A Duchess By Accident (The Quinten Sisters #1)

Chapter 1

“What is that infernal racket?”

The muffled growl heated Cathy’s shoulder through her thin chemise. Kathleen Quinten shifted in her sleep. That deep, gravelly, and faintly familiar voice did not belong in a lady’s bedchamber. The sound seemed drenched in bourbon, too much of it. Was there a man in her bed?

It cannot be...

She shifted again, her body primed to bolt.

However, a heavy weight pinned her to the mattress.

Her mind was still under the effects of a deep slumber, but her hand had wandered idly and settled on something warm and smooth.

Upon contact, her fingers instinctively curled around it, and it quickly turned rigid.

“W-what?” she muttered, finally opening her eyes and letting go of the foreign body part of the very person who held her down in her bed.

The scream did not just gurgle in her throat; it erupted.

“Hush!” Tristan Radcliffe, the Duke of Baxter, leaped from his prone position and placed his large, calloused hand over her mouth. “I said, hush!”

She could not believe the audacity of the man! What was he even doing in her room? In her bed?

Cathy stared up at him, her vision still swimming. The morning light was dim, filtered by the heavy velvet curtains.

The usually well-groomed Duke of Baxter, acclaimed as the most eligible bachelor of the ton, was unrecognizable.

On this morning, when Cathy could barely bring herself to rise, his own eyes were bloodshot from possible intoxication.

Though he invaded her senses in many ways, that smell of alcohol—so familiar in her childhood—evoked white-hot fury within her.

She bit his palm.

“Argh. You vixen!” the Duke grunted, yanking his hand back and shaking it hard. “What are you doing?”

It did make him lift his weight off of Cathy. He rolled off and away to the edge of the bed. She took it as an opportunity to scramble backward, pulling the silk duvet to cover herself.

“No, what are you doing in my room?” she demanded. “You should not be in my bed at your wedding party!”

The Duke groaned, rubbing his temples with his fingers.

“Why are you so loud? My mind is not ready for this. I am hearing a whole cavalry marching inside my head, and I cannot process what you are saying when you yell at me with that shrill voice of yours.”

My shrill voice? How dare he be so unbothered by this?

Cathy narrowed her eyes at him, her shoulders stiffening as she got herself into a more upright position on the bed. She suddenly felt a blast of cool air touch her bare shoulders.

Wait. Why are my shoulders bare?

What was happening? The cool touch was a stark contrast to the heat the Duke left behind on the sheets. The duvet felt like barely any protection against the man who could make even a tall woman like her feel small.

“I will scream louder if you do not vacate my rooms this instant!” she hissed, her eyes blazing.

“You should know what standards of conduct to follow, even if you are known as a rake. Is your own suite not opulent enough, or did you lose your way after drinking yourself into a stupor? If a maid enters this room at this very moment, my life or what is left of it will be over!”

The Duke squinted back at her, his eyes dropping to the breasts she was covering with the duvet.

Then, he shook his head as if clearing it before he explained, “I do not really remember what happened. The last thing I remember was drinking with Brandon. Then, everything that happened after felt like I was in a fog. I knew that I smelled your lavender soap somewhere, but I could not fathom how we were so close.”

Cathy’s eyebrows raised in indignation. Of all the things he could remember, it would be her soap. Why did he know what she smelled like?

“That is how you describe it?” Cathy’s voice rose once more. “You are a man, not a hound, Your Grace. You climbed into an unmarried lady’s bed because you were drinking with your friend last night, and you had the call of the wild as a canine?”

The Duke straightened himself, standing on the floor by the foot of the bed. He had managed to pull up his breeches, which still hung obscenely low on his hips. That was all he was wearing.

Cathy’s eyes widened at the sight of his muscular shoulders and well-defined abdomen.

She had never seen a man in such a state of undress before.

Her breath came like a huff, but this time, she managed to tame her gasp.

The morning light caught every ripple of muscle.

On his shoulders. On his chest. On his.. .

For as long as she had known of him, he had always been attractive, but his rakish ways seemed to have diminished his appeal—to her, anyway. She had no tolerance for rakes. At the moment, though, his presence dominated the room.

He turned to her, seemingly oblivious to what she was thinking.

“Come to think of it, I do remember speaking to you last night, Miss Quinten,” Tristan said, fixing her with a stare.

“You were your usual self, arguing with me about some nonsense. Oh, yes, you said something to the effect that Homer was superior to Virgil, although I had spied one of your sisters clutching a book of Virgil’s.

Somehow, there is something suspicious about that, since I ended up in your bed. ”

Cathy frowned, racking her brain for a similar memory. “I cannot remember. I... I cannot remember a thing from last night either.”

Panic began to set in. Her breaths came in shallow bursts now, but it seemed that the Duke was not convinced. He scoffed, his lip curling mockingly into a knowing smirk. She did not like that. She did not like that at all!

“How perfectly convenient. Neither of us has any recollection of what happened the night before. Though you do not look like the sort who drinks to the point of oblivion. Did you wait for me to start swaying to lure me here? Was this your plan? Did you wish to trap me into marriage?”

The last two words made Cathy feel hot smoke coming out of her ears. This man did not know her at all. She was not one who would ever trap a man. Let alone a libertine like him!

“How dare you?” Cathy asked, the feeling inside her chest about to explode. “I would rather crawl through the mud while feeding pigs than be shackled to a rake who cannot find his own rooms. I am not that desperate!”

“Oh, but you are, Miss Quinten,” the Duke argued, with that irritating smirk of his.

“You are more than desperate. Do not act as if you do not know what your father has done. He has gambled away everything, including your and your sisters’ dowries.

Your estate is falling apart. So, it is quite easy for me to assume that you had other motives.

You must have led me here. I would not have known where your room was otherwise. ”

The audacity of that cad!

This time, he scrambled for the rest of his clothes and attempted to dress himself in the face of Cathy’s growing wrath. She herself knew the extent of her humiliation, her cheeks burning hot, as she threw a pillow at Tristan. He caught it easily and discarded it onto the floor.

“You know nothing of my family!”

“Oh, but I do,” Tristan retorted, as he straightened himself.

His shirt was on, but it was visibly wrinkled.

Cathy could not help but notice how tall he was, and how his height made the room feel small and the ceiling low.

“The ton gossips about everything, including you, of course. They say that you have been trying to manage what are supposed to be your father’s affairs. ”

“Get out of my rooms,” she whispered with as much control as she could muster, her lower lip trembling with barely contained rage. “Get out before I find something with which to crack your skull.”

As he adjusted the rest of his clothes, it only dawned on her that he was still half-naked and his male anatomy was in her hand not too long ago.

She felt a strange feeling in the pit of her stomach at the thought of that velvet skin that turned hard like a weapon in her grip.

Despite her growing hatred, she could not look away from his broad, muscled back.

She did not know that a man could also look like a work of art from behind.

Of course, that was something she would never admit to him.

Her breath hitched when she realized the weight of her indecency.

No, Cathy. This is not the way you should think. You have already compromised your family’s name by sleeping with a man about to be married!

The touch itself was accidental, but thinking about how he felt in her hand was something else.

She was a hypocrite! Outside this room, she was the embodiment of decorum while her pulse raced at a mere glimpse of the Duke’s naked back.

It was mortifying. She needed to fix this. She needed to fix herself.

“Before you go, can you tell me if... Did you compromise me, Your Grace?” she asked, swallowing hard. “Please tell me the truth so that I may know what to do.”

The Duke paused his dressing to look at her. For a second, the mockery and anger were gone from his eyes. Those green eyes flickered momentarily, holding a curious expression she wanted to fully understand. They roved over her face and then her lips, before snapping back to her eyes.

“I might be a rake, Miss Quinten, but I assure you that I would never do that even if I were drunk. If I had tasted you, I would have remembered. It would still have been on my tongue.”

Relief coursed through Cathy, although his last sentence should have been enough for her to punch his face in on an ordinary day. Then, she realized what he had just said and felt stung for some reason.

“So, you would not even touch me even if you were intoxicated? Am I not worth any interest to you even drunk?”

Tristan sighed at that. He truly did sound weary and would rather be out of the door by now.

“Please do not get the wrong idea, Miss Quinten,” he explained. “It is not because of you. I am getting married tomorrow and have given my word to my betrothed. This is my wedding party.”

Cathy sat up straighter then and clutched the duvet against her chest tighter. The mention of the engagement and the wedding party brought her back to the reality of their situation.

“Just get out. We shall not speak of this to anyone,” she said, her voice taking a steely edge. She gestured at the door, as if dismissing a stray dog. “Prepare yourself for the wedding, and we shall ensure our paths do not cross for the remainder of the party.”

The Duke put his coat on, his eyes lingering on her. Perhaps she imagined it. After all, she was not in her right mind at that moment.

“Of course, Miss Quinten. I will leave you with the knowledge that for someone so bookish, you have a remarkably firm grip.”

He tilted his head to the side as if expecting her to gasp or blush or throw something else at him. Instead, Cathy merely arched an eyebrow.

“It is a pity, then, Your Grace, that you do not possess a firm character to match. Now, leave and close the door behind you.”