Anna Campbell - What a Duke Dares

She looked strained and intense. When she tightened against his incursion, he struggled to contain the urge to push her further, faster. He curled his finger, rubbing the sleek passage with his knuckle. On a choked sound, she lifted her hips. When he kissed her, her ardent response demanded more.

With a slow, suggestive slide, he withdrew. This time, he tested her with two fingers, subtly stretching her. She bit her lip, eyes flaring at his intimate caresses. The craving to taste her sex made his mouth water, but he restrained himself. He bore down with the heel of his hand, making her buck against the mattress. She grabbed his arms with frantic hands. When he pulled free, she released a disappointed whimper.

Her hands fluttered across his chest, setting off blasts of heat wherever they landed. He kissed her again, plunging his tongue into her mouth. As she yielded, the seemingly random brush of her hands became more purposeful. When she flattened her palms against his nipples, he started.

“Do you like that?” She trailed her lips up his cheekbone.

“Yes,” he said, not sure if he did. Her slightest caress threatened incineration.

He gritted his teeth as she circled her palms. Those fiendish hands drifted lower. One curved over his right buttock. The other covered his cock. He groaned with a painful mix of elation and frustration.

Her fingers tightened until he saw stars. “Take off your trousers.”

He reared up on one arm. “You need to be ready.”

To his surprise, she laughed. “Any more ready and I’ll be flying.”

When she pressed the underside, white heat blinded him. “Pen—”

“Do you need help undressing?”

Before Cam could respond to her impudence, she tugged at his trousers. In her haste and inexperience, she was breathtakingly clumsy. Finally his throbbing cock bobbed free.

“Good heavens…” Pen breathed, looking down.

“You saw me last night.”

“You look bigger.” She licked her lips, ratcheting up his arousal. “I think I’m nervous.”

He wrenched her up and kissed her, holding her with one arm while his other hand shucked his trousers. Her mouth was hot and wet and desperate. As he followed her down onto the bed, he slid between her legs and nudged her humid heat. She sighed against his lips and shifted on him. A tilt of his hips and he edged inside.

She caught her breath and stiffened.

In an agony of need, he stopped. He couldn’t bear to hurt her again.

She lay unmoving beneath him.

No, he wouldn’t accept this. Penelope was created for pleasure. And he intended her to achieve it. Or die trying.

With a shaking hand, he touched her sex. Every nerve close to snapping, he caressed her into trembling urgency. She arched and drew him into her. The sudden acceptance had him thrusting before he recalled the devastating price of impatience.

On a sigh like the sweetest music, she twined her arms around him. Her body flowered into glorious welcome.

Pen braced for pain, but between last night and now, her body had adjusted to Cam. This sensation was closer to completion than invasion. After all her running and dodging, she was in Cam’s arms and she’d stay here.

His head dropped to the curve of her shoulder. His soft hair tickled her cheek. His skin was damp and hot.

The long muscles in his back tautened and released under her hands as he moved. To her surprise, the glide of his body set off a faint quake. A quake that intensified when he kissed her neck.

She inhaled sharply as he withdrew to plunge again. Immediately that sweet fullness returned. His spicy scent was the air that she breathed.

Another glorious stasis before he moved once more. This time, he changed the angle. A spiral of tension stirred inside her. Half pleasure, half torment.

He established a powerful rhythm. She clung as the spiral twisted tighter. Instinct made Pen raise her hips. This time, impossibly, he went so deep, he must touch her heart. He groaned encouragement into her shoulder.

Roughly, he raised her knees, changing the angle again. She was shaking and sweating and clawing at him. The tension in her belly coiled and uncoiled. She reached for something she’d never experienced before, some relief from this agonized striving.

Moving faster, Cam’s thrusts became choppy, urgent. His body hardened. She tilted her hips, begging with incoherent sighs for him to fill her.

She was so close. So close.

He bit down hard on her shoulder and flung her over the shining horizon into the melting heat of the sun. Crying out, she shuddered under the onslaught of astonishing, overwhelming, inescapable pleasure.

Brilliant light blinded her and she closed her eyes to retain the rocketing colors. Fire ricocheted through her, searing every corner, making her anew. Through the wild clamor, she felt Cam jerk against her. His groan filled her ears.

She opened hazy eyes to see him rise on his arms. As he spent himself inside her, the strain leached from his face and his eyelids drooped with sensual satisfaction.

Briefly he looked happy, younger, less burdened. As if Camden Rothermere during these seconds became just a man, not the embodiment of centuries of duty and tradition.

Sensual reaction still pounded through Pen. If he’d done this to her on the yacht, she’d have drowned for sure. Right now she didn’t have strength to roll over, let alone swim for her life.

I love you, Cam. I’ve always loved you.

The words welled up. She knew he didn’t love her, but after the shattering honesty of what they’d just shared, she couldn’t keep such a vital secret.

Cam’s kiss was tender. She tasted satiation.

“Thank you,” he said softly. “Thank you for trusting me.”

She stroked the side of his face. “Of course I trusted you, Cam.”

Tears loomed close, making her voice sound rusty. But she didn’t feel like crying. She felt like wrapping this precious, magnificent man in her arms and holding him safe.

He shook his head to deny what she said and she watched his joy retreat. So quickly the familiar self-possession returned. Although physically they were as close as two people could be, she sensed that somewhere in his mind, he established a distance.

That breathtaking consummation had convinced her that they were bonded forever. For him, it threatened defenses that he’d spent a lifetime building.

Her impulsive declaration of love died unspoken and her happiness seeped away even as she still quivered with reaction.

Cam had sealed eternal dominion over her soul. In return, she’d fed his physical hunger.

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.