Anna Campbell - What a Duke Dares

“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.

But what could he say to her? You’re too good, You’re too obedient. You’re like a textbook description of the perfect lady and I loathe it. Do something shocking. At the very least, tell me off when I’m my asinine self.

This husband business was a conundrum. One that deepened every day.

And not one he’d solve in Jonas’s impressive front hall while Pen watched with the faint curiosity that counted as interest these days. The old Pen would have told him in no uncertain terms to hurry up. The new Pen waited patiently.

“Your pardon, my dear.” He stepped forward to lift her cape from her shoulders. Briefly he fantasized about Pen in ruby red or deep sapphire. Something to complement the ardent soul that he still, despite all evidence, believed she possessed.

But the dress was gray with long sleeves and a bodice that covered her to the collarbones. Logic insisted that not every gown she’d ordered from the ruinously expensive modiste was gray. It merely felt like it.

He was sure he’d seen some beige.

Pen was still technically in mourning for Peter, although she could wear colors after three months, and her marriage meant that only sticklers would count the days since her brother’s death. But damn it, Cam had married a beautiful, sensual woman, and she dressed like a blasted nun.

The irony struck him that he’d asked fate for a wife who was the opposite of his mother. Fate had very generously granted his wish.

He wanted to plant fate a facer, then kick it in the ribs for good measure.

“Your Grace?” Pen asked softly.

He realized he stared blankly at her. “You look lovely,” he said with the deathly politeness that had infected his behavior too.

Regally she inclined her head. “Thank you.”

Again, Cam questioned his discontent. No woman had ever appeared more the duchess. Yet he wanted to wrench the diamond combs from Pen’s black hair and rend the French silk dress and kiss her until her lips were red and swollen and she never called him “Your Grace” again.

He offered his arm. In bed, her exquisite body was his to do with as he willed. During waking hours, she kept physical contact to a minimum. Her hand lay so lightly on his arm that he hardly felt her through his black superfine sleeve.

As if on a royal progress, they ascended the staircase. Cam had no idea what lurked in Pen’s mind. Once he thought he knew her as well as he knew the men awaiting them. Now, thanks to the wedding ring on her slender finger, she’d become an enigma.

The butler flung open the drawing room door. “The Duke and Duchess of Sedgemoor.”

Cam mustered a smile appropriate to a newly married man, even if it threatened to crack his jaw, and ushered his bride forward to meet his dearest friends.

Every person in that drawing room cared for Cam, more than he deserved.

Jonas, Lord Hillbrook, turned from his dark-haired wife Sidonie and strode forward, hand outstretched. A smile lightened his scarred, saturnine features. “Cam! About time you introduced us to your duchess. Sidonie and I were about to set up camp at the gates of Fentonwyck.”

“I suspect your definition of camping would differ from most people’s.” Cam clasped his friend’s hand with a warmth that contained a shaming measure of relief. The last time he and Jonas had met, the encounter had ended in a bitter quarrel over his plans to marry Lady Marianne. “Silk tents, servants, and champagne at the least.”

“I was afraid you didn’t invite us to your wedding because you thought I’d scare your wife.” The humor sparking in his dark eyes softened the remark, although Jonas’s face aroused unease, even now.

“I wanted to keep my bride to myself.” Cam released Jonas’s hand. “Penelope, this is our host, Jonas Merrick, Viscount Hillbrook.”

“My lord.” Pen dipped into a curtsy so graceful that Cam’s heart stopped. The coolness between them didn’t lessen her power over him.

Jonas bent over Pen’s hand with an aplomb remarkable in such a big, heavily muscled man. “Your Grace, welcome to my home.” He straightened and gestured to Sidonie who slid her hand around his waist with a natural affection that pierced Cam’s barricaded heart with envy.

When he’d married Pen, he’d hoped that they’d establish such physical closeness. Whereas for all that they stood together, an invisible chasm a hundred yards wide separated them.

“Your Grace, I’ve been in a fever of curiosity since Cam wrote to tell us of his wedding,” Sidonie said. “And in such haste that we couldn’t attend the ceremony.”

Cam caught Pen’s hunted look, although the meaningless smile remained. It was a smile Cam had never seen until Pen became his duchess. Once, she would have responded with a witty remark. The expression in her eyes now hinted that she considered heading for the hills.

Cam saved her from replying. “Our marriage isn’t as sudden as it appears. Pen and I have known each other since childhood.”

Sir Richard Harmsworth stepped forward to take Pen’s hand. “Pen, dashed good to see you. I thought you were lost to us forever. You’ll adorn London as you’ve adorned Paris and Rome.”

“Richard.” There was no mistaking Pen’s pleasure. An unforced pleasure that Cam couldn’t remember her targeting toward him since her adolescence. “I doubted you’d remember me.”

“Remember you? Why, when you sailed for Calais, you broke my heart.” With his famous urbanity, Richard pressed his lips to Pen’s cheek, the privilege of long-standing friendship.

For one fraught moment, Cam glared at the golden-haired fellow kissing his wife, and he wanted to thump the man who had been his best friend since their miserable days at Eton. With a shock he recognized two unwelcome facts. The first was that despite his plans for a sensible, calm marriage, his wife aroused a jealousy that wouldn’t discredit his father. The second was that the roots of this estrangement with Pen extended to long before his wedding.

“I see you still talk a lot of nonsense.” For the first time that night, Pen’s smile looked real. Cam’s jealousy stirred anew, even though he knew their flirting meant nothing and Richard was devoted to his wife.

“He does indeed,” Genevieve Harmsworth said drily. “Welcome to London, Your Grace.”

Richard kept Pen’s hand, curse him, while he turned to the lovely blond woman he’d married six months ago. “Pen, allow me to introduce my clever wife, Genevieve. The only silly thing she ever did was to marry a dunderhead.”

“Good evening, Lady Harmsworth,” Pen said.

“Your false modesty convinces nobody, darling,” Genevieve told her husband.

“I’m trying to be charming,” he retorted. Luckily for his continuing health, he released Pen’s hand.

“And succeeding,” Pen said quickly. “Lady Harmsworth, I’m a great admirer of your work.”

Genevieve smiled. “You know just the right thing to say. I’m still feeling my way in London. Fortunately everybody is so enamored of my husband that my odd ways go unnoticed.”

Cam glanced across to Jonas and Sidonie. To his dismay, both looked troubled. Did they disapprove of his wife? He had an unwelcome inkling that they didn’t find Pen unsatisfactory, but their old friend Camden Rothermere.

Cam broadened his smile until he grinned like a damn effigy at a fair. Still he knew that his show wouldn’t convince Jonas and Sidonie. They knew how to glean emotion from mere pretense.

Richard and Genevieve still glowed with wedded bliss. It must be perfectly obvious that Cam and Pen… didn’t. Bugger it, he should have avoided introducing Pen in such intimate surroundings. In a public setting, the cracks in their union might be less apparent.

Thank God for Genevieve, who turned out to be familiar with Pen’s writing. She drew his wife toward a chaise longue, asking about some excavations outside Rome.

Cam sucked in his first full breath since arriving. At least Pen wouldn’t feel a complete outsider. Genevieve’s welcome made Pen less the pallid Duchess of Sedgemoor and more like the vivid woman he’d known in Italy.

“Cam?”

Cam started from studying his wife to see Jonas extending a glass of champagne. He hoped that his expression didn’t betray his thoughts, but he had a nasty feeling that it did. He accepted the wine. “Thank you.”

Richard and Sidonie chatted beside the fireplace. Jonas showed no concern. But then, Jonas knew that Sidonie adored the ground he walked upon. Sourly Cam wondered what that felt like, before he reminded himself that the absence of love in his marriage was a blessing, not a curse. A wife who adored a man who couldn’t love her back would make a damned uncomfortable companion.