Her Christmas Earl

Clearly he’d been wrong.

He wasn’t used to being wrong. Confound her, he didn’t like it.

Her voice remained curiously flat. “I’m sorry, Cam. ‘There you have it, then’ won’t pass muster. You’ll need to do better than that.”

From where she stood before the high mullioned window, she studied him much like a schoolmistress surveyed an unpromising student. He only just resisted the urge to run a finger under his unaccountably tight neckcloth.

Good God, this was Pen. She wasn’t a female who put a man through hoops before she fell into harness. She’d never demand more than he could give. She’d never subject a fellow to emotional storms. She’d never lie and cheat and betray.

She was the absolute opposite of his late mother, in fact.

Cam was unaccustomed to feeling like a blockhead, especially with the fairer sex. By nature he wasn’t a vain man, but he’d anticipated a better reaction to his proposal. Pen’s father Lord Wilmott had been in alt to hear that his daughter would become a duchess.

Most definitely, Pen was not in alt.

And she bloody well should be. After all, she was a mere baron’s daughter—and a ramshackle baron at that—while Cam was heir to the nation’s richest dukedom.

The Thornes were an old family, but had always had a justified reputation for trouble. In times of political unrest, they backed the wrong side. If they managed to lay their hands on any money, they lost it, usually in some disreputable pursuit. “Wine, women and song” should be the family motto instead of the much more staid and highly inappropriate “steadfast and faithful.”

The previous generation had spawned a handful of eccentrics, including an uncle who had married his housekeeper. Bigamously as it had turned out. Lord Wilmott had squandered his wife’s dowry on a succession of greedy strumpets. Pen’s aunt ran with a dissolute crowd on the Continent. Peter, Cam’s friend and the current heir, was devoted to the gaming tables and disastrous investments. If Cam’s mother hadn’t been great friends with Lady Wilmott, the families would have had little contact.

What made Pen’s tepid response to Cam’s suit even harder to understand was that she’d always worshipped the ground he walked on. Was he a fool to presume on childhood adoration?

A horrible suspicion struck him. Was he presuming on far too much? Despite his parents’ scandalous behavior and the gossip about his legitimacy, the ton lionized Cam as the future Duke of Sedgemoor. Had endless flattery turned him into a self-satisfied ass?

If Pen thought him insufferably arrogant, no wonder his proposal hadn’t bowled her over. He sighed with self-disgust and impatiently ran his hand through his hair. “I’m making a dashed mess of this, aren’t I?”

Pen’s slender body lost its rigidity as a wry smile curved her lips. Lips, he reluctantly noticed, that were pink and full and lusciously kissable.

As shock shuddered through him, he wondered why he’d never noticed before. Pen had been such a constant in his life that he hadn’t taken the time to mark how she’d changed.

Still unwilling to admit that Pen wasn’t the girl he remembered, he looked more closely. To his dismay, the coltish adolescent hovered on the brink of becoming a true beauty. Even more dismaying, he felt the unwelcome, unmistakable prickle of desire.

“Yes, you are. But it’s not totally your fault.” With a grace he hadn’t seen in her before, she gestured toward the leather chairs ranged around the unlit hearth. “Sit down, for heaven’s sake, and stop looming over me.”

Actually he wasn’t looming, although with his height, he loomed over most people. Pen had always been a long Meg, closer to a boy than a girl in his mind. But in this discomfiting instant, when for the first time he saw more than his friend Peter’s occasionally annoying younger sister, there was nothing boyish about Miss Penelope Thorne.

Since he’d last seen her—and for the life of him, he couldn’t recall when that had been, such an ardent suitor he was—she’d grown up. The thin body had gained subtle but fascinating curves. The vivid, pointed face that had always seemed too small for her decisive features had refined into striking attraction. When had she tamed her tangled mane of hair into those gleaming ebony coils?

Apprehension tasted sour on his tongue. God help him, this new Penelope was a bloody disaster. He narrowed his eyes on the siren who had mysteriously supplanted a hoyden as daring as any of his male friends. And saw that she was blossoming into a woman who made men stupid.

Categorically he didn’t want to marry a woman who made men stupid, the way his mother had made his father stupid. How insulting to his chosen bride that part of her appeal had been her lack of overt attractions.

His father’s example proved what catastrophes resulted from choosing a tempestuous beauty as a wife. Cam had grown up hearing salacious gossip about his mother’s affair with her husband’s younger brother. Nobody, including Cam, knew who had fathered him. He was a Rothermere, but not necessarily the late duke’s son.

Long ago Cam had decided to marry someone he could be friends with, not who became a challenge to every deuced roué in London. Cam wanted a wife who would help him establish the Rothermere name as one to be respected, not a cause for snickering and dirty jokes as it had been all his life.

Gossip about his parentage had dogged Cam from boyhood. School had been a nightmare, and while he made a fair job of pretending he no longer cared, he knew whispers of his bastardy still spiced the tattle whenever his name was mentioned. He’d be damned before he subjected his own children to similar torments.

He reminded himself that this was brave, honest Penelope Thorne, she who risked her neck to save a kitten from village boys twice her size. But looking at her now, he didn’t see the girl who had launched a hundred escapades. Instead, he saw a woman who other men would pursue. A woman who perhaps would succumb to temptation, as his mother had done. Pen’s burgeoning loveliness made Cam burn to bed her, but it beggared any chance of an unexceptional domestic life.

Feeling slightly ill, Cam accepted Pen’s offer of a seat and watched her take the chair opposite. Dear heaven, when had that smooth glide replaced her eager gallop? This was Pen, yet it wasn’t.

Even as he questioned his old playmate’s suitability as a bride, he couldn’t take his eyes off her. When had she become this intriguing creature? Where the hell had he been when the transformation took place? At nineteen, she was a little late to be approaching her first season, but he could already see that she’d set society on its ears. She’d prowl into London’s ballrooms on those long legs, like a tigress set loose amid a host of pretty little butterflies.

“I appreciate that you’re doing your duty by your mother and mine. A match between us was always their greatest wish.” The earnestness in Pen’s regard was familiar, but still he felt as if he’d been tossed high into the air and come to land in a different country. “But let’s be realistic. I’m not the woman for you.”

While today’s misgivings hinted that Pen might be right, his pride flinched under her rejection. “We know each other so well—”