Anna Campbell - What a Duke Dares

Dear God, she needed to keep her wits about her. All her life, she’d known that confessing her love would at best create restraint, at worst send Cam fleeing what he viewed as impossible demands.

To be fair, he wouldn’t want to hurt her. Although the sad truth was that because he didn’t love her, he hurt her again and again.

The true hell of her marriage struck like a blow. Disgrace and scandal could never match the damage that awaited now that she’d irrevocably tied her life to Cam’s.

She was a damned fool.

And the largest part of her damned foolishness was that despite all she knew, all she’d seen, in some corner of her mind she’d hoped that over time, he might find it in himself to love her.

She stared into his eyes and recognized that the barriers against her, against anyone threatening his self-containment, would always be there. Although she felt like crying, she summoned a smile. “Cam, I promise to be the wife you want. You’ll never regret marrying me.”

He grimaced as if her words held a sting. “I don’t deserve you.”

Even harder than that smile was dredging up the kind of remark he’d expect of sharp-tongued, independent Penelope Thorne. She’d enlisted for a lifetime of lying when she married Camden Rothermere. She refused to stumble at the first fence. “I intend to be the world’s greatest duchess.”

He regarded her searchingly. She saw the moment he decided to accept her humor at face value. “High hopes indeed.”

“Why aim for the ordinary?”

His soft laugh vibrated through her. Despairingly she wondered how he could lie inside her, yet feel a million miles away.

“My dear Penelope, you couldn’t be ordinary if you tried.”

The passion in his kiss made her blood pump. The world’s greatest duchess would never deny the duke his pleasure, even if her heart cracked into a thousand pieces.

When Cam passed the blue salon on his way inside from checking his new colt, he heard gusts of feminine laughter. Since his sister’s marriage two years ago, Fentonwyck had been a bachelor establishment, so the sound struck him as unexpected. Pen, to his bitter regret, hadn’t laughed much lately.

Curiosity made him pause. Curiosity and a determination to rescue his wife. If county society descended, having decided that a week was sufficient privacy for the newlyweds, this would be Pen’s first solo encounter with the English upper classes since her return. His wife would be a lamb in a den of wolves.

Cam had spent a lifetime countering spite, starting with savage bullying at Eton over his mother’s adultery. He’d learned the hard way how to handle trouble. His gut knotting with worry, he stepped into the room’s azure and gold splendor. And stopped dead.

The neighbors ranged around the tea table. The Countess of Marley. Lady Greene and her two daughters. The three Misses Moulton-Brent. Lady Gregory Fulham and her spinster sister. All cats to their last breath. All hanging entranced on whatever Pen described in an uncharacteristically quiet voice.

She’d been uncharacteristically quiet all week. He almost wondered if he’d married two completely separate women. One by day was prudent and obliging and almost demure—a word he’d never thought to associate with Penelope Thorne. By night, the other Pen was endlessly responsive. It was like living with the perfect wife and the perfect mistress, all wrapped up in one spectacular package. Every man’s dream.

And Cam could hardly endure it.

This new version of his wife confused him, sparked his impatience, obsessed him—which bolstered his impatience. Both with Pen and himself.

He’d attempted to break through to the vibrant woman he’d known in Italy. But she’d greeted his fumbling efforts to establish some ease between them with cool disinterest. Even when he was so far inside her he felt like their blood flowed through a single heart, Pen held herself tantalizingly separate.

The real Pen, the Pen who infuriated and fascinated and challenged him, remained hidden behind those brilliant black eyes. And every breathtaking climax seemed to edge her more out of reach. It was enough to drive a man to drink. Longingly Cam thought of the brandy in his library, even if it was only early afternoon.

While he’d never wanted an emotional connection in his marriage, he had imagined that sharing a home, however large, would result in friendly intimacy. But he felt further from Pen than he had when he’d saved her from the bandits.

Despite this polite estrangement, their sexual encounters transcended his experience. Every time he spilled into her body, he felt like he surrendered part of his soul. He hated to be in thrall to a woman determined to remain elusive. She turned his nights to flame, and his days to mere intervals of waiting before he joined her on that wide bed upstairs.

He felt like a satyr. He felt out of control. He felt like she hovered just beyond his grasp, even when she stirred to his most daring caresses. Nighttime Pen never denied him, physically at least. Daytime Pen seemed set on establishing a life completely apart from his.

Now daytime Pen coped perfectly well with the intrusive curiosity of Derbyshire’s ladies. He prepared to retreat, but Lady Greene saw him. “Your Grace!”

So much silk fluttered as the ladies curtsied that a breeze ruffled Cam’s hair. He greeted them, starting with the countess who considered herself local society’s leader. The Duchess of Sedgemoor trumped the Countess of Marley. Lady Marley wouldn’t like that.

“Her Grace was describing your heroic rescue in the Alps,” Lady Marley said. “No wonder you two fell in love on the spot.”

As usual when he heard the word “love” in relation to himself, Cam’s stomach curdled. How ironic that he’d given his friends romantic advice. Camden Rothermere talking about love was like a blind man describing a rainbow.

“The tale seems to have roused your amusement, my lady.”

With a neutral smile, Pen set down the teapot. She presided with a sureness of touch that even his mother would have envied. She wore one of the dresses she’d ordered from Sheffield to carry her through until they left for London next week. It was conservative in style and color. He’d never have imagined Pen could look dull, but in this drab gray gown, she looked… dull.

“How dashing,” one of Moulton-Brent girls sighed.

“Just like a novel,” Miss Greene added in an equally saccharine tone.

The swooning made Cam bilious, but as he glanced around the group, he commended Pen’s cleverness. These ladies had arrived prepared to despise her, until the stories of his courtship presented this marriage not as a woeful mésalliance but a romantic triumph.

Damn it. He’d been a fool to fret over Pen. He forgot how she’d charmed her way through Europe. He forgot that she was a Thorne. While the Thornes might neglect life’s prosaic elements, they could always woo an audience.

“I told the ladies how shocked I was when my childhood idol marched in at such an opportune moment, Your Grace.”

Daytime Pen always addressed him formally. Each time she said “Your Grace” in that sweet, soft voice, he felt like she struck him with a hammer.

Cam shouldn’t be piqued that she’d been perfectly all right without him. He shouldn’t be piqued, but he was.

His wife smiled at him over the tea as if meeting a mere acquaintance. London’s most perfect gentleman stifled the impulse to fling the priceless china into the fireplace and tell the duchess’s new acolytes to sod off.

He’d known Pen all his life, yet every day, she felt more a stranger.

Merrick House, Mayfair, early April 1828

Cam descended from the luxurious Sedgemoor town coach painted with the Rothermere unicorns. He extended his gloved hand to escort Pen up the short flight of marble steps.

“Thank you,” she murmured in a very un-Penelope voice to the footman who held the carriage door open.

As she surveyed the magnificent home of Jonas Merrick, Viscount Hillbrook, and his beautiful wife, Sidonie, Pen’s grip on Cam’s hand tightened. He glimpsed something in her face that looked like genuine emotion. It said something for his state that her trepidation made him feel better. She’d become such a cipher that he frequently wanted to pinch himself to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. Or perhaps pinch Pen to check whether she was alive and not just a lovely automaton.

Because she was still officially in mourning, Cam wasn’t giving a ball to launch her into society. Instead, the new Duchess of Sedgemoor made a low-key arrival. Tonight, Lord and Lady Hillbrook hosted a dinner before the party attended a musicale at Oldhaven House.

“They’ll like you,” he murmured, leading her toward the door, which opened at their approach. “Don’t worry.”

Without hope, he waited for some humorous response. Pen didn’t speak. How lowering to remember that he’d wanted a quiet, perfect wife. Now that he had one, he itched to throw tantrums and shake her until she shouted back.

The odious truth was that Pen was everything that Cam had wished in a duchess. Tranquil. Undemanding. Well behaved. Polite. Cooperative. Who knew unusual, dashing Penelope Thorne would prove such a conformable spouse? Damn it, she’d even been a virgin when he’d married her.

If he told anyone about his increasing dissatisfaction, they’d call him a lunatic.

As Cam handed her into the black and white tiled hall, she stepped ahead wrapped in her new velvet cloak. They’d been in London since Easter and rapidly established the kind of marriage that proliferated in society. Cam saw his wife at breakfast and dinner where they swapped inconsequential information. With every hour, she retreated further.