and she moved her skirts so he could lie next to her, as he had dozens of times before. Hundreds of them. Once he was settled on his back, his hands stacked behind his head, he spoke to the canopy. “It’s never quiet there.”
“Because of the carts on the cobblestones.”
He nodded. “The wooden wheels make a racket, but it’s more than that. It’s the shouts from the taverns and the hawkers in the market square. The dogs barking in the warehouses. The brawls in the streets. I used to stand on the roof of the place I lived and bet on the brawls.”
“That’s why you’re so good at fighting.”
He lifted a shoulder in a tiny shrug. “I always thought it would be the best way to help my ma. Until . . .”
He trailed off, but she heard the rest. Until she’d taken ill, and the duke had dangled a title and a fortune in front of a son who would have done anything to help. She turned to look at him, his face drawn tight, resolutely staring up at the sky, jaw set.
“Tell me about the cursing,” she prodded.
He let out a little surprised laugh. “A riot of foul language. You like that bit.”
“I didn’t even know cursing existed before you three.” Boys who came into her life like a riot themselves, rough and tumble and foul-mouthed and wonderful.
“Before Devil, you mean.”
Devil, christened Devon—one of his two half brothers—raised in a boys’ orphanage and with the mouth to prove it. “He’s proved very useful.”
“Yes. The cursing. Especially on the docks. No one swears like a sailor.”
“Tell me the best one you’ve ever heard.”
He cut her a sly look. “No.”
She’d ask Devil later. “Tell me about the rain.”
“It’s London. It rains all the time.”
She nudged him with her shoulder. “Tell me the good bit.”
He smiled, and she matched it, loving the way he humored her. “The rain turns the stones on the street slick and shiny.”
“And at night, it turns them gold, because of the lights from the taverns,” she filled in.
“Not just the taverns. The theaters on Drury Lane. The lamps that hang outside the bawdy houses.” Bawdy houses where his mother had landed after the duke had refused to keep her when she’d chosen to have his son. Where that son had been born.
“To keep the dark at bay,” she said softly.
“The dark ain’t so bad,” he said. “It’s just that the people in it haven’t a choice but to fight for what they need.”
“And do they get it? What they need?”
“No. They don’t get what they need, and not what they deserve, neither.” He paused, then whispered to the canopy, like it really was magic. “But we’re going to change all that.”
She didn’t miss the we. Not just him. All of them. A foursome that had made a pact when the boys had been brought here for this mad competition—whoever won would keep them all safe. And then they’d escape this place that had imprisoned them all in a battle of wits and weapons that would give his father what the older man wanted: an heir worthy of a dukedom.
“Once you’re duke,” she said, softly.
He turned to look at her. “Once one of us is duke.”
She shook her head, meeting his glittering amber gaze, so like his brothers’. So like his father’s. “You’re going to win.”
He watched her for a long moment and said, “How do you know?”
She pressed her lips together. “I just know.” The old duke’s machinations grew more challenging by the day. Devil was like his name, too much fire and fury. And Whit—he was too small. Too kind.
“And if I don’t want it?”
A preposterous idea. “Of course you want it.”
“It should be yours.”
She couldn’t help the little, wild laugh. “Girls don’t get to be dukes.”
“And here you are, an heir, nonetheless.”
But she wasn’t. Not really. She was the product of her mother’s extramarital affair, a gamble designed to deliver a bastard heir to a monstrous husband, forever tainting his precious familial line—the only thing he’d ever cared for. But instead of a boy, the duchess had produced a girl, and so she was not heir. She was a placeholder. A bookmark in an ancient copy of Burke’s Peerage. And they all knew it.
She ignored the words and said, “It doesn’t matter.”
And it didn’t. Ewan would win. He would become duke. And it would change everything.
He watched her for a long moment. “When I am duke, then.” The words were a whisper, as though