England is too confining for a young woman with more than half a brain and she has no intention of going back there to be suffocated by society’s do’s and don’ts. The problem is that Penelope doesn’t want to go back home. Fortunately, Cam turns up in time to rescue his damsel, guns blazing, in a very “movie hero” moment, which I have to say, Ms Campbell does rather well. He traces Pen to a shabby inn somewhere in the Italian Alps, where he finds her being accosted by a group of nasty Italian bandits. But the aunt has recently died, and in order to fulfil a promise made to Pen’s dying brother, Cam must find her and take her home. Shortly after turning down Cam’s proposal nine years earlier, Penelope seized the opportunity to join an eccentric aunt on a trip to the Continent, and then settled with her in Italy. In order to try to make society forget the circumstances of his birth and the public misery of his parents’ marriage Cam, now the powerful, cold and self-possessed Duke of Sedgemoor, has spent his entire life being fiercely correct, making sure his actions are above reproach, and doing everything he can to restore his family name to respectability. Like the heroes of the other full-length books in the series, Cam doesn’t know the identity of his father. – he doesn’t believe in love and wants nothing to do with it.Īnd Penelope – who has loved him all her life – won’t marry without it. Because Cam watched his parents’ marriage disintegrate –Īs a result of love, my father descended into cruelty and obsession and my mother became a byword for promiscuity.” Her real reason for refusing him, however, is a completely different one, which she can’t tell him. Her father is a rake and gambler, her eldest brother is cut from the same cloth, and Penelope herself is fond of forming her own opinions about things, frequently outspoken and not at all the type of demure debutante who will make Cam a dignified wife. And she tells Cam so in no uncertain terms when she turns down his proposal of marriage, for the Thornes are by no means pillars of respectability. The last thing Camden Rothermere needs, in the opinion of his childhood friend, Penelope Thorne – is to ally himself with a family whose name is a byword for scandal.

I enjoyed meeting the very proper and austere Duke of Sedgemoor in the other books, and had high hopes for his story. This, the third book in Ms Campbell’s Sons of Sin series, is one I’ve been looking forward to.

Anna campbell what a duke dares