What a Duke Dares (32 page)

Cam sighed and spoke less belligerently. “What’s your advice?”

“I’m rather astonished to be counseling the font of all wisdom.” Richard’s mouth stretched in a reminiscent smile. “I remember Pen as a girl. She was plucky and impulsive and full of life.”

“Yes, she was.” Cam too found himself smiling.

Richard’s smile faded. “That wasn’t the woman I met last night.”

“You knew her many years ago.”

“You need to convince her that you won’t come down in a hail of reproach if she steps out of line. She’s clever; she’ll soon work out what she can and can’t do without upsetting the old biddies.”

“You make me sound like a despot,” Cam protested.

Richard shrugged. “You chose a woman of spirit. Or at least she will be, once she stops fretting about any whisper of disapproval that might inconvenience you. She’s a Thorne. I can’t imagine she’s terrified on her own account. The Thornes drink recklessness with their mother’s milk.”

“Her reputation precedes her,” Jonas said quietly.

Cam set down his glass with a click. “Shall I knock your teeth down your throat, chum?”

“Threaten all you like—not that there’s much of my hide left to mark. I’m just speaking the truth we all know, Cam,” Jonas responded calmly. “You always said you’d marry a woman of unsullied reputation. In fact, that was why you chose Lady Marianne, if I recall our discussion.”

“Not entirely why,” Cam said uncomfortably. Despite his apology, despite fate selecting another bride, he felt guilty about Marianne Seaton. He’d seen the sideways glances directed at her. Society interpreted Cam’s marriage to Pen as a rejection of his first choice.

“She met your standards of beauty and intelligence. But if she’d had the slightest brush with scandal, you’d never have gone within ten miles of her.”

“Then you arrive home with Penelope Thorne, who’s kicked up her heels from Cairo to Stockholm,” Richard said. “You can’t blame us for being curious.”

Cam sucked in a breath and realized that he had to tell his friends the truth. They knew him too well to believe the tale of falling madly in love. He straightened his shoulders. “Pen is the only woman I’ve proposed to.”

Jonas looked unimpressed. “Obviously. You married her.”

Richard already knew the sorry facts, or most of them. Cam had never confessed his unwelcome yen for nineteen-year-old Pen. “Well, yes, I proposed before the wedding. But nine years ago, I asked her to marry me.”

“You’ve been engaged all this time?” Jonas looked astonished, either at Cam’s delay in claiming his bride or, more likely, at discovering something he didn’t already know. Jonas Merrick prided himself on his omniscience.

“Of course not.” Cam disclosed one of his few failures. “She turned me down.”

“Good for her,” Richard interjected, toasting the absent Penelope. “Didn’t I say she had backbone?”

“Penelope Thorne wouldn’t marry you?” Jonas asked. “The family must have already been in financial straits. There’s always been a whiff of notoriety about the Thornes. Superb soldiers in times of crisis. Nothing but trouble in peace.”

Cam’s lips tightened, although it was an opinion he’d grown up hearing. “Peter was my friend.”

“I know the fellow was charming. Too charming for his own good. And they’re a handsome family. You’ve caught yourself a beauty, Cam.”

“Lady Marianne isn’t exactly a pill,” Richard protested.

“Not at all,” Jonas said. “But even an old married man like me can tell that the new Duchess of Sedgemoor will turn heads. Once she gets some confidence and—forgive me saying so—buys some decent clothes, she’ll be so spectacular you won’t get near her for admiring swains, Cam.”

Hell, that was the last thing Cam wanted. He’d decided young that he didn’t want a duchess whom other men panted after. Yet here he was under the sway of a woman who set masculine hearts racing. His lifelong ambitions for a quiet domestic life were doomed.

He bit back a surge of jealousy to think of anyone else touching Pen, of her doing to another man what she’d so breathtakingly done to him last night. His stomach clenched tighter than a fist. Anyone trying to poach Pen away would face annihilation.

He paused in lifting his glass, wondering when he’d turned so primitive. Passions were dangerous, unless leashed. Yet he’d kill any bastard who came sniffing around his wife.

“Are you all right, Cam?” Richard asked.

Cam must be staring at his friends in a complete daze. He felt out of kilter, as if someone had chopped a couple of inches off one leg.

“Of course.” They’d recognize the lie, but surely they’d never guess the reason behind it.

“You looked like you wanted to rip Jonas’s guts out through his waistcoat.”

Cam struggled to smile. “Pen is my wife. She merits my loyalty—and your respect.”

Jonas frowned as that devilish mind whirred. “Of course she does.”

Cam hadn’t expected such ready agreement. “You’ll like her when you know her.”

“I’m sure I will.”

This level of amiability verged on the fantastical. Cam scowled down his long nose at his friend. Unfortunately, Jonas was at least as tall so the withering stare didn’t have its usual effect. “Are you being sarcastic?”

Jonas looked genuinely surprised. “Not at all. I’m delighted that you didn’t marry Lady Marianne. I was against the match from the start. I hated to see you enter such a coldhearted arrangement.”

Cam started to say that his match with Pen was just as coldhearted until something stopped him. Perhaps an inkling that Jonas waited for an open declaration of his feelings. Or lack of them.

“Pen will make a splendid duchess,” Richard said peaceably from the sofa. “It’s still a puzzle that she didn’t marry you in the first place if the Thornes were in a mess.”

“Are you both suggesting that she’d only marry me for worldly advantage?” Cam’s tone bristled.

Richard regarded him disapprovingly. “You’re deuced touchy, Cam. That’s not what we mean. Anyway, you know that even if you were off your head with opium or inclined to slobber into your dinner, chits would still line up for the duchess’s coronet.”

“Thank you,” Cam said grimly.

“You’re welcome.”

Jonas remained keen to explain himself, which didn’t happen every day. Cam controlled his temper enough to listen. “All those years ago, her family must have pressured her to accept you. Was she in love with someone else?”

“Not that I know.” Cam found the idea distasteful, although he couldn’t say why. If Pen had been in love at nineteen, the affair hadn’t had a happy outcome. “There was never any talk.”

“There was talk on the Continent,” Richard said soberly.

“It was purely talk,” Cam said. He only realized after he spoke how his confidence hinted that he had reason to know. Heat tinged his cheeks and he sipped his brandy to hide his embarrassment. Pen’s innocence was nobody else’s business. He quickly changed the subject. Unfortunately the topic was almost as discomfiting. “Her mother nagged her to the point where Pen canceled her season and scarpered for Italy.”

Jonas burst out laughing in one of those quicksilver changes of mood so characteristic of him. “Oh, Cam. You have my commiserations. But damn it, that’s priceless.”

Cam glowered at his friend. “I fail to see the funny side.”

Jonas took an infuriatingly long time to stop laughing. “You would if you’d been subject to your perfection all these years. I’m liking your bride more and more.”

“Cam, don’t go all haughty on us.” Richard rose and lifted the decanter. “Even I find it a tad amusing that the woman who met your criteria was so horrified at the prospect of marrying you that she fled the country.”

“She escaped her mother,” Cam said stiffly.

“I’m sure.” Richard refilled Jonas’s glass and turned to Cam. “None of this explains how you tied yourself to her
after so long and after she’d led a fascinating life, never sparing you a thought.”

Whereas Cam had devoted too much energy to a setback that shouldn’t have mattered. He hid a sigh as he extended his empty glass toward Richard. He should be grateful to have friends brave enough to prick his arrogance. If only they knew that they were nowhere near as skilled at skewering him as his lovely bride.

“Peter asked me on his deathbed to escort Pen to England.” He waited for some response, but he’d captured his friends’ attention so completely that they remained silent. “I found her in the Alps and brought her back.”

“Alone?” Richard replaced the decanter on the table.

“Yes.” Cam paused. “Don’t look like that. I kept my hands to myself.”

“That must have been bloody difficult,” Jonas said.

Cam bared his teeth at Jonas, who seemed remarkably taken with another man’s wife. “She’s my friend’s sister. I’d grown up with her.” He paused. “She didn’t offer much encouragement.”

As he returned to the sofa, Richard studied Cam. “That must have rankled.”

Cam nodded before he thought better of it. He rushed into the rest of his story. “We pretended we were married and avoided places where anyone might recognize us.”

“Until?” Jonas asked.

“Until the ship went down, I imagine,” Richard said. “Good God, Cam, talk about destiny taking a hand.”

“Pen wore the Rothermere signet. The people who fished us out assumed we were married. There was no way to keep the story quiet.”

“So no passion-fueled wedding in an Italian chapel?” Jonas asked.

“No.” Cam resented Jonas’s amused superiority.

“No wonder you didn’t wait to invite us to the wedding. I must admit to being rather… piqued.” He paused. “I worried you’d taken our last discussion to heart.”

Cam’s laugh held no humor. “I was ready to shove your ill-considered opinions down your gullet. But not enough that in normal circumstances, I’d neglect to ask you to my wedding.”

“That’s good to know,” Jonas said without a trace of irony. “I’m not so flush with people I trust that I can afford to lose one.”

Cam’s resentment faded. And his jealousy. Jonas had eyes for only one woman, and it wasn’t Penelope Rothermere. “You spoke with good intentions—and your usual need to run the show.”

“That’s the pot calling the kettle black.” Richard laughed and drained his glass. “Life has been adventurous lately, my friend.”

“Indeed.” Cam finished his own brandy.

Richard was his friend. So was Jonas. After the recent hiccups, he was relieved that the bonds they’d formed at Eton hadn’t weakened.

It was time to return to Pen. Especially if Jonas was right about her becoming a focus for male attention.

Chapter Thirty-One

A
fter the Matlock ball, Pen waited in Rothermere House’s hall while the footman took her cloak. Cam glanced back at her from the doorway to his library.

She was always aware of his arresting male beauty, but something about the way the chandelier cast a sheen across his black hair and set his green eyes gleaming made her heart swoop. She became briefly the innocent girl who had pined after him, instead of the woman of twenty-eight who knew his body better than her own.

Especially after last night.

Anticipation sparked at the prospect of testing his resolve again. All day, their battle had been in abeyance, but his intent expression now hinted that he too contemplated pleasure.

Her eyelashes flickered down, not altogether with shyness. Guilt itched like ants crawling over her skin. In the ball’s retiring room, she’d passed Sophie a message from Harry. A message whose contents marked Pen a conspirator against her husband’s wishes.

The marble statues lining the hall stared down in disapproval. She hated those cold, white Romans with their supercilious expressions to rival Cam at his most ducal.

“Will that be all, Your Grace?” the footman asked.

“Thank you, Thomas,” Cam answered. “Her Grace and I will have a brandy in the library before we go upstairs. You may finish for the night.”

“Good night, Your Grace.” The young man bowed and left.

Surprised, Pen turned to Cam. “Ladies don’t drink brandy.”

“You do.” He paused. “Or at least you did.”

“I wasn’t a duchess then.”

Weariness bracketed his mouth. Weariness or irritation. “Pen, if you want a brandy, bloody well have a brandy.”

On the way home, she’d wondered whether she’d displeased him. He’d been quiet and he hadn’t touched her. His bristling tension had convinced her to keep her distance. “I don’t understand you, Cam.”

He leaned one arm high on the door, making her overwhelmingly conscious of his lean, strong body. “Unfortunately I suspect that’s true.”

She made a frustrated gesture. “You’ve spent your life repairing the damage your parents left behind. Yet you encourage me to kick over the traces.”

“My parents acted without honor.” A smile lengthened his lips. “You’re the most honorable person I know.”

She was too astonished at the compliment to be pleased. She stared at him, mouth open, until she realized she must look half-witted. She snapped her jaw shut. “Thank you.”

He stepped aside to let her pass. She paused in the center of the room. This was very much his territory, furnished in leather and gleaming dark wood. Pen took in the rows of
leather-bound books, the shining scientific instruments, and the paintings on the walls. Her eyes focused on the magnificent Titian above the fireplace, the painting Cam had mentioned last night. Venus and Mars. Mars was clearly completely besotted. Lucky Venus, Pen thought sourly.