Karen Ranney

“All my happiness seems caught up in one of your smiles. - Jered Mandeville, 'Upon a Wicked Time”

“It was not the time to recall all those really horrifying nursery stories she'd read, Bluebeard, Babes in the Wood, Little Red Riding Hood. Why is it that children's stories are so filled with monsters like wolves and witches who eat children, and men who kill their wives? And to think, that people actually sat and told their children such things.”

“They locked gazes in that moment, the mother and the rake. Neither doubted that a battle had been joined”

“A castle sat in the background, turrets flying a minuscule emblem in the foreground sat a lady, her skirts adorned with picked blossoms "A castle," Helena murmured, "fit for a princess, except that the prince has escaped.”

“He wanted her now in a way that was barely human.”

“Memories of her, however, would remain with him. Everywhere he’d look, she would be there, as if she were a hundred women, all shadow and wraith, marking each place at Tyemorn and Ayleshire. He’d see her on the village road, smiling beneath an oak, straddling a furrow and laughing at something a companion had said. There again, tilting her head in an inquisitive look and offering advice on the line of the barn wall, or at night, when he could only see the outline of her form.”

“He wanted to know her with such familiarity that he could curve his fingers around a wrist, an ankle, a knee and recognize her from a hundred, a thousand other women”

“Mental seduction. He’d never thought it possible”