Chasing the Duke: Steamy Second Chance Regency Romance

by Tracy Sumner

  On a hard pulse of pleasure, she gasped and arched, losing her rhythm and the kiss, darkness edging her vision as a wave of ecstasy, more potent than any she’d experienced, caught her in its grip. Pressing her cheek to the mattress, she watched Tristan’s hand twist in the counterpane until his knuckles whitened, and this exhibit of arousal pushed her over the edge.

  “Thank God,” he whispered into her shoulder as she convulsed around him, her cry ringing through the room. He held her close as she shuddered, then he followed seconds later, his arms tensing, his groan tortured, her name spilling from his lips the most erotic sound she’d ever heard.

  To think she’d done this to him, left him panting, trembling…

  For a long moment, they lay still, limbs tangled, skin slick, lungs churning.

  When Camille was able to open her eyes, she found Tristan braced on his elbows, staring down at her with a look of bewilderment. “I just died and went to heaven,” he rasped and rolled to his back, pulling her with him. She collapsed atop his chest, his heartbeat pounding beneath her ear, her own a dizzying rush through her veins. Head to toe, she was a quivering mass of nerve endings. And between her legs, a part of her body that would never be the same, oh, my…

  “Tris, is it always—”

  “No,” he said, cutting off her question. He laughed weakly and tightened his arm around her, his rough kiss dusting the crown of her head. “Good God, no. If it were, people wouldn’t leave the house. I’ve never experienced anything like this, Princess. Like you.”

  Camille wanted to ask more. How many positions were there? Did it sometimes last longer? When could he do it again? Because she could do it again, her body was ready. But the pang of jealousy constricting her chest meant her heart was not. That damned actress, she groused and blew a sigh across his collarbone. Fathoming that he’d experienced anything close to this with another woman sliced like a blade.

  Pride and possession she had no right to feel battled inside her.

  This was the danger, the risk, the trap.

  Owning Tristan, even for one night, and losing him to fate, to life, was going to rip her apart. Her childhood obsession becoming her one, true love now seemed marginally hard to manage when she’d thought it would be easy to experience this and leave him to his life while continuing on with hers.

  “What’s the fit of pique?” he asked in a sleepy rumble. “Even in my near delirium, I can feel your mind churning.”

  She drew a circle around his nipple and watched it pebble, felt his body tense. “You promised two. Times. The after, remember?”

  He mumbled a vague response.

  She waited, the silence drawing out as she trailed her hand down his body. His sex was hardening when she wrapped her fingers around it. She’d not touched him there yet. Rigid, silky smooth, moist. Wonderful.

  “You’re insatiable, is that it?” His tone was light but filled with a breathless urgency that told her she was doing something right.

  “Maybe,” she returned and stroked, learning her way. Then his hand was there, guiding her, showing her what he liked.

  She could, she reasoned, get used to this.

  He groaned softly, deep in his throat. “I suppose I must stand by my promise.” Sinking his fingers into her hair, he rolled, pressing her into the mattress and claiming her.

  And she was lost.

  Chapter 6

  Where a discarded letter causes trouble.

  Camille watched Tristan sleep as the moon crawled high in the sky, milky light flooding the bedchamber and bathing the world white. Midnight or just after, she’d guess. Sitting up, she stretched and shifted, feeling unfamiliar twinges in a well-loved body.

  Love.

  Gazing at him, she cataloged his every feature from head to toe, able to do so without his probing green eyes throwing her off-balance. He looked younger, long eyelashes dusting his cheek, slender lips slightly parted, innocent in a way he wasn’t. Not anymore. She frowned and reached to trace the scar on his shoulder, then drew her hand back. He didn’t sleep well. Nightmares, which he’d told her about in brief. So she wouldn’t wake him. Not when they’d made love three times already, and he’d tumbled into sleep after the last with little more than a kiss and sigh. She giggled and pressed the back of her hand to her lips. Three. Who would have imagined it? Twice in Tristan’s bed and once while standing, her legs wrapped around his hips, back pressed to the wall. So he’d been the only one on his feet.

  Such a different feeling, that position, like he touched her in places he couldn’t while lying down. He’d barely made it inside her before her release began to overtake her.

  She dreamily shook her head, still dazed from their night together.

  Drawing the wrinkled sheet to his chest, Camille crawled from the bed, snatched Tristan’s shirt from the floor, and snaked her arms through the sleeves. Her stomach growled, and she remembered she hadn’t had a bite to eat since breakfast. And it was freezing in the bedchamber. She’d round up whatever foodstuff was in the lodge, the plums she’d brought if nothing else, start a fire in the hearth…and tell him she loved him. Ask him, not beg, mind you, to consider giving them a chance. Despite his fears about the future, despite hers about losing her independence, this…she glanced back at her slumbering duke, this could very well be something.

  Something magical, something extraordinary.

  Something like love.

  The wadded foolscap lying on the faded carpet caught her eye as she passed the desk. Glancing back, she noted Tristan’s chest rising and falling in a fixed rhythm. Crouching, she smoothed the sheet flat with her hand. A nagging prick of guilt hit her, but she lifted the letter into the moonlight and read it anyway.

  A before-unknown inheritance should arrive by Christmas. A deceased cousin of Lady Bellington’s would be appropriate, someone distant enough to be difficult to locate in Debrett’s. Direct funds to run Longleat Manor indefinitely.

  Camille swallowed hard and sat back on her heels. Scrambled to her feet to pilfer through the correspondence scattered across the desk. A completed letter was there, addressed to the Tierney family’s solicitor in London. Apparently, Tristan’s solution to the problem, her problem, had been to create an inheritance. So she needn’t marry Ridley.

  Or him.

  The air quite literally vanished from her lungs.

  Hand trembling, she grabbed a quill pen, dipped the tip in the inkwell, and scribbled her opinion across the top of the letter.

  Then she dressed and stalked from Tierney Hall’s hunting lodge.

  And took her blasted plums with her.

  Tristan roused slowly, groggy after what felt like hours of actual sleep. He could only think, I’ve found my duchess. Under his nose all along. This, followed by a private declaration that should have scared the piss from him but didn’t, I’m getting married.

  Maybe even before Christmas.

  He turned, smoothing his hand over her side of the bed. Sunlight was edging in around the drawn curtains, a pleasing frame of gold. Daylight. A full night’s sleep, the first in years. Stretching, he smiled to himself. Her side of the bed. He liked the sound of that. Camille would always have a side with him from now on. She was the answer to his dreams. His path to the future, to happiness, to peace. To think, he’d considered letting Ridley marry her. Even if she hadn’t cried off, even if they hadn’t sealed their fate during a lush, remarkable night, that wouldn’t have happened.

  A daft idiot, he’d been twitching with jealousy since the night of his return.

  He sat up, a slight twinge pinging his back, guessing Camille was rounding up food as they’d eaten nothing last night. They’d swigged wine and whispered and laughed and made love. Again. And again. The last time shoved against the wall, him holding her up, hence the pain in his back. She had this neat trick, sucking on his tongue when she kissed him, which made him lose his mind. Lose. His. Mind. And her eyes, they’d gone this exacting shade of green, like fresh limes, when she slid over the brink
. Impossibly beautiful.

  And horribly arousing.

  He’d never experienced a night like it, a woman like it, not once, not ever. He’d known he would marry her, so he’d remained inside her to completion, the first time he’d ever done that. Bliss.

  His cock boosted the sheet as images commandeered his mind. Camille astride him, underneath him, legs locked around his waist, arms looped around his neck. Her mind invading his. She’d asked curious, delightful questions about other positions, other locations.

  Was it possible on a chair? Outside? In the bath?

  She’d damn-near talked him into a state of frenzy.

  With the winter sunlight flowing over him, his body spent, his heart light, he accepted his existence was shifting. He was going to make Camille his duchess, then have a family. Have a life. Build her the finest greenhouse in England. Repair his tenant’s homes and the village’s roads, build a new school, and expand the church. He had ideas, thousands of them. He’d simply needed someone to help bring them into play.

  He’d needed a reason to live again.

  He’d found one. Found her.

  The lengthening silence and extreme chill in the room began to register. The crack of a branch against the windowpane, wind whistling down an empty hearth, but nothing from inside the lodge. Not a breath aside from his. He drew one scented with her tantalizing essence as a flash of unease stirred his senses.

  His gaze landed on his desk, papers jumbled, the letters he’d started then balled up in frustration and chucked to the floor tossed about. His effort to find a way out of having Camille marry Ridley without Tristan having to marry her himself. Scrambling from the bed, he approached the mess as if it were a blazing coal someone had asked him to shove down his trousers. Hesitant but certain, his belly clenched, a gut-sure feeling he usually paid attention to.

  Oh, no. Not good.

  Her handwriting, exhibited in a hastily-sketched note across the top of the letter, was lovely and delicate and strong. As she was.

  Fury pulsed from her words like blood from a wound.

  You have honor, I have pride. Thank you, but no.

  “Bloody hell,” Tristan whispered and crushed the vellum in his fist.

  He stalked into the main room of the lodge, searching the corner where she’d dropped them yesterday. No basket, no plums.

  Bracing his hand on the wall, he hung his head with a stricken groan.

  A very angry future duchess was on the loose. And a very persistent duke was going to catch her.

  “Where is she?” Tristan snapped as he stalked into Lady Fontaine’s lavender parlor two hours later. Her favorite room, and the one she’d summoned him to for every gentle scolding of his youth, it fairly pulsed with femininity and stylish restraint. And the raw scent of pine. She stood before that silly tree he’d chopped down a mere four days ago, when it seemed like a hundred, her smile coy, sly, curling wickedly at the edges.

  Oh, he just bet she loved this.

  “My darling duke. What a surprise.” She turned a sparkly silver ball in her hand and hung it from a branch. Tapped it once to send it swinging. “Or not.”

  He took a fast step forward, into the room. “Consider me foolish, but I have a feeling Camille isn’t here. That she’s gone racing off in a fit of ire you made no effort to talk her out of.” He yanked his beaver hat from his head and muscled his fingers through his hair. “Am I correct?”

  Lady Fontaine held up a slim tallow candle. “Not a good idea to place these on the tree, do you agree? Lady Markem tried tapers on hers. Gorgeous, those sparks of light. Until the wood caught fire. Torched her parlor and the library.” She sighed and set the candle atop the hearth mantle. “Lord Markem is most displeased.”

  “You could have stopped her.” He slapped his hat against his thigh, then jammed it back on his head, entirely willing to be impolite in the presence of a lady. He’d dressed for London, known he was likely heading there. Oswald was in the carriage, stewing, annoyed to be running back to Town before his promised holiday was complete. Now, he had a furious woman and valet to soothe. “You’ve been dangling your niece before me like a tasty biscuit since I arrived in Yorkshire, and now that I’ve taken a bite, you let her leave?”

  “Certainly, I could have kept her here.” She hung a length of crimson yarn and stepped back to review her display. “But where’s the fun in making things too easy, darling?”

  “I’m going to make her my duchess, so there’s nothing scandalous about my intentions, should you be wondering. There was no need to introduce competition into the proceedings when there’s always been too much.”

  “Oh, you foolish boy, I know that. I know you. Tristan Tierney, honorable to his bones. I never expected less.” She closed the distance between them and tilted his head from his study of the Aubusson rug—until he had nowhere to look but into her wise, knowing gaze. “At least she didn’t want to leave.”

  Tristan perked up at this. “She didn’t?”

  Lady Fontaine patted his cheek. “You must have been impressive, aside from your rather amateurish wooing. I had to practically push her out the door while she was listing the many reasons to flee.”

  “Where, Bel?”

  “She decided to spend the holiday with Edward if you must know. In that filthy city. Leaving me to water the plants in the conservatory on a dreadfully regimented schedule. I’ll be running out there three times a day, thanks to your abysmal courting skills.”

  “I have no idea how to court anyone. I’ve never been in love before.”

  Lady Fontaine’s eyes pooled with tears. Sniffing, she leaned in to hug him. He hugged her back, the woman who’d been more of a mother to him than his own. “Chase your duchess, my darling. Prove to her you will.”

  So chase he would.

  Chapter 7

  Where a future duchess receives an invitation.

  Tristan stepped through the doorway of White’s two days later and into a world he’d left behind. Before the war, he’d been a part of this, he recalled as he gazed around the candlelit room, holly and mistletoe hung here and there to provide a whiff of the season. Murmured conversation over brandy and gin, knowing laughter, ribald jokes, cards, dice, a fresh copy of The Times on every table.

  The solid fragrance of wealth and promise, and at times, despair.

  He gave his coat, hat, and cane to an attendant and moved to the salon he’d been directed to, the last on the left. Not a private room; Edward Bellington, the Marquess of Rutherford, couldn’t afford private lodgings, not if his ancestral estate was in financial distress. Tristan suspected he was even having trouble paying his dues, but some things in society were compulsory.

  Or seemed it.

  Tristan shook off the dispiriting thought and crossed into the dimly-lit salon. His childhood friend sat in a tufted armchair, book in hand, tumbler by his side, firelight rolling over him in tawny waves. He had Camille’s nose, or she his. The shape of the eyes the same but not the coloring. The hair, no, not quite. Camille’s was thicker, lush, silky, as you desired when you were tunneling your hands through it.

  “Are you coming in, Tris, or are you going to stand there deliberating about the wallpaper?”

  Tristan pushed off his doorjamb perch and strolled inside, his heart seizing at what he needed to say, the speech he’d practiced on the carriage ride over. Camille’s father was deceased, so this left Edward as head of the Bellington family. It was this man, his closest friend, he’d have to open his heart to.

  I’m in love with your sister. The one who battled the angry swan, the termagant. Yes, that’s her.

  Instead, he held his composure, pouring brandy from the decanter on the sideboard, then crossing to sprawl in the seat opposite Edward. Kicking one polished Hessian atop the other, he released a modest yawn. “How is she?” he asked, charging in right off, ruining his strategy to discuss London’s foul weather before diving into the real reason he was in town.

  To chase down the man’s hellion of
a sister.

  Edward dipped his head, his laughter so familiar, so welcome, Tristan’s gut clenched. Affection poured over him like a drenching rain, washing away any fear he’d had that they’d misplaced their friendship.

  “I’m not sure what you find so amusing,” Tristan mumbled into his glass.

  Edward propped his chin on his fist and grinned. It was Camille’s maddening smile, to be sure, slapped across her brother’s handsome face. “I’m sure you don’t. The ones stuck in it never do. I’m going to wring every ounce of joy from this. London is boring as hell during the winter, don’t you know? This, you and Camille, is more than I’d hoped for, more than I’d dreamed of. God knows, she worked for it, the tenacious sprite, hanging in there until the end. Imagine, the two people, aside from my wife, I love most in the world finding each other. Unbelievable.” He sipped slowly, his smile positively luminous. “I wondered how long it’d be before you arrived. Less than three days, I said to myself, means the man is besotted. And you made it in two. That’s blind love, which Camille deserves, of course, referring back to all the work she put into getting you. Although she’s a challenge, shall we say, a bit fractious. Likes to get her way.” He raised his glass in a toast. “Good luck to you, my dearest friend. You have my blessing and my sympathy in advance for the nights you get booted from your home by your loving duchess and are forced to sleep on my settee.”

  Well, Tristan reasoned, with relief and a surge of irritation. “I sprinted to town like a feral dog, worried about what she might do, owing to that”—he grimaced—“fractious nature. I already know what I’m getting, and no matter the complexity, I want it. I want her. And if you want Ridley to continue breathing, you’d better make damn sure he doesn’t put one polished patent pump in my way.”