Chasing the Duke: Steamy Second Chance Regency Romance

by Tracy Sumner

  Camille cringed and brought her arm over her face. She’d known her aunt had male friends years ago, but to discuss them was a different matter altogether. And thinking about Tristan in bed with another woman made her want to smash her tumbler against the wall. “I’m sure I don’t want to hear this.”

  Bel turned to face her niece, grasped her hand, and held on tight. “I won’t allow you to marry Ridley to save Longleat, Camille. Do you hear me? We can go to London. It might even be the best solution. You’ll marry for love or not at all. I hoped if Mercer spent time with you, your infatuation would rise up and knock him in the head, now that you’re old enough to act on it. You’ve both turned out so well, so pleasingly pretty, and he a hero, a difficult but good man. I will say, he couldn’t remove his gaze from you today, though he tried mightily to. I’m surprised Ridley didn’t challenge him, but he knows better. Mercer would thrash him, the pup.”

  “Maybe I love Ridley,” Camille muttered after finishing the last of her brandy. Her head and belly were as warm as a lit ember, and she suddenly felt quite talkative. And sleepy.

  Bel’s gasp didn’t disappear behind the hand she threw to her lips. “Do you?”

  “I’m not chasing a duke. Never, ever, ever again.”

  Her aunt groaned and dropped her head. “I know he brought up the swan story, a bit cheeky, the naughty boy, but it’s a fond remembrance among family.”

  Camille snorted, switched glasses with Bel and emptied it.

  “Oh, darling”—she wrestled the crystal away from Camille—“you’re going to be foxed.”

  Camille leaned back, closed her eyes, and imagined what it would be like to do more than kiss a man—when the kisses themselves were so, so good. Her mind swam with suggestive images that sent hot streaks along her skin. “He kisses like a demon. Horribly addictive, I imagine. Like opium. Absinthe even.”

  Bel sputtered a laugh. “Oh, dear, me, you are half-sprung. This is the greatest conversation of my life. Do go on.”

  “He has an enviable bottom lip I shall cling to next time. I think he’d like that. He didn’t rush it, didn’t force me. It was all my decision. I felt powerful.”

  “Oh, this is more than I’d hoped for. Mercer’s not only lovely but a generous lover. So there will be a next time. How could there not when you make a simple kiss sound so glorious?”

  Camille twisted her hands together in her lap. Dejected. Guilt-ridden. Ashamed. “No. The war hero doesn’t want to cuckold Ridley, can you believe it? I suppose I was willing to, ye of little moral fiber. My one chance to experience passion before marriage to a man I feel no passion for, and Mercer’s ruining it with his bloody principles.” She said the last in the same tone as she’d say chamber pot. “In any case, he doesn’t know what he wants. It was a kiss to kill, true, but nothing more. I stunned him, I stunned myself, but he still ran off with his tail between his legs. Champion sprinter, our devilish duke.”

  “So, only a kiss.” Bel gave her pearls a good spin. “The killing kind, which must be the best.”

  Camille made a mark in the air. “Correct.”

  “With no proposal attached to it.”

  Another mark. “Correct.”

  “Then you’ll simply have to compromise him. While we let him think it’s his decision, since he’s wavering. You’ll force his hand in ways tried and true. Foolproof, feminine chicanery. We only have to devise a plan.”

  “Sounds like a devious trick to play on a family friend.”

  “I was compromised by multiple wonderful men in my youth, Camille. I highly recommend it. It’s time men got theirs.”

  Countess Milburn chose this moment to stagger into the library, her ivory-tipped cane in hand. When it got later in the day, her hip tended to lock up, and she wouldn’t dare use it if men were present. “He left, did he? Ruins my plans, right down the drain with the filthy bathwater.”

  Camille groaned low in her throat.

  Bel gave her pearls an additional rattling shake. “Ridley had to get back to his mother. You know the dowager viscountess doesn’t like to be alone in the Mayfair residence. As dangerous as a rookery to her mind. Evidently, a thousand servants aren’t enough to comfort her.”

  The countess’s limping shuffle sounded as she crossed the room, then Camille heard the decanter clink. So they were all going to get foxed this evening. “I don’t care an owl's hoot about Ridley! My grand celebration just lost all significance. Imagine, a duke at the Milburn winter ball for the first time since Parnell attended in 1801. And he was nothing to look at, nothing like this one. Mercer’s attendance would have hit the gossip sheets, posthaste. Everyone knows he’s kept a low profile since blasted Waterloo. The rumor is, he’s not even keeping a mistress. The opera singer was years ago, wasn’t she, before he left?”

  “Actress,” Camille murmured.

  “Well, no matter, because she’s out of the picture. My ball could have served as his reintroduction to society. A chance to snatch up a wildly available man, if only for one night. I have a footman oil all the parlor and sitting room locks before a gathering. Incredibly well-maintained should a couple want to utilize the space for fifteen minutes or so. I don’t mind innuendo but don’t want an outright scandal occurring on the premises.” She thumped her cane on the floor, three hard blows. “Behind bolted doors is best for all.”

  “Adelia,” Bel gasped, “not in front of an unmarried girl if you please.”

  Camille opened her eyes to find the countess’s belligerent gaze fixed on her. “Balderdash. She’s no girl. Do you see the way she looks at him, like icing atop a biscuit. And don’t go suggesting I’m talking about Ridley! If Mercer ran away with that level of heat licking his skin, my ball is doomed.”

  “I don’t look at him like icing atop anything,” Camille whispered from her slump on the settee, though she feared this was exactly how she’d looked at Tristan and always had. She palmed her aching chest, wishing to disappear from the room and this horrid conversation. “I don’t even like him.” Although he kisses like a dream, she thought somewhat distractedly, brandy a lingering influence.

  “Like it or not, someday he has to marry and put an heir in place. I mentioned there would be several eligible young ladies in attendance.” The countess threw herself into the chair closest to the fire, hooked her cane on the arm, and drank half her brandy in one gulp. “Not all horse-faced misses, either. Lady Monterey has promised to attend. And the Wellesley chit, she’s quite nice to gaze upon. If only she wouldn’t speak. Find a wife, find a mistress, up to you, I told him. I left it open, after alluding to my pristine locks. Always good to let the randy ones know in advance, is my policy.”

  Bel slapped her glass to the table. “Well, that settles it. He’ll never come.”

  “Unless…” Adelia Rothingham-Wicket, Countess Milburn, once the loveliest creature to roam London, shot a sly look Camille’s way. “Unless he has a reason to think he should.”

  Bel scooted forward on the settee, her knees popping. “I love it when you get that Machiavellian tone.”

  “Servants talk and men like competition,” Adelia murmured into her glass. “I witnessed Mercer giving out his own share of piquant looks during our outing today, which is why my hip is acting up. The jaunt across an icy field, not adoring attention from a duke. Who needs a tree inside the house? Hope the blessed thing doesn’t catch fire and burn you up in your sleep.” She sucked on her teeth and nodded, agreeing with her unspoken suggestion. “What if a certain bit of gossip, another man interested in Lady Camille, for instance, a rival laudable enough to get Mercer’s blood flowing, reached Tierney Hall’s lower staff? They chatter the most. It wouldn’t take much scheming for this tidbit to make it to Mercer’s valet. He’s had the same one, that old crone Oswald, since his youth. If the man has any inkling his duke is interested in someone, even if he doesn’t want to be, this could work. And I get the finest winter ball since ’01.”

  Camille lifted her head, unease racing through her as her
aunt and the countess exchanged glowing looks. “Why would I agree to this?”

  Adelia rolled her eyes and huffed out a savage breath. “Must we do all the work here? Because you want him.”

  “I don’t want him.”

  “I’ll try again. Because you want to know if he wants you. If he does, you can decide what to do with him.”

  Camille paused, alcohol swimming through her mind and muddling her thoughts. Did he want her? He’d admitted his attraction, but the Duke of Mercer had been attracted to many women if one believed the broadsheets Countess Milburn valued so much.

  Unaccountably, spitefully, Camille admitted she wanted Tristan to want her so much it decimated him, as her adoration for him had always decimated her. Turnabout was fair play, after all. “I have Ridley,” she finally said in a pained tone speaking little of being glad she had him or this wanting a duke to want her badly business.

  “Posh, that’s nothing to boast about. But the Duke of Mercer…” The countess sent a defiant glance over the rim of her glass. “If you’re so prideful about your prior infatuation, which everyone in England is aware of and which you could take pitying advantage of, well then, we’ll make him come to you. You’re lovely, and he’s noticed. It won’t be hard.”

  Camille slid low on the settee, closing her eyes and praying for sleep to take her. “He won’t agree to it. He won’t come. You’ve seen the last of the man for months, years even.”

  Countess Milburn sniggered and her aunt, after one delicate breath of silence, joined in. Camille listened to them giggle and whisper and plot until slumber and a liberal dose of brandy claimed her.

  Chapter 4

  Where a waltz does the talking.

  Tristan stood in a shadowy corner of the terrace, his back pressed to a snow-dusted windowpane, and gave the assemblage flowing into Countess Milburn’s ancestral castle a bored glance—should anyone have sussed out his hiding place and taken leave to note his expression. He took an appreciative sip from his flask and slipped it back in his waistcoat pocket, wondering what the everlasting hell he was doing here.

  Attending a winter ball in the Yorkshire countryside, that’s what.

  A decision made after his valet, the long-suffering Oswald, told him a juicy snippet he didn’t wish to hear. When Tristan hated balls. Hated dancing, although he was quite good at it. Hated gossip and innuendo and answering questions about Waterloo and where he’d been disappearing to since he returned—on darkened terraces, don’t you know. He wasn’t charming anymore. Wasn’t fit for his title, though he wanted it. Or wanted Tierney Hall, to be precise. He loved it more than any property he owned, and he owned five. His parents had routinely sent him to Yorkshire with his tutor and valet in tow, the servants stepping in where his family faltered. He hadn’t wanted them to come with him. Not after he realized they weren’t a real family.

  Here, he’d always felt at home. At peace.

  Turning, he took the stairs leading to the side garden, drawing a breath of air that frosted his lungs on contact. There would be a servant’s entrance somewhere along the side of the house, near the kitchens, and he meant to use it. He’d show his face at this event, but he wasn’t going through a bloody receiving line.

  Not even for the chance to touch her again.

  Ridley was temporarily out of the picture, but a handsome young marquess of some notoriety was interested in Camille and taking advantage of her betrothed’s absence this very night. Which shouldn’t have mattered one whit to Tristan, but here he was, tromping through ankle-deep slush, his Hessians, when no one wore boots to a ball, filthy, his breeches damp, his skin chilled. He was wounded, in soul if not body, the worst man for her should he have considered offering for her himself, which was not the plan. There was no room in his life for eyes the color of spring rain and kisses that made him forget what year it was.

  Cunning looks and witty rejoinders and a sharp pinch of attraction he didn’t remember feeling before.

  He would act the protector, stepping in for her brother, Edward, since she and her aunt seemed unable to locate a good man between them.

  With a weak curse, Tristan halted at the first service door he came to. What would Camille Bellington—female botanist and entrepreneur—think if he told her he’d spent the last forty-eight hours dodging memories of her fingers tangled in his hair, her lips molded to his, her breath, light and effervescent, sliding down his throat to dent his heart?

  Dodging what he’d like to do if he got his hands on her.

  Not exactly brotherly affection.

  She’d be pleased; she wanted him to pay for not loving her back when it had been an impossibility.

  Now, he was interested. And she was unavailable.

  “Shit,” he said and shoved the door open with his shoulder, music from the ballroom enveloping him like a hug. Ditching his coat and hat in a chair in the deserted hallway, he followed the sound of the orchestra, ignoring the startled looks of the kitchen staff as he muscled his way through them. The aroma was redolent of snug nights by the hearth, holidays, family.

  Nothing he’d ever known.

  As he took the stairs opposite the manor’s main entrance down to the ballroom two at a time, Tristan gave the ache in his chest a hard rub. What silliness was this? He’d never been sentimental, never longed for children. Or a wife.

  Tea and crumpets over The Times.

  Pausing at the edge of the ballroom floor, couples engaged in a quadrille flitting in and out of his vision, he gathered his life was changing.

  A rupture, a separation of the old from the new.

  Because it was the way things were going, Camille stepped into view at the opposite end of the dancefloor, moving in and out of the rectangularly-patterned set with ease. Her hair breathing in candlelight from the many chandeliers and releasing it in a ginger burst. Perching against a marble column, Tristan appropriated a flute from the liveried footman and sipped champagne while he watched.

  No patched gown this evening; no dirty-kneed termagant anywhere in sight.

  She was magnificent. The loveliest woman in the room.

  If Countess Milburn and Lady Fontaine were dangling Camille in front of him, which he’d considered might be happening, it was working.

  His blood was pulsing with the longing to touch her again.

  Sink his fingers in her auburn tresses and capture her lips beneath his. And be prepared for the implosion this time. Slide that exquisite gown—somewhere, depending upon one’s opinion, between green and blue—right off her slender body and show her what it was to worship.

  Tristan reined in his fascination and gazed about the room as if he cared who else was in it. A crowd had gathered, not too close, mind you, his temperament was suspect, but close enough.

  Because he was part of the entertainment.

  Who better to liven up a ball than a reluctant, battle-weary duke?

  The final notes of the song sounded, and couples dipped into neat curtsies at the quadrille’s close. When the musicians broke into the Sussex Waltz, Tristan made his decision. By God, he wasn’t watching her waltz with another man, the bawdiest activity one was allowed to perform in public, while he felt this combustive. Over her. “Hold this for me, will you?” he asked and shoved his flute at an unimaginative baron he’d met years ago at an unimaginative musicale.

  He was across the floor before Camille had a chance to catch her breath and locate her next partner. “Mine, I believe,” he said, coming up behind her, a spot of treachery he could live with. “Lucky you, because I’m staggeringly good at the waltz, risqué though it may be.” Lowering his voice, he closed his fingers about hers. “No dance requires the level of touching this one does. Be prepared, Princess, for the spin of your life.”

  “You arrogant oaf,” she muttered as he tucked her into place. “Your name isn’t on my card this round, and you know it.”

  He counted off the rhythm, then led her into the dance, sweeping her through the first rotation effortlessly. For a tall
woman, she was light as a proverbial feather, following his charge without objection, their bodies in picture-perfect alignment. It made downright shocking images flood his mind. He shook his head and found the wit to respond. “You dare to defy a duke?”

  “Oh, my, no. I would never.” She dipped her chin and batted her lashes, demure as a tigress.

  His laughter had her looking up and into his face with an expression of pure astonishment, honesty, and avarice.

  His breath caught as the world fell away.

  Candlelight shimmered off the unpredictable eyes fixed on him—dark as bluebells this evening—as he maneuvered their owner through a turn, swirling her around the parquet floor as if they’d been born to dance here, on this night, together. Hunger for her, and only her, burned a trail from his brain to his cock. “Your gown is the same color as your eyes. In reality, they’re a different shade every time I look at them. I admit to being spellbound in anticipation of what I may receive.”

  Camille’s step didn’t waver as her lips pressed tight. In annoyance or amusement, he couldn’t tell. “Silliness, this talk. After you forced me into this, you should behave yourself.”

  “My attraction to you is silly?” His eyebrow rose, just the one, a trick women usually liked. “And when have you known me to behave myself?”

  “This discussion is silly,” she said, her tone severe. “And, good point.”

  Definitely annoyed, he decided. “Are you surprised to see me, at least? I don’t usually attend these things, you know. Only Almack’s is worse.”

  “Countess Milburn is dizzy with delight, I’m sure. The best winter ball since 1801.”