The Duke I Tempted Quotes

“What she wanted in this life was not a husband. It was freedom, finally, from dependence on men. Her entire life had been dictated by their fortunes: their deaths, plunging her from crisis to crisis; their charity, allowing her to survive, to scrape by, to make her tenuous foothold in business; their half-truths, sabotaging her ambitions. She was tired of needing permission, dispensation, kindness. She intended to be the mistress of her own fate. And there was one thing she knew with absolute certainty from observing the ways of the world: one did not get that kind of power by marrying it.”
― Scarlett Peckham, The Duke I Tempted

“It was a trap, this business of being a woman. The simple truth of it was that after all her efforts to secure her independence, she was still stuck. To accomplish what she ought, she need not have bothered with years of being single-minded and industrious. She needed only to have been born a man.”
― Scarlett Peckham, The Duke I Tempted

“It could not possibly be true, because love is not a declaration. It is a system of behavior. If the treatment I have enjoyed from you over the last five years amounts to your way of showing love, I’d do anything to avoid such adoration for the rest of my life.”
― Scarlett Peckham, The Duke I Tempted

“Perhaps she should always drink brandy and invite men with kind eyes to undress her.”
― Scarlett Peckham, The Duke I Tempted