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

by Sarah MacLean

Whit answered. “You broke her heart.” The words sent pain straight through him, sharp and ragged enough to have him raising a hand to his own chest. Whit watched him for a moment, seeing the truth. “We don’t have to wreck you,” his quiet brother, who’d suffered so much at his hands, said. “She’ll do the wrecking. And you won’t for a minute think you don’t deserve it.”

“What if I’m all fight?” he whispered. “What if that’s all I have to give?” The sun was low now, nearly over the rooftops, casting golden light through the alley, turning his golden hair, dusted with soot and mud from the Rookery, to the same color as his eyes, burning into hers. Those eyes that she knew as well as her own. Better. The ones that haunted her in her dreams—the only place she could allow herself to remember them. He lowered his voice. “What if you cannot claim my fight without claiming me?”

They were planets, drawn to each other. No. He was a planet. She was the sun.

“Every day, every hour. I missed you.” A pause, and then, “To say I have missed you—it’s not enough. The word . . . it implies a natural occurrence. It suggests that if only I’d been home the day you called . . . if only you’d been on St. James’s the last time I bought cravats . . . then I’d have had a chance not to miss you. But what do we call the aching emptiness that I feel for you? All the time? Every day?”

I loved you the moment I set eyes on you a lifetime ago, but what that was—it pales in comparison to how I love you now.

“It’s always been you. Every day. Every night. Every minute. Since the beginning. This is the sum of my ambition: To be worthy of you. Of your love. Of your world. To stand by your side and change it.”