answer.

But there, in the hush before her city turned from day to night, Grace Condry, bareknuckle fighter, unparalleled businesswoman, and queen of Covent Garden, found that she did not have an answer.

She didn’t know what she needed.

She didn’t know what she deserved.

And she was terrified of what she desired.

“I don’t know,” she said, the words too quiet. Revealing too much.

The confession changed him, his gaze hardening, his jaw tightening. He took a step back and somehow, impossibly, she hated the distance he put between them.

But didn’t she want distance? Didn’t she want infinite distance between them? Didn’t she want him to leave and never return?

Didn’t she need that?

Of course she did.

Didn’t she?

He stopped, and two yards might have been two miles.

And then, over the riot of her thoughts, he spoke. “Come see me when you know.”

Chapter Sixteen

Waiting for her was torture.

Ewan stood at the center of his bedchamber later that evening, aching from the bout with the Garden and from the bout with Grace, knowing that only one set of those aches was guaranteed to heal.

He’d seen the way she wanted him. He’d felt it, when they’d kissed there, in the open alleyway. He’d heard it in her little sighs, as she’d clung to him and pressed herself against him, making him wild.

And worse, he’d seen how she struggled with that desire when he’d asked her what she needed.

She needed him, dammit.

Just as he needed her.

And he might have convinced her of that, as the sun set over the rooftops. She might have let him follow her as she scaled the wall and made her way to her home, where she might have let him stay.

She might have let him kiss her again, and finish what they started.

She might have told him what she needed. And let him give it to her.

But that wasn’t enough. He didn’t simply want to be allowed to be with her. To touch her. To kiss her. He wanted her to want it too, with the aching, gnawing desire that he wanted it.