Chapter 13 Duke
Duke
The Chicago skyline is tinged pink as the rising sun fights against the grey of another fucking day in limbo.
Grace and I didn’t speak much on the flight home last night, but it was still more than I spoke to my evil bitch of a fiancée.
I’d messaged her to let her know I was back in Chicago, then promptly rejected her call.
If her goons were intending on listening in, I didn’t have the stomach to play nice.
I’d convinced myself that Katarina was a product of her family’s twisted upbringing and that behind the snarls and sharp claws, there was a frightened girl who’d never been shown an ounce of kindness.
I’d stupidly thought that deep down, she appreciated my help.
And while I was never under the illusion that I should trust Katarina, her threat yesterday had been a sucker punch.
Maybe she is terrified of her uncle recalling her back to Russia.
Maybe she hit out because she felt cornered.
But maybe I’ve been giving her way more credit than she deserves.
The real threat might be Vasili, but Katarina took way too much pleasure in suggesting she could hand him fresh ammunition.
I may have to be her lapdog for the time being, but I’ll kill them all if they touch Grace.
“Was this such a good idea?” Grace asks.
She’s sitting in a visitors’ chair across from my desk.
Her dark hair is pulled up in a clip with a few loose strands framing her beautiful face.
Those deep brown eyes keep flicking between me and the notepad on her lap.
Her smooth legs are crossed, one foot tapping in midair, making her emerald green dress slips further up her thigh.
“Duke?”
I recline back in my chair, adjusting my position to allow room for my thickening cock. “Sorry, was what such a good idea?”
She taps her pen against her lower lip then thinks better of it when my gaze goes to her mouth. I shift again. “Scheduling meetings this early,” she replies. “Your mind keeps wandering. I’m guessing you’re not a morning person.”
“Mornings I can do. Not touching you is the goddamn problem,” I grit out. Yeah, I’m still in a mood about being denied one single night with my woman.
After Katarina’s latest move, I’ve blocked out an hour in my calendar every morning just for Grace. It’s so early that even Ed hasn’t arrived and he’s going to be pissed when he finds out I’ve messed around with my calendar, but I need this. I need her.
Officially, this is a project update meeting, one Grace is taking very seriously judging by the discussion points scribbled on her notepad. I haven’t heard a single one. I can’t. Not while Grace and I have this no-touch agreement.
All I can do is devour her body with my eyes. Her dress has buttons all the way down the front. It’s tortuous.
“Eyes up here, Mr. Moncrief.”
Grace’s smile is an angel-soft pink in an otherwise grey world.
“Four weeks, two days until Katarina leaves,” I tell her.
“You’re counting down the days?”
“Aren’t you?” It’s meant to be a playful comment, but there’s a serious question behind it. Is she willing to wait knowing what she now knows about Katarina?
Grace’s face creases. “You’re counting down to things returning to normal, but for me, none of this is close to normal,” she says, gesturing around my office.
“Even if I discount the small matter of the Bratva knowing my name, our lifestyles are vastly different. You didn’t have to think twice about buying a fancy-as-hell apartment for me, something I would have needed to save up for a lifetime to afford, and maybe not even then. ”
“It’s the least I could do for luring you to Chicago.”
“Which makes me wonder what else you got up to.” She scowls. “You didn’t just force Cameron to sign the divorce papers, did you? You paid him off.”
I guess we’re having that conversation. “I did.”
Twin eyebrows rise in judgement. “Within hours of meeting me?”
When I think back to that night, my cock twitches. Every. Fucking. Time. I straighten up. Stay focused. “I’ll accept it was a little impulsive, but the money meant nothing to me and I knew the house was important to you.”
“You knew it was important,” she echoes, but instead of thanking me, Grace stabs her pen against her notepad.
“You also knew the damn address, Duke! Why the hell didn’t you just turn up at my door one day and say, ‘Hey, Grace, by some chance, are you still as obsessed with me as I am with you? Would you like to go on a date? Because, you know, I’m not engaged yet to the spawn of Satan. ”
I could laugh at her very fitting description of Katarina, but there’s pain stoking Grace’s anger. I tense, knowing my answer will frustrate her as much as it does me.
“I did turn up at your door,” I confess. “In fact, I parked on your street and stayed there all night. Not once, but twice.”
We came so close to getting it right.
Grace’s jaw is set firm and the breath she releases is a grunt of anguish. “What did I do wrong?”
Her words slam into me, wrapping a fist around my heart. Fuck this. My chair rolls backwards as I dive up to reach her. I drop to my knees and as her notepad slides from her lap, I take her trembling hands in mine.
“You did everything right, Angel. I was the fuck-up.”
Tears well in her eyes. “Because of the accident?”
It’s painful to swallow. “Because I thought I’d killed my best friend.”
“Maddie told me your family were worried about you,” she says as a rogue tear slips down her cheek.
I untangle my fingers from hers so I can swipe away the tear. “What else did she tell you?”
Grace’s nose wrinkles. “Some line about me being a legend.”
“You are.”
She sniffs back her tears. “Explain.”
This could take a while and the longer I stay kneeling in front of her, the more chance there is of someone walking into the office, especially as Ed isn’t at his desk yet. I’d deliberately kept the door unlocked in an effort to keep us apart. Big fail.
I rise to my feet and keep tight hold of Grace’s hand, taking her with me when I go to lock the door. Neither of us speak as I lead her to the lounge area at the opposite end of my office.
As I walk, I debate who should sit where. There are two armchairs facing each other, which would be a safe option. But I have another fuck-it moment and when I sit down on the soft leather couch, I pull her onto my lap.
When Grace takes a breath, I speak before she can tell me off. “Don’t want to hear it,” I say gruffly, tucking her into me, an arm around her waist. “Yesterday was a shit show and a weekend without my daily dose of you is looming. Just for one damn minute, I want to hold my girl.”
“Don’t you mean your legend?” she asks, her light words scratching nonetheless as she rests her head on my shoulder.
My heart thuds in my chest. It’s time to share more than vague facts about my accident. Grace needs to know that when she traced my jagged scars, her gentle touch had healed me in ways no doctor or therapist ever could.
“You are my legend,” I tell her. “Not that I knew it when you gatecrashed the opening of the Exemplar.”
“I had an invite,” she huffs.
“It was your attitude that got you in, not some flimsy piece of card with someone else’s name on it,” I correct. “Meanwhile, I had my family name emblazoned across every soft furnishing in the place and I still didn’t know who the fuck I was.”
Grace threads her fingers through mine again. She doesn’t interrupt. She gives me the space to tell my story.
“When you’re the tallest and broadest amongst your peers, you naturally fall into the role of protector and I was good at it.
My older brothers came from the same mold and they’d been my role models,” I tell her.
“But everything changed the night I lost my best friend and…” I take a breath.
“To all intents and purposes, I lost my twin sister too.”
Grace doesn’t look up. “You’re a twin?”
“Not identical. Obviously,” I add because it’s a running joke whenever Meri and I introduce ourselves, or it was when she could bear to be in the same room as me. “We’re not similar at all. She can be moody as fuck. And the quieter Meri is, the more afraid you should be.”
A rumble rises up through Grace’s chest. “Yeah, that doesn’t sound like you at all.”
I smile, but it quickly fades. “Meribeth was the other person in the car with me and Ewan that night,” I explain.
“We were in Scotland, just the three of us. Meri’s a Moncrief through and through, and she was on a mission to find isolated pockets of the globe where we could create exclusive retreats for our clients.
We found ourselves in the Outer Hebrides and were having the time of our lives.
Ewan and Meri were in a serious relationship and he’d let me into the secret that he was going to propose. But then…”
I stare out the window at the cityscape. The pink sunrise has long since disappeared and the sky is pewter grey.
“My head injury wiped out most of my memory so I came up with different scenarios to explain what happened, centering myself as the villain in every single one. It was raining and I must have been overconfident about the driving conditions. It was dark and I was probably chatting away to Ewan, who was in the back with Meri resting her head on his lap as she slept. It was late at night, so maybe I was tired and closed my eyes at the wrong time.”
“There was no evidence to substantiate any of my theories. Nor was there anything to disprove them,” I continue.
“On balance, it had to be my fault. Meri needed someone to blame and I was happy to oblige. I’d taken on the role of protector, but I failed them both, and Ewan paid with his life.
I was useless. Worthless. Hopeless. I fantasized about climbing to the top of some godforsaken mountain and never coming down again. ”
Grace strokes her thumb over mine. “I’m glad you didn’t.”