What a Duke Dares (2 page)

Her momentary softening congealed to frost. “I’m not a hound to come at your whistle.”

He sighed again. “You know that’s not what I want in a bride.”

“Do I?” she asked, arching her eyebrows. “You’ve devoted your life to rising above your parents’ disgrace. You’ve never made a secret of the fact that your wife must be beyond reproach.”

He bared his teeth at her. Mention of his mother’s adultery always raised his hackles. “Pen, this isn’t something I wish to discuss.”

She made a sweeping gesture. “Whether you want to talk about it or not, the scandals have guided your every action.”

He winced under the compassion in her gaze. “That makes me sound like a complete widgeon.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“You can help me. You’ll make a capital duchess.”

“You’re mistaken.” He’d never imagined that worldly smile on Pen’s face. His reluctant desire deepened. “I’m too independent to be anyone’s duchess, especially yours.”

“You can change,” he said desperately, wishing he’d taken Lord Wilmott up on his offer of a brandy earlier. Cam wasn’t used to being so wrong-footed with a woman, with anyone. Where had his famous social assurance buggered off to?

“Perhaps I can. If I wanted to change. I don’t.” She sighed with a tolerance that made his skin itch with resentment. “You’d be trading your family’s scandals for mine, and the rumors would continue to dog you all our lives. I follow my heart before my head. I speak my mind. Before the ink was dry on the settlements, I’d do something to upset the old tabbies. You’d find yourself knee-deep in gossip and you’d hate that. You’d start to hate
me
.”

“You’re the only woman I’ve ever pictured as my wife. I decided as a boy that I’d marry you.” He straightened in his chair and bit out each word, before remembering that he came to woo, not browbeat her. “Our families expect me to make you my duchess.”

The regret in her smile did nothing to bolster his optimism. “I’m sorry, Cam. For once in your life, you’ll have to disappoint expectations.” Her gaze sharpened in a way that he didn’t completely understand. “I know you don’t love me.”

He flinched back as though she’d struck him. Damn, damn, damn.
Love.
He’d thought Pen too smart to fall prey to mawkish sentimentality. “I esteem you. I admire you. I enjoy your company. You know the Fentonwyck estate. You know
me.
”

“All very gratifying, I’m sure.” Her smile turned sour. “But I won’t marry without love.”

He surged to his feet. “We both have parents who married for love. As a result of
love
, my father descended into cruelty and obsession and my mother became a byword for promiscuity. Pardon me saying so, but your parents aren’t much better. Doesn’t that convince you that friendship and respect form a stronger basis for marriage than passing physical passion?”

“I doubt that either my parents or yours understood what love truly is.” Emotion thickened her voice and strengthened his premonition of failure. “Love means wanting the best for the beloved, whatever the cost. Love means sacrificing everything to achieve the beloved’s happiness.”

“You’re an idealist,” he said disdainfully.

“Yes, Cam, I am.” She rose with more circumspection—an adjective he’d never before associated with Pen Thorne—and regarded him with an unreadable expression. For a woman who confessed lack of control, she was remarkably controlled. “I believe love makes life worth living and nobody should marry without it. You’re too young to settle for second best.”

He placed a short rein on his temper. He was rarely angry, but right now, he wanted to fling one of the smug Ming dogs on the mantelpiece into the fire. “I’m twenty-seven.”

She released an impatient huff. “Well, I’m only nineteen. I’m definitely too young to settle for second best.”

“I hardly think becoming the Duchess of Sedgemoor
counts as second best,” he said frigidly, wondering just where his childhood friend had gone.

Pen sighed as if she understood his turmoil. “It is when the duke offers only a lukewarm attachment.”

Resentment tightened his gut. He didn’t want to be understood. He hoped like hell she hadn’t noticed his bristling sexual awareness. Having Pen recognize his unwilling desire just as she sent him away with a flea in his ear seemed the final humiliation.

“Would you rather I lied?” he growled.

She winced as though he’d hit her. “Even if you lied, I wouldn’t believe you, Cam. I’ve known you too long. And you set your mind against love long ago.”

He struggled for a reasonable tone. Blustering would only make her dig her heels in. The encounter verged dangerously close to a quarrel. “Pen, think of the advantages.”

Her jaw set in an obstinate line. “Right now, aside from the obvious fact of your riches, I can’t see any.”

His appeal to her worldly interests disappointed her. Shame knotted his gut. With regret, he recalled the days when in her eyes, he could do no wrong. He drew himself up to his full height and glared.

“There’s no point going all ducal, Cam,” she said curtly, not, blast her, remotely cowed. “That look lost its power over me before you went to Eton.”

She shifted closer, stretching one hand toward the mantel. When he noticed how her fingers trembled, he faced the unpleasant truth that despite outward calm, this encounter upset her.

Of course it did. She felt things deeply. More than once, he’d caught Pen crying alone after her brothers’ teasing had struck a painful spot. She was proud, Penelope Thorne. Another desirable quality in a cracking duchess.

But clearly not his duchess. Pen didn’t have a monopoly on pride. Cam regarded her down his long nose and spoke as coldly as he’d speak to an overweening acquaintance. “I gather that you’re refusing me.”

The knuckles on the hand clutching the mantel turned white, although her voice remained steady. “Yes, I am.” She paused. “I appreciate your condescension.”

That was so obviously untrue that under other circumstances, he’d have laughed. But pique shredded his sense of humor. Through his outrage, he knew that he behaved badly. However unfairly, he blamed Pen for that unprecedented state of affairs too.

He bowed shortly and spoke in a clipped voice. “In that case, Miss Thorne, I’ll waste no more of your valuable time. I wish you well.”

Something that might have been pain flared in her dark eyes, but he was too angry and, much as he hated to admit it, wounded to pay heed. She stepped toward him. “Cam—”

“Good day, madam.”

He turned on his heel and stalked off.

Pen watched Cam march out of her father’s library, his back rigid with displeasure, and told herself that she’d done the right thing. The only thing she could in honor have done.

Right now she didn’t feel that way. She felt like she’d swallowed toads. She clung to the mantel to stay upright on legs likely to crumple beneath her.

Her anguish didn’t change merciless reality. Cam didn’t love her. Cam would never love her. Nothing in today’s awkward, painful encounter had convinced her otherwise.

As a foolish child, she’d dreamed of him tumbling head over heels in love with her. What girl brought up in close proximity to the magnificent Rothermere heir wouldn’t
imagine a fairy-tale future? Especially when her mother encouraged her.

But that was before Pen had grown up and recognized the stark truth. A truth ruthlessly confirmed when she was sixteen. One summer at Fentonwyck, she’d overheard Cam talking to his best friend Richard Harmsworth about discouraging a local belle’s advances. When Richard had blamed the girl’s antics on love, Cam had responded with cutting contempt and said that was even more reason to steer clear of the unfortunate lady.

Romantic love has no place in my life now or ever, old chap. Let other fellows make asses of themselves. I’ve seen too much of the damage that poisonous emotion can wreak. It’s a trap and a deceit and a damned nuisance. I’ll never marry a woman who expects me to love her.

Pen felt sick to recall that self-assured pronouncement. Perhaps she might have dismissed his remarks as a young man’s bravado, except that in the three years since, everything she’d seen of Cam confirmed that he’d meant every word.

Even with those closest to him—Richard, his sister, Pen—he kept some element of himself apart, untouchable. Over the years that distance had only grown more marked.

Camden Rothermere was rich, handsome, clever, honorable, and brave. And completely self-sufficient.

Pen had prayed that Cam would ignore his late mother’s matchmaking, but of course, he considered it his duty to offer for Penelope. Just as he considered it his duty to inform her that his interest was purely dynastic.

If she’d harbored the tiniest shred of hope of melting the ice in his heart, she’d disregard questions of her notorious family and headstrong inclinations. She’d even try to make herself anew in the image he wanted.

But she knew Cam as she knew herself, and she’d never been a fool.

Cam wouldn’t countenance a marriage based on love and she couldn’t countenance a marriage that wasn’t. She never went into anything halfhearted, and a loveless union would destroy her.

Pen remained trembling near the fireplace, knowing that her family awaited news of her engagement. Her refusal of the greatest marital prize in the kingdom would set the cat among the Thorne pigeons. Right now, her control was so precarious; she shied from her mother’s bullying.

She fought a childish urge to cry. If she cried, there would be endless questions and more bullying. Her mother saw tears as opportunity for manipulation, not for comfort.

Pen sucked in a shaky breath and although she’d sworn that she wouldn’t, she rushed to the window facing the long drive.

Cam cantered away on his magnificent bay horse. He didn’t glance behind to catch her staring after him. Why would he? He’d want to get as far away from her as he could. For a famously self-controlled man, he’d verged very close to losing his temper this afternoon.

That had been a surprise. She hadn’t imagined that he cared so much about marrying her. In truth, she hadn’t imagined he cared at all.

But then, he’d expected her to say yes without hesitation. Despite the fact that Penelope Thorne was wrong for him on every count.

Except perhaps one.

The fact that she’d love him until she died.

Chapter One

Calais, France, January 1828

T
hrough the bleak hours between midnight and dawn, the candles burned low in the shabby room high in the dilapidated inn. Wind rattled the ill-fitting windowpanes and carried the creaking of boats at their moorings and the reek of salt and rotting fish. The man lying in the narrow bed gasped for every breath.

Camden Rothermere, Duke of Sedgemoor, leaned forward to plump the thin pillows in a futile attempt to offer his dying friend some relief. When Cam sank into his wooden chair beside the bed, Peter Thorne’s eyes opened.

Although he and Peter hadn’t been close in years, Cam knew about his friend’s numerous reverses. The Thornes were famously rackety, and a son and heir who gambled away his fortune was hardly the worst of it.

Cam had arrived in Calais a few hours ago and rushed straight here to find the doctor in attendance. He’d cornered
the man before he left. The harassed French medico had been blunt about his patient’s prospects.

At first, Peter had drifted close to unconsciousness, but the eyes focusing on Cam now were clear and aware. Eyes sunk in dark hollows in a face that carried no spare flesh. It was like staring into a skull.

“You… came.”

The words were hoarse, slow in emerging, and ended in a fit of coughing. Swiftly Cam fetched some water in a chipped cup. After a sip, the sick man collapsed exhausted against the hard mattress.

“Of course I came.” Anguish and outrage gripped Cam. Peter had been a companion in childhood games, a participant in university hijinks. He was only thirty-five, the same age as Cam, too bloody young to die.

“Wasn’t sure you would,” Peter gasped before succumbing to another coughing fit.

Cam offered more water. “We’ve always been friends.”

“From boyhood.” The response was a papery whisper. “Although you’ll wish me to the devil tonight.”

“Never.”

“Don’t speak… too soon.” He closed his eyes and Cam wondered whether he slept. The doctor had said that the end would come tonight. Looking into Peter’s bloodless features, Cam couldn’t doubt that conclusion.

Grief stabbed his gut, made his hand shake. He placed the cup on the crowded nightstand before he spilled the water. He wasn’t a religious man, but he found himself murmuring a prayer for a swift end to his friend’s sufferings.

“I need your help.”

Cam started to hear Peter speak. Spidery hands plucked fretfully at the threadbare covers drawn high on this cold night. If Cam thought it would do an ounce of good, he’d
shift his friend to the best inn in town. But even without the doctor’s warning, he saw that Peter’s time was measured in hours, perhaps even minutes. Relocating him would be cruel rather than kind.

“It’s Pen.”