Miss Lydia Harcourt has spent four unremarkable Seasons as a sensible gentleman’s daughter—clever, capable, and entirely invisible to the sort of men who actually matter. When a house party at Thornfield Park is interrupted by a violent tempest, Lydia takes shelter in the duke’s private library—only to find herself trapped inside it with the duke himself, both of them too stubborn to leave and the door impossibly, mortifyingly, locked from the outside.
Henry Darlington, the ninth Duke of Ashford, has engineered his entire life around control. Heir to a dukedom he neither wanted nor deserved (three older brothers being regrettably dead), he has resolved to choose a duchess with his head, not his heart. He does not believe in love—he has seen too many men ruined by it—and he has absolutely no intention of being compromised by a wide-eyed bluestocking who argues with everything he says and smells, infuriatingly, of jasmine.
But when they are discovered in the morning by half the household, there is nothing to be done. A duke of Ashford does not ruin a gentlewoman without remedy. And so they are married. Quickly. Quietly. Furiously.
The problem, as Lydia will discover, is that the Duke of Ashford at close quarters is considerably more dangerous than the Duke of Ashford at a polite distance. And Henry will find, to his considerable inconvenience, that a woman who refuses to be managed is the most compelling thing he has ever encountered.
The Duke’s Accidental Duchess is a slow-burning, emotionally charged Regency romance about two people who were each other’s last choice — and eventually, each other’s only one.
Forced marriage. Forced proximity. One locked library and a love neither of them planned for.
