Tara Janzen

“He'd kissed her, and she'd been poleaxed, frozen in place, because his mouth had felt like coming home. The taste of him, the smell of him, the sound of his breath-the slow slide of his tongue over and around and down the lenght of hers, it had all said, "Here's your place,girl,here with me.”

“Good God. Johnny freakin' Ramos. Out in the hall. Of course, out in the hall. Hell, he'd spent half his life out in the hall,especially at Campbell Junior High,especially during seventh-grade social studies call. She'd gotten sent out in the hall with him once, her one and only time in the hall ever, the two of them put there to "work things out", and her poor little thirteen-year-old heart had barely survived the experience.”

“Fuck, Dylan said, then thought it, just for the hell of it.”

“- Which State Department, exactly, are we talking about? - The one in Washington, D.C.”

“Mission of mercy, he said, straightening up, his voice so cold, he could have owned the patent.”

“You’ve stopped crying. I’m glad. I don’t want you to cry anymore.”

“Remembered pain tightened his mouth into a grim line. The weeks he’d spent looking for her had left permanent scars on his heart.”

“I believe in love at first sight, and I believe that’s what we’ve got going here. I was willing to die for you. I’m sure as hell not going to pass up a chance to live with you.”

“Excuse me,” she said, her voice tight. “But if I’d known there was going to be a firearms examination at the end of the kidnapping, by God, I would have studied for it!”

“You can’t possibly be afraid of trees.”

“She’d never known a man whose initial move was to undress the woman he wanted.”

“It was the most traditional wedding ring in the world. It reeked of stability and fiftieth wedding anniversaries. It proclaimed itself to the world as the rock upon which vows were never broken. It was a testament of his love. Proof of his commitment.”

“No. Thank you she said in a voice that said he could go to hell and take his jacket with him.”

“Spending the next nine hours with a crying woman wal real close to the top of his "Avoid at All Costs" list right under untimely death and a desk job.”

“He looked around the room at all the stuff. But it wasn't just stuff and it wasn't just any girl grenade that had gone off in there. It was Nikki McKinney grenade.”

“Nikki : I think he makes women question their position in life through their association with the dichotomy of his physical power and his whole feminine mystique. That's the part of Travis I'm always trying to capture. The tension. You must have felt it in the studio.She was serious. He could tell by the tone of her voice. And again, unbelievably, she was waiting for an answer.Kid : Uh...no.Nikki : You didn't feel the tension ?Kid : Yeah, there was tension. I just didn't realize it was the dichotomy of Travis' physical powers and his,uh,feminine mystique creating it. I thought it was the paint and the hellish death motif, not to mention the,uh,sheer demonic luridness of the eternity-sucking vortex.”

“Kid Chaos : "Yes, ma'am".”

“This isn't about you, Skeeter. It's about me, and I need you here. If we lose Crutchfield, we'll get him another day. If I lose you...”

“But here they were, despite death and everything, sitting in a car.If this was fate, she was buying.”

“Politics and war were just different names for power, and the price of power was predictably high and could be precisely measured-in dollards,yen,euros,rubles,riyals, and blood.”

“He caught her, and he held her, and he let her cry, and cry, and cry, and he let her use his sheets to wipe her eyes, and her nose, and God knows what, because he had plenty of clean sheets, and he only had one Kat.”

“Hanson got to sleep with you, and I didn't,” he said, his own jaw a little tight. “So I stole his car.”

“It worried him. Like him, she had to be exhausted. She smelled like gasoline; her clothes were torn. She had a small white bandage on her forehead where the EMT had cleaned her cut. Dirt smudged her face, her arms, her legs. He knew she still didn't have any underwear, and for the first time, he felt bad about it. Real bad. He wanted to protect her, make her feel secure, keep her from harm—and all he'd done was lose her underwear and practically get her blown up.”

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”“No, we don’t.” He liked meeting like this, over her bare ass, a hot-off-the-presses copy of the Rocky Mountain News, and a steaming cup of coffee. It was so perfect, he planned on doing it every day for the rest of his life. He just hadn’t told her yet.”

“You’re staring at my ass.”“Yes, I am.” It’s what he did in the mornings, when she woke up and spent the first hour lying around in bed.”

“Don't you want to be neighbors?""No." he said. "I want to be lovers. Sleep-together lovers. Wake-up together lovers. One bed."Oh, God, she was going to fall in love. She could feel it happening.”

“That meant Ms. Starkova was his. He'd found her; he'd tailed her; and he'd saved her from Reinhard Klein. By jungle law, even the urban jungle, that made her his.”

“She was in love. In love with the same man she'd always been in love with-God save her.”

“How could she not know he was thinking about sex? he wondered. It was all he'd been thinking about for the last eighteen hours, give or take a few minutes spent thinking about keeping them both alive. Oh, yeah, and twice he'd thought about food, once about her mother, and once he'd checked to make sure he had an extra mag for his Glock.”

“Hawkins's plan to be more careful was starting to include things like "carefully brushing her off," and "carefully take her home," where he could "carefully kiss her mouth" and "carefully take her clothes off.”

“Do you still have Ms. Dekker?"Have her, had her, going to have her again-at least he'd planned on it until the troops had arrived.”

“There was a lesson in here somewhere, he was sure. Or maybe he'd offended some ancient, pre-Columbian god while he'd been in South America -because this was a test.”

“You stole my heart, Regan,"he told her. "And I don't particularly want it back.”

“It was better to talk, which would be a helluva lot easier if he would just talk back a little. Damn it, it was like pulling a teeth to get him to say anything.Like right now. He'd gone completely silent on her again, leaving the ball in her court, where the ball had been for the last half an hour.”

“He needed to gather her up, hold on to her, anything to help her stop trembling. Something was going to shake loose if she didn’t.”

“He wanted to paddle her himself, then shake her, then sit her down in a chair and explain to her why she must never, ever get herself in a situation where she could be shot at again—and then throw himself at her feet.”

“The man in 4B wondered if he could have your autograph. He told me his daughter is a huge fan.”Fan? What the hell? Dylan lifted himself up and looked over the back of his seat. Since when did covert operators have fans?”

“He should probably make love to her.”

“She'd kicked Klein's ass and still had enough moxie to tag him, and enough physical strength to get herself out of a window ten feet up on the wall.He really should marry her.”

“He'd wanted to take her dirty and take her sweet, take her any way he could get her and every way he could dream up”

“She could not leave him hanging like this. “If you were hurt, I need to know.” It was a rule somewhere, in the good-guy handbook.”