Sherry Thomas

“Her hand reached up and took a strand of his hair between her fingers. “Simple as that.”She gently pulled on that curl and let it go. “It’s so springy.”They’d barely grazed at the truth, but I she was satisfied—and distracted. By his hair, of all things.“I feel like a sheep that has been overlooked during spring shearing,” he murmured.“Yes, adorably fluffy.”Another time he might have protested the use of that adjective. But now he was all too relieved. “Would you like me to pull my chair closer, so you may fondle my hair with greater ease?” he asked.She beamed at him. “Why, yes, I’d like exactly that.”

“What did you do to your hair? I don’t like it asmuch.”His brow knitted. “How do you like it?”“I prefer the curls.”He looked as if she’d told him she preferred him with three eyes. “You used to make fun of them. You told me that if Bo Peep had a child with one of her sheep it would have hair like mine.”She burst out laughing—and gasped at the pain that shot through her scalp. “You are not making it up, are you? Did I really say that?”“Sometimes you called me Goldilocks.”She had to remind herself not to laugh again. “And you married me? I sound like a very odious sort of girl.”“I was a very odious sort of boy, so you might say we were evenly matched.”She didn’t know enough to comment upon that, but when he was near, she was… happier.”

“This time he could no longer hold back his tears. And with them came words that he’d never been able to say to her his entire life. “I love you, Helena. I have always loved you. Wake up and let me prove it to you.”

“His voice, however, was utterly velvety—if an upholstered wrecking ballcould be called velvety. “I won’t need to try, my dear. My touch will burn away his.”She couldn’t breathe.“You were always quiet in his bed,” he went on, “but you won’t be in mine. You will scream with pleasure—and you will do it again and again.”

“And when the governess had left, he would slip out of his own room and peer at her door until her light was extinguished at last, before he returned to bed to stew anew in lust and yearning.A habit that he’d kept to this day, whenever they happened to be under the same roof.Her light turned off. He sighed. How long would he keep at this? Soon he would be twenty-seven. Did he still plan to stand in a dark passage in the middle of the night and gaze upon her door when he was thirty-seven? Forty-seven? Ninetyseven?”

“She fluttered her fan. “And do you know what they say of women of a certain age, what they want above all?”Desire simmered in him at her not quite smile. “Do tell.”“To be rid of you, Hastings. So that they don’t have to waste what remains of their precious few years suffering your lecherous looks.”“If I stopped looking at you lecherously, you’d miss it.”“Why don’t we test that hypothesis? You stop and I’ll tell you after ten years or so whether I miss it.” ....He rose and bowed slightly. “You wouldn’t last two weeks, Miss Fitzhugh.”

“The worst thing about falling in love with her so early in life was that he’d been an absolute snot at fourteen, at once arrogant and self-pitying. Almost as bad was the fact that he’d been nearly half a foot shorter than she at their first meeting —she’d been five foot nine, and he barely five foot four. Though she was only a few weeks older than he was, she’d looked upon him as a child—while he broiled with the heat and anguish of first love.When nothing else garnered him her attention, he turned horrid. She was disgusted by this midget who tried to trick her into broom closets to steal kisses, and he was at once miserable and thrilled. Disgust was better than indifference; anything was better than indifference.”

“I’ve always loved you,” he said, his eyes a blue that was almost violet. “You know this.” She swallowed a lump in her throat. “I only wonder whether I deserve such devotion.”“Sometimes people fall in love with those who do not return the same strength of feelings. It is as it is,” he said with a quiet intensity. “What I give, I give freely. You owe me nothing, not love, not friendship, not even obligation.”

“Perhaps you forgave him too much, but who among us would not wish to be so generously loved and generously forgiven?”

“I beg you to exercise wisdom and restraint and remember that not all opportunities are created equal. Some are nothing but steps leading down toward catastrophe.”

“I love everything about her, including her talent for breaking my heart.”

“Because being in love does not give you any excuse to be less than honorable, LadyTremaine.”

“Sometimes people fall in love with those who do not return the same strength of feelings. It is as it is,” he said with a quiet intensity. “What Igive, I give freely. You owe me nothing, not love, not friendship, not even obligation”

“Never mind what a man says; watch what he does.”

“Gigi se olía una historia de Romeo y Julieta, una historia cuyo atractivo se le escapaba. La señorita Capuleto debería haberse casado con el hombre que sus padres eligieron para ella y luego haber tenido una aventura ardiente, pero muy discreta con el señor Montesco. No sólo habría seguido viva, sino que al cabo de un tiempo se habría dado cuenta de que Romeo era un joven imberbe y aburrido con poco que ofrecerle salvo bonitos tópicos. "Es el oriente, y Julieta es el sol". Por favor.”

“Even they would think you a monster were you toorchestrate a divorce right after my confinement.”“How long do you recommend I wait, then?”“A long time. I know what happens when a divorce is granted:The woman never gets anything. And I will not be parted from my child.”“So you will contest the divorce?”“To my last penny. And then I’ll borrow from Fitz and Millie.”“So we’ll be married ’til the end of time?”“The sooner you accept it, the sooner we are all better off.”His ancestors would have appreciated her hauteur: a fit wife for a de Montfort. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I must have enough rest.”He gazed at her retreating back. Foolish woman, did she not realize that he’d already accepted it from the moment he’d said “I do”?”

“The next minute he realized what had happened to him, but not before she’d caught him staring.For a decade, I was fixated by her beauty. I wrote an entire article on the evolutionary significance of beauty as a rebuke to myself, that I, who understood the concepts so well, nevertheless could not escape the magnetic pull of one particular woman’s beauty.She knew. With surgical precision, she had peeled back his layers of defenses, until his heart lay bare before her, all its shame and yearning exposed.He could have lived with this if only he’d kept his secret whole and buried. But she knew. She knew.”

“She recognized the signs of danger. When she’d said to the duke that she had a certain effect on men, she hadn’t been exaggerating. It was not every man and it was not all the time, but when the effect happened, proposals flew like confetti and all parties involved usually ended up feeling quite mortified.”

“He wanted to make cast models of her. He wanted to take a set of precision calipers and measure every distance between her features. He wanted her blood and glandular fluids analyzed by the finest chemists in the world—there must be something detectibly different in her inner workings for him to respond so dramatically, as if he’d been given a drug for which science had yet to find a name.But more than anything, he wanted to—”

“...So far I have restrained myself. For how much longer, I do not know.I have never known such happiness, shot through with such misery. Only four days have passed, they tell me. But that is not true. It has been decades since I sawyou last.You will find me a stooped old man when we meet again. Perhaps I might even need a pair of spectacles to recognize your veil.But I remain always,Your servant,C.One of Christian's onesided letters to the Baroness”

“For the next three seconds, he still dared to let himself hope.Perhaps she was making a grand entrance. Perhaps she would be carried in like Cleopatra, hidden in a roll of fine carpet.Perhaps—Three porters, grunting, pulled in a handcart.A crevasse opened before him and in fell his heart. No need to remove the tarpaulin wrapping. He recognized the stone slabby its size and weight.She had returned his present. She would have nothing more to do with him.”

“The explanation for her absence had been staring him in the face all the while, but he hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it: The affair meant nothing to her. He’d been the only one bewitched body and soul. For her, he’d been but a temporary source of entertainment, a way to pass the otherwise tedious hours in the middle of an ocean.He’d been the one to press for a continuation of their affair beyond the voyage. He’d been the one to offer his heart, his hand, his every last secret. She never even gave her real name.And, of course, never showed her face.”

“Do you think I should be paying my addresses to Mrs. Martin, my dear Miss Fitzhugh?” he whispered. “Martin doesn’tlook the sort to have enough stamina to service two women.And goodness knows you could probably exhaust Casanova himself.”Again this insinuation that she must be a sufferer of nymphomania. Behind her fan, she put her lips very close to his ear. “You’ve no idea, my Lord Hastings, the heated yearningsthat singe me at night, when I cannot have a man. My skin burns to be touched, my lips kissed, and my entire body passionately fondled.”Hastings was mute, for once. He stared at her with something halfway between amusement and arousal.She snapped shut her fan and rapped his fingers as hard as she could, watching with great satisfaction as he choked back ayelp of pain.“By anyone but you,” she said, and turned on her heels.”

“He glanced at her. “You were the moon of my existence; your moods dictated the tides of my heart.”The tides of her own heart surged at his words, even though his words were nothing but lies.”

“- É aquele estupido marido que tenho. - disse para o velho cão. - Em vez de me dar uma trancada,bate no raio do piano. Vamos lá dizer-lhe para se calar.”

“...the hero is a secret agent? Well, who gives a crap about the rest of his case once he has met the heroine. Time for moody angst!”

“«She sat at the bow of a pleasure craft a stone's throw away, under the shade of a white parasol, a diligent tourist out to reap all the beauty and charm Copenhagen had to offer. She studied him with a distressed concentration, as if she couldn't quite remember who he was. As if she didn't want to. He looked different. His hair reached down to his nape, and he'd sported a full beard for the past two years. Their eyes met. She bolted upright from the chair. The parasol fell from her hand, clanking against the deck. She stared at him, her face pale, her gaze haunted. He'd never seen her like this, not even on the day he left her. She was stunned, her composure flayed, her vulnerability visible for miles. As her boat glided past him, she picked up her skirts and ran along the port rail, her eyes never leaving his. She stumbled over a line in her path and fell hard. His heart clenched in alarm, but she barely noticed, scrambling to her feet. She kept running until she was at the stern and could not move another inch closer to him (…) Gigi didn't move from her rigid pose at the rail, but she suddenly looked worn down, as if she'd been standing there, in that same spot, for all the eighteen hundred and some days since she'd last seen him. She still loved him. The thought echoed wildly in his head, making him hot and dizzy. She still loved him.»”

“Was it possible—was it at all possible that she could come out of her most desperate choice with a man as clever as Odysseus who looked like Achilles and made love like Paris…?”

“He was a god above her, powerful, beautiful, larger than life. The light brought out the latent gold of his hair. The shadows contoured the perfect form of his body. Light and shadows converged in his eyes, bright lust, dark anger, and something else. Something else entirely. She recognized it because she’d seen it in the mirror so many times: a bleak, austere loneliness.”

“He felt as if he stood at the very top of a high cliff. Take a step back and all was safe and familiar. But going forward required a singular leap of faith—and he was a man of little faith, particularly when it came to himself. But he wanted her to look at him again as if he were full of possibilities. As if they were full of possibilities.”

“Her Leo, so bright, so beautiful.And in the end, so catastrophically flawed.”

“Tenderness, that most alien and disconcerting of emotions, swelled and billowed in her. She picked up a cherry and stared down at the soft, bright-red fruit. “I love you.”The last time she'd declared her love he'd thrown it right back in her face. She waited uncertainly for his response. She didn't even have to wait a second. He leaned over and kissed her on the mouth. “I love you more.”- Gigi and Camden”

“That was how he would go on tormenting her, after his physical departure from her life. A baroque plan, byzantine even, a plan that both pleased and shamed him.He awaited only the night, this one grotesque, terrible night.”

“He smiled at her. And it hit her like a mallet to the temple, the realization that she was in love with him. Stupidly, dreadfully in love with him.Overnight, she'd become a fool.”

“She touched him, placing her hand over his curled fingers, straightening them so that they were palm to palm, then she interlaced her fingers with his. Her fingertips were icy. A silent, dangerous thrill coursed through him. He wanted to pull her atop him and show her what awaited a foolish young woman who slipped into a man's bedroom in the dead of the night after having devoured him all evening with those dark, intense eyes of hers, setting his blood to simmer over three long hours.”

“The Castle. He’d seen this expression far too many times during their marriage. The Castle was Bryony drawing up the gates and retreating deep into the inner keep. And he’d always hated it. Marriage meant that you shared your goddamn castle. You didn’t leave your poor knight of a husband circling the walls trying to find a way in.”

“Outwardly, other than her hair, she had not changed much. She was still more or less the same cool, aloof woman who garnered more respect than affection. On the inside, however, it had been impossible to return to the person she used to be.”

“Her jaw dropped. She grabbed him by the shoulders. “I think I have formed an attachment to you. You know, what the English call a desire to have symphonic concerts with someone at all hours of the day?”He smiled. “And I love you too, darling.”-Lizzy and Will”

“What is withdrawal?""Let's see, since you know your scripture so well, was that Onan? Yes, that bugger. What he did.""Spilling his seed on the floor?""Yes," continued her husband, "it would be lovely if I could take you and spill my seed somewhere else. Not on the floor, mind you. But perhaps on your very soft belly. Perhaps even on your splendid breasts. and perhaps, if I'm in a really terrible mood, I'll make you swallow it.- Vere to Elissande”

“Sometimes limbs must be re-broken to set properly, her heart too needed to shatter anew before it could truly heal.”

“Even the boy who cried wolf was right about the wolf once.”

“I had this daft idea to come and bury the past. Except the past is not quite dead.”

“To the beginning of the rest of our lives.—Leo”

“It doesn’t matter where I am; I’m yours.”

“Just that I have loved you, even when I was nothing and no one to you, when you didn’t know my name and barely knew my face.- Leo”

“Some lovers were fortunate enough to grow old together. They’d grown old apart. She did not think him any less handsome. She only wished that she’d been there when the first line on his face had appeared, so that she could have stroked and kissed and cherished it.”