“She had crept away from his bed, leaving him asleep across the jumbled sheets. She'd closed the bathroom door softly behind her. Standing naked before the mirror, she'd stared at the girl she saw there. At the disheveled hair and smeared mascara and lips that he'd kissed. Slowly shaking her head at the image in the mirror, the thought played over and over in her mind like a scratched track on a CD: Why? Why did you do it? Why did you let it happen? Then she'd turned away, covered her face with her hands, and cried. She would never again be the same person. She'd been irreversibly changed.”

“Wyatt had planned a romantic evening and he'd been teasing her with little notes for weeks that left hints about what they would be doing. I walked into Miranda's bedroom and she'd taken all those notes off her mirror and had them on her bed in a circle around her. The bear he'd given her last year was sitting in her lap and the necklaced she'd saved so long for was in her hand. She was rubbing the smooth diamond as she stared at the notes in front of her.”

“She stared at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were dark, almost black, filled with pain. She'd let someone do that to her. She'd known all along she felt things too deeply. She became attached. She didn't want a lover who could walk away from her, because she could never do that - love someone completely and survive intact if her left her.”

“She'd once thought God would never intentionally hurt her. But looking back over her life, she'd had cause to rethink that. She was certain nothing touched her life that didn't first filter through the loving hands of her heavenly father. But she was also convinced that God sometimes wounded, in order to bind up. And that He shattered, so that His hands could heal. This was part of His inheritance she'd overlooked before, but never would again.”

“If he licked her there, she'd rob a bank for him. When she felt his tongue glide across her throat, she quivered all over. Mick tightensed his hold on her, and the bastard did it again.”

“She'd cried loudly enough that the man sitting across from her had offered her a tissue, and she'd screamed, what do you think you're looking at jerk? At him, because that was what you did in New York. After that she felt a little better.”